Work from home is becoming increasingly common for today’s employees. Last week, we saw the benefits and drawbacks of working from home from the employee’s perspective. Today, let’s focus on the pros and cons of work from home from employer’s viewpoint.
Advantages
- Decreased attrition rate: Employee retention is without doubt one of the intense challenges faced by the companies today. Today’s employees crave for work life balance. Creating a flexible work environment and providing the employees with facilities like work from home has positive effects on retention. It prevents employees to look out for other options.
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- Increased productivity: By working from home employees save a lot of travel time. The time wasted in the traffic every-day is huge. By providing work from home facility to the employees, the unproductive hours can be converted into productive ones which would be beneficial for the organization. Plus, the employees get a calmer and stress-free environment with no unnecessary discussions and meetings.
- Work life balance: As discussed earlier, employees today want to have a balance between their work and personal life. Also, companies today are working hard to help the employees have a life that makes them happy and satisfied. Facilities like work from home, flexible work timings and locations help the employees create a balance and have a better life at professional and personal front.
- Access to wider pool of applicants: By providing work from home facility, access to wider range of applicants is possible. For example, women employees have to ensure that neither their family life nor their career suffers because of the other. Provisions like work from home helps them to focus on their carrier and hence the companies do not miss on talented employees. The disabled people who prefer to work from home at-least twice or thrice a week, employers can hire them as well if they are efficient.
- Happy employees: The rise and downfall of an organization is directly dependent on the performance of the employees. Happier employees equals better productivity and improved productivity means higher growth. Hence, the companies today are coming up with such ideas to keep their employees satisfied and pleased.
Disadvantages:
- Difficult to monitor performance: The most challenging problem that arises due to work from home is managing employees and their performance. For managers it is a tedious task to keep a check on home employees every day hence there can be a possibility that the efficiency of the employees instead of increasing decreases.
- Irregular working hours: Many employers come up with the point that there is no way to keep tabs on the employees working hours when they work from home and hence, there is no way of knowing whether the employee is being extra productive or merely postponing work to be done once they return to the workplace.
- Personal work: Although office distractions are avoided by work from home but there are other interruptions at home. Family, friends, neighbors, children may be very interfering. In addition to that there are personal duties at home that can’t be avoided if present at home. Sometimes, employees get too much involved in their personal work that a task that can be done in 30 minutes takes hours. The problem of unavailability is another issue if the employees are not there in the office. Also, the costs on the organizations in terms of home connectivity and other infrastructural aspects is additional.
- Discipline: Some employees are disciplined and make sure that if they are availing work from home, the work must not suffer. But, there are also some resources who misuse this facility and instead of working from home they take it as a holiday. Employees when working from home need to be dedicated, punctual, disciplined and most importantly should realize that work from home doesn’t permit them to switch off from work and get involved with their personal life. It is just a change of location not off from work.
- Not updated on several fronts: Many firms come up with the fact that by working from home employees miss important meetings and appointments with other employees. It also becomes difficult for other employees to contact them for assistance and help. They also seem to be unaware of developments like staff reshuffling, new hires, changes in the company policy, new competitive intelligence, new business, changes in the team etc. When working in teams, physical presence is as important as employment.
Given these advantages and disadvantages, it can be a win-win situation for both the parties if companies come up with rules and policies regarding the work from home practice. By, creating a right balance, the life of the employees and the employers would become a lot easier with increased productivity and growth.
