We are now in the work-from-home work culture, where businesses allow their employees to work from their homes on their beds wearing their pajamas and just go online for a certain period of time. In this article, we will tackle the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of work culture.
Advantages
1. More Freedom
By working from home, you can have much freedom in terms of scheduling your own time—organizing how much time you’re going to work, to rest, to spend with your family, to play and to go off on breaks. In doing all non-work activities, you don’t have your boss raising an eyebrow on you. You can work at your kitchen counter, coffee table, bed and wherever inside the house without feeling troubled about how orderly or office-like the work space is.
2. No Transportation Expenses
Because you’re staying around the four walls of your home, you don’t need to take any public transportation, drive your automobile and beat the early morning traffic at the expense of going to the workplace. Time and effort in commuting are saved and these could better be spent doing more productive work.
3. More Comfort
As they say, “Home sweet home.” Your home is the most comfortable place in the entire universe. Because it’s yours, you are not required or bound to follow any rules as in the traditional workplace. You don’t have to worry about any dress code as well. You’re good to go, as long as you get your work done and satisfy your boss at the end of the day.
Disadvantages
1. No Motivation
When you have that much freedom at your disposal, you might be too tempted to not work for long. Sometimes, when you overly think that nobody would care about your work schedule anyway, you tend to procrastinate and be less effective in the long run. Given this, you need to find something to keep you motivated enough to get you up by your appointed time.
2. No Routine
By human nature, we are creatures of habit. Sometimes we may find routine jobs boring but routine keeps us sane. Without having a regular routine or schedule being opposed onto oneself at home, we might end up not completing the job and remain unfocused—baffled as to whether we can still expend any more minutes to play video games instead of accomplishing some load of paperwork.
3. Less Contact
Without personal contact with colleagues or office mates, we might feel alone and empty. No one would give us a boost when we’re isolated or stressed and we don’t have the right network that we can relate our problems with, despite that there’s social media and other online communication tools. In our professional life, without having a team that we can physically interact, we might turn up as introverts or people who prefer to work alone. There are bigger possibilities to feel depressed and less outgoing.
Company Supporting Work From Home
OutDesk specially enables all employees to work from home to do virtual assistance and telecommuting jobs. The domain is under real estate and workers are to engage with agents and potential clients whenever they have inquiries regarding the land, properties and packages. They are monitored in a span of the nine hours spent at work; their profile status should always be online and their responses are all recorded for employers to countercheck their performance later on. Workers’ Internet broadband speed, computer specifications, system requirements and workspace at home are verified before granting the job.
Pros and cons as mentioned above apply to them; adding to cons are that employees would need to pay for electricity bills and other utilities used up to do the job and they are not offered any other benefits and insurance except for the compensation itself.
When others hear that you’re working from home, the response would almost definitely be that they often dream about being the same. However, the truth is that working from home is not for all. To some who cannot manage their own time and space, this is not an easy way out from the typical day-to-day job but a nightmare.
If your office is your home, make sure that you’re able to stay concentrated on your tasks without much supervision from your employers or bosses. If in doubt, you might have dire consequences and put your job and your name at stake in the rocks.
Your thoughts?
Alexis Thompson
Alexis Thompson is a former Mountain Backpacker and a 26 year old mother of 2 daughters, Sophie and Rhian. She is into almost all types of Music especially The Fray and Hillsong. She also has a passion in Singing and Scrap Booking
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