Work From Home, Should you Implement it or not?

Covid 19 & work from home, these two words seem to be connected. Most of the people think that work from home came into existence because of Covid 19 and the lockdown, but it’s not true. The roots of work-from-home goes to a long way back in time, infact it is said that the work-from-home system was first introduced in the early 1970s. It was introduced in the form of ‘telecommuting’ in which employees worked from their home as they were calling people to sell their products. Seems crazy, right? But it’s true and work from home should be appreciated as it helps both the organization and the employees. It reduces the organization’s costs and provides employee with extra leisure time with their family.

Work from home is simply working from a remote place, usually the employee’s home, rather than the office. Even though we had the technology and the resources to work from home, it was somehow considered a bad idea because of a common belief that the remote employees’ productivity would decrease if they worked from home. But it’s not true. With the right kind of tools like online employee attendance system, time tracking software, geo-fence tracking, and selfie with punch. you can manage your remote employee’s time and productivity.

By reading this article, you will learn about the advantages & disadvantages of working from home. How it will impact your employees and their productivity and whether you should implement it or not. So just sit tight and get ready to unveil a side of work from home that you never knew before.

Advantages of Work from Home

As mentioned above work from home is very helpful to both the employees and the organization. These advantages can be helpful while considering whether to implement work from home or not in your organization. Work from home has many advantages, but we have selected some of the best advantages for you:

1. Better Work-Life Balance

Spending time with family is very important for an employee to be happy & satisfied with their lives, but any normal employee spends long hours in the office and isn’t able to spend time with their family. Work from home allows employees to spend more time with their families. It gives them mental and physical energy, which helps them to stay focused on their work as well. This brings a balance between work and personal life.

2. Reduction in Costs

This advantage is for both the employee and the organization. For the employee, when they work from home, they don’t have to travel to their office, which saves their traveling expenses. For the organization, the savings are even bigger as they don’t have to pay for office infrastructure, electricity bills, maintenance, and cleaning expenses.

3. Attract New Talent

Many organization prefers to recruit new employees from the same city. But work from home allows them to recruit any candidate from anywhere they want and opens a gate for a whole pool of new talent. This just doesn’t end here. As of now, work from home is not preferred by majority of the organizations, but work from home is something that could be very attractive for the candidates. Offering something that your competitors don’t offer will give you the advantage of accessing new talent.

4. Greater Flexibility in Schedule

Work from home saves employee’s a lot of time. They don’t have to travel to the office, so their travel time is saved, which can be used for other useful things. There is also no fixed time for working, so employees don’t have to wake up early to start their work on time.they can start their work whenever they want, it gives them flexibility to adjust their schedule according to their time..

Disadvantages of Work from Home

Everything in the world has it’s disadvantages. Work from home also has its own disadvantages. Not every organization can implement work from home for their employees. If it’s not suitable for you and you still implement it, then you can face many losses. Learn these disadvantages to know how work from home can be a wrong implementation for an organization:

1. Lack of Communication & Teamwork

Any normal employee works in a team to work together and achieve their common targets, but when they have to work alone from their home, it can be difficult for them because communication is key while working remotely, and during work from home there could be a communication gap among the colleagues of a team which could to losses in the future.

2. Family Distractions

Family time is important, but sometimes even the same family can create distractions for you. When an employee is working from home, he needs to concentrate on their work, and some distractions can break their concentration and interrupt their work. That’s why it is important to let your family know not to disturb you during your work so that your work efficiency can be maintainted.

Home gives comfort to any person, and sometimes employees feel too comfortable at home and stop caring about their work. They become too complacent and lazy to work and losses motivation.

3. Difficult to Measure Performance

In an office, there are supervisors for all the employees who assign them tasks, monitor their work, and give them reviews, but it’s difficult for supervisors to do all these for work-from-home employees and on regular basis as well. Supervisors can’t know what their employees are doing when they are not being monitored.

4. Biased Towards Office Employees

When you work in a hybrid organization where both office and work-from-home employees are present. Then there could a situation where the office employees are treated differently than remote employees. The office employee will have preference over the remote employees because they communicate more and have a better relationship with their superiors than remote employees who don’t communicate as much.

How to Maintain Productivity of your Remote Employees

When you think about implementing work from home, the one thing that concerns you is it’s impact on your employees. But if you implement work from home in a right way according to your plan, then you shouldn’t be worried about it. The following methods will help you to maintain the productivity of your remote employees.

1. Promote & Encourage Work from Home Culture

When your employees are working from home, it’s important to let them know that nothing has changed and the organization is satisfied with the work from culture. That will motivate your employees and boost their productivity. Not only the employees, but you should also promote the work-from-home culture outside your organization to let everyone know the flexibility you are offering to your employees.

2. Encourage Employees to Create Workspace at Their Home

Sometimes working from home can be difficult, your employees can be distracted by many things, and that could decrease their productivity. That’s why you should encourage your employees to create their own workspace somewhere in their home where they can’t be disturbed or distracted so that their productivity is maintained.

3. Automate Processes

An organization operates multiple functions, and they have different processes for that, but when it comes to remote working, it’s difficult to maintain all such processes manually. For example, how do you record your employees’ attendance, or how do you measure their performance. The answer to these questions is quite simple, just automate these processes. As we mentioned earlier, you can use facoHR’s remote attendance software to record the attendance of your employees working from home and workforce performance management platform for monitoring your remote employees’ performance.

4. Increase Communication

Human is a social animal. They thrive when they are surrounded by other humans and deprive when they are alone. The same can be said about their work and productivity, when an employee is isolated at their home and keep working alone on the same thing for hours, then they might get bored & tired of working that could decrease their productivity that’s why it’s important to keep communicating with all the employees. You can ask them about their work, and how they are feeling, organize team meetings as well as informal team activities to prevent them from getting bored and keeps them motivated towards their work.

5. Implement Flexible Working

Work from home is already a flexible working method that an organization offers to its employees, but we are talking about offering even more flexibility. Like offering flexible working hours where employees can start & end working whenever they want. They just have to complete their total number of working hours. This would lead employees to set up their schedules with flexibility to finish their work more efficiently.

Factors to Decide Whether you Should Implement Work from Home or not?

Work from home is a time & cost-saving option for organizations, but not all organizations can implement this method. If it’s not suitable for them, then it can prove to be a loss-making option. That’s why you should consider the following factors to decide whether you should implement work from home or not.

1. Nature of your Business

Not all jobs are remote-friendly, some jobs are based on physical work like factory workers, farmers, drivers, delivery services, etc. if your business’s nature is not remote-friendly, then you should not implement work from home to avoid getting losses.

2. Availability of Remote Working Tools

Work from home is not possible without remote working tools. You can’t just tell your employees to go home and work from there. There are some tools required for that. The first and most basic one on which the employee will work is a laptop or computer. Then other necessary tools like software for recording their attendance and work, communication tools for online meetings and communication. You can implement work from home only if you already have these tools or can afford to have these tools.

3. Talent & Experience of Employees

All organizations have some employees who are not talented enough or requires training to start working on their respective jobs. You need to provide trainers for them to train them about their work, so it’s better to not allow this kind of employee to work from home until they are experienced enough to complete their work efficiently.

4. Employees’ View on Working from Home

It’s always important to get your employees’ views before making any big changes in the organization. And implementing work from home is certainly a big change not just for the organization but for the employees too. Who knows, maybe your employees might not like the idea of working from home, and you certainly wouldn’t want to implement something that’s making your employees unhappy.

5. Scale of Remote Working

There are different kinds of implementation for remote working, some companies allow all of their employees to work from home. Some allow 50% of their employees, while some companies rotate their employees for office and remote working. It depends on multiple factors already mentioned above, but it’s on you to decide how much of your workforce is going to work from home.

Conclusion

Work from home method is relatively new and not much used around the world, and there is not much information about it on the internet either, so don’t think that it’s easy and beneficial for all because it seems easy only theoretically but it’s very hard in practical, you need to be very cautious while implementing it. We hope that we have taught you everything there is about the work-from-home method, and now you should be able to decide whether it’s the right fit for you or not.