With the COVID-19 epidemic still going strong, over 88 percent of companies worldwide either mandated or encouraged their staff to work from home in 2020.
Work from home was not a novel idea that companies had to suddenly accept; it has been around for a long time, even if it became immensely popular throughout the year due to restricted lockdowns in some areas of the world. Even before the epidemic, 4.7 million people had remote jobs.
Work from home is clearly here to stay as things gradually return to normal. It helps businesses and staff members equally, after all.
Employing from a worldwide talent pool and saving infrastructure expenses allow organisations to hire more people, while individuals benefit from more flexible schedules and improved work-life balance.
For whatever reasons, your business should design and customise its work from home policy to meet the demands of both employees and the organisation. All the information you require to work from home will be included in this post.
WFH Shorthand
Work from home or WFH is an acronym. Employees that work from home collaborate and interact with their teammates utilising a specialised laptop or PC linked to the internet and business apps. While some workers commute to the office half the time, others work from home most of the time.
Definition of WFH
Without necessarily having to travel to the workplace, WFH allows people to set up their workspaces in their homes and handle all of their work from there.
Relevance of WFH
The main obstacles for employers of working from home
1. Working alone
Since employees no longer work from the same actual office area, collaboration is one of the main work from home issues facing businesses. Whether you need to call a team meeting or just have a little question, everything has to be planned ahead of time to guarantee availability. This can wind up taking a lot of time away from the employees’ primary duties.
2. Workers that operate out of several time zones and locales
Employing workers who can work from home enables companies to hire bright people without regard to geography. The major drawback of this benefit, though, is that businesses wind up with a totally dispersed workforce with workers operating from several time zones and places. Enforcing everyone to be accessible at the same time is neither the best nor a sustainable approach because many would wind up working through the night. However, letting remote workers decide when to work implies that you wind up with workers who come in at different hours of the day. Working together, figuring out when to do weekly team meetings or even one-on-one sessions may get rather difficult.
3. Creating and preserving trust
Employees that don’t engage in person run the risk of developing some really clear trust problems. 52 percent of remote workers believe that when they work from home, their team is less trusting of them and they are frequently left out of important decisions. Since managers cannot see remote workers functioning directly in front of them as they can in physical offices, they also struggle to trust workers who work from home. However, one must never forget that trust is reciprocal. Employees that are constantly mistrusted by their colleagues may become demoralised and feel excluded.
Employees’ main difficulties with working from home:
Overworked
Though managers frequently believe that workers are less productive from home than they are in an office, the reality is quite different. Without taking too many breaks or driving far to work, remote workers are 20–25 percent more productive than those in offices. But what increases the risk of burnout for remote workers is the absence of breaks throughout extended labour. Since you have to balance your personal and professional lives within the same home, setting limits can be challenging and frequently result in overwork, weariness, and lower productivity.
The loneliness
Without casual social contacts with coworkers, workers may feel alone and may have trouble communicating with the rest of the group. After all, you won’t even think to ask a basic inquiry of your team members if you don’t feel close to them. When social isolation is not adequately addressed, it can worsen and result in burnouts, lower productivity, and a higher desire to leave for those who have been made to work from home for extended periods of time or who are permanently remote.
Lack of community
It might be fairly difficult to foster a feeling of unity and camaraderie among team members when your only in-person encounters are via weekly or monthly video sessions. Maintaining contact with your colleagues through video conferences is a positive thing, but the issues come when social connections are completely eliminated.
These work from home advices will help you go beyond the aforementioned difficulties and enjoy a long-term successful working from home experience.
Benefits of WFH for firms and workers
Benefits to both employers and employees of working from home include:
Saves on expenses
Less workers coming into the workplace means that companies need less desks, equipment, and space to house them, which will immediately result in less infrastructure and rental costs. Actually, by cutting costs on office space and infrastructure, companies can save up to $2000 for each employee who works from home. Working from home can save employees a tonne of money as well. No morning commute translates into no additional expenses for daily office travel. Furthermore, being near their headquarters no longer requires expensive rent for employees.
More freedom and a flexible timetable
Working from home employees are free to arrange their own hours according to their level of productivity and personal commitments. They can work through the hours or early in the mornings if that is when they feel most productive. Counting the hours spent in front of their screens is not as important to work from home individuals as completing their tasks and meeting deadlines.
Bring in and keep worldwide talent
Offers of work from home benefits make it easier for businesses to keep talent. A new employment offer is heavily weighed by the possibility to work from home for 83% of workers. If given the option to work from home, more than 73% of workers would be prepared to leave their present positions even if their pay remains the same. That means that for businesses, enabling workers to work from home can facilitate the hiring and keeping of exceptional talent without regard to location.
Better balance between work and life
Employees that work from home immediately save a great deal of time that they can use to spend with friends, family, or just to do things they enjoy by not having to spend hours every day driving in traffic, chatting with coworkers near the watercooler, or planning dinner parties with team members. Employees that have more downtime, enough sleep, and a better work-life balance are better able to concentrate on their task, which increases output.
Satisfactory working experience
Work from home ultimately enhances the whole employee experience inside the company because of its greater flexibility, lack of daily transportation jams, and improved work-life balance. This in turn produces a high performance culture in the organisation where staff members want to give their all and keep getting better at work.
Boost of production
Workers are more upbeat and productive when they are allowed to design their own workday and workstation. Work from home workers also end up being more productive than those in offices because they don’t have to take frequent breaks or deal with interruptions from coworkers. Actually, more than 77% of workers say that working from home increases their productivity.
The optimal approach of overseeing WFH management
These are some recommended methods for productive home work:
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Keep staff members trusting one other
The basis of productive remote work is trust. The work of employees can eventually suffer when they don’t feel that they are trusted inside the company. Therefore, before you even begin to set up a work from home plan for staff members, make sure you enumerate the expectations of both them and their team managers. More crucially, one should not micromanage staff members. They should have some breathing room, at least. -
Establish rules for correspondence
More distressing than remote workers feeling alone and alone is their feeling overburdened by the volume of calls and texts they get. Working from home requires efficient team communication, but it’s as crucial to establish explicit communication rules. Here are several approaches you can establish team work from home communication standards:
- Schedule team meetings and one-on-one conversations more easily by keeping a shared team calendar with everyone’s time zones and working hours.
- Establish a limit number of hours that staff members may respond to communications before feeling under pressure to do so.
- List the primary corporate communication tools together with their primary function.
- Reduce the amount of emails and choose texting services instead.
- Set up distinct lines of contact for official and informal correspondence.
- Stay away from diversions
In order to keep constant productivity, employees should set up a distinct office in the home. In addition, they must stay away from internet distractions and spend as little time as possible on social media, emails, and websites irrelevant to work. By giving staff members a single platform for project management, task management, and communication, organisations may assist with that and spare them from switching between several programmes, which can eventually divert them from their work.
Identify and value excellent work.
It could be somewhat isolating to work from home alone without seeing or seeing your coworkers, thus ongoing validation and acknowledgement are more crucial than ever. Recall that acknowledgment need not always be expensive; sometimes, all it takes to raise your colleagues’ spirits and motivate them to put in more effort is a simple “good work” remark.
Work from home essentials to get you by:
1. Tools for communication and collaboration
Features that facilitate employee collaboration when working from home include voice calling, ticketing, video calling, instant messaging, and support for both private and public communication channels.
2. Instruments for project management
Using the correct project management solution can facilitate distributed teams’ ability to keep total transparency while streamlining project work and chores. It guarantees everyone is always in agreement and lessens the amount of back and forth correspondence.
3. Tools for cloud storing
For staff members to manage their work from any place or device, you need centralised and private cloud storage that enables them to access and search for the most recent version of the documents. Choose dependable, reasonably priced, safe cloud storage that complies with all relevant industry regulations.
4. Tool for screen sharing and recording
Employees that use screen sharing software have the necessary context to grasp one another’s viewpoints and the problems they are facing. It can also facilitate support staff in giving your clients quicker and better resolutions.
5. Platform for digital workplace
Introducing a digital workplace platform into your company may assist employees cooperate, communicate, and manage their way without constantly switching between programmes, rather to employing thousands of digital tools that can only make remote employees more overwhelmed and confused.
Future of working from home
Work from home is genuinely the way of the future and it will continue. Working from home has many benefits that much exceed its drawbacks, notwithstanding certain difficulties. First-time work from home strategy implementation can be challenging, but not impossible. Working from home can be successfully implemented in your company that fits with your long-term business objectives and the needs of your employees as well, provided you have a strong corporate culture and the appropriate tools.
