In the last 2 years we have seen work from home culture at a rise due to the covid situation. In my Company where I used to work previously at Accenture, we always had this conveniency of work from home so it was not a new concept for me, but then there are many companies who absolutely never had work from home practices but due to this situation they were forced to bring in that culture within their organizations and now we see that remote working is becoming a common practice with even those Companies who would have never thought of it.
Many Companies had a belief that remote work impacts productivity but rather it is opposite at a large, ya there will always be few exceptions with some of them taking advantage of the benefit. But overall, it has been found that the productivity of the person is better. Not only that from my own personal experience also I can say that in work from home we end up working longer hours. There are pros and cons of this but sometimes I feel it is beneficial for the employee to have this facility.
When someone would be unwell at my home or if I had to visit my Son's school or if I had any other important thing to do, I would take work from home. The benefit would be that I would save my leave day, if I had just some little time of work and need not require a full day off then it would be the most ideal and then I would make up for the time working longer. This way work and personal matters both would get taken care off. My Mom-in-law would often be unwell so it was better for me to have that facility to accommodate home as well as office. The other very good part was that I would save so much on the travelling time and use that time productively. I had a daily 2.5 hours of travelling time to and fro work, it would get so exhaustive with the pollution and traffic that by the time I would reach home I would be in no energy to do anything else. So remote working also gave me that benefit of relaxed working.
As I said there are pros and cons of everything. So, with this also there are some disadvantages. Whenever I would be doing work from home, I would end up working longer hours than normal office timings. The bosses would think that work from home means that you are available 24 hrs, the work would just keep coming in. The other part is the space at home. If you are doing work from home, many people at home do not understand that, especially old people and kids and they would think if you are home means you are available for them all the time when needed. If you avoid them then that creates altogether another tension at home. And if two people are doing work from home and the house is small, and if there are calls to attend for both of them, that that is the biggest challenge to face. We also lose track of time when it is work from home and do not realize that it is past our lunch time or that we have been sitting in one position for a long time.
There are good advantages as well as some hinderances but then still overall I feel that work from home/ remote working practices are healthy for the wellbeing of an employee. Now that offices are back to 100% operations, they should think of adding these additional benefits so that employees can avail them when needed. Understand that there are some jobs which are not possible to do work from home, like many roles in hospitality, communications and service industry, or jobs which have high technology office systems. But every company can work out these policies for jobs that are possible to do with remote working.
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