Spending enough time with your family? Finding it difficult to manage a work-life balance? Thinking of shifting to ‘work from home’ option? Learn the “work from home” benefits and challenges. And how staying closer to your family can actually make you more productive or more stressful too.
Longer working hours, huge traffic queues and far away offices are becoming increasingly painful day by day. The offices are in city and the property prices in the city are extremely high so it becomes unwise to spend hard earned money in the rental expenses. The easiest option to save on rental expense is to stay away from workplace and travel to work daily.
One may end up spending couple of hours on the drive. That seems so unproductive but can we really help it? Yes, you can. The option to all these issues is opting to work from home.
Discover pros and cons of working from home to help you decide if work from home suits your requirement. You can learn how you can make best out of the option of working from home. You also can be prepared for challenges the new change can bring and find way out of it. Make it a win-win situation by researching more about it.
Benefits of working from home:
Flexible work schedule
This is most obvious benefit of working from home. If you are a new mom or you have toddler to take care, this can be boon to you. You can have your own working hours and manage work as per schedule of your baby. You can take breaks at the time to suit your personal commitments. Similarly if you are entrepreneur managing multiple businesses, working from home helps you manage your tasks as per need of each business.
Set your home anywhere
With rising rentals and lack of spacious homes, it becomes inevitable to find economical homes within our budget close to our workplace. Working from home gives us flexibility to choose our home away from the buzz of noisy streets or churning machineries.
Wear comfortable clothes
Are you tired of those heels that make your legs cramp at the end of the day? If you never loved being prim and proper for each meeting or think that wearing a make up to office is waste of your productive time, work from home is better option for you. Its no hassle to bother about the kind of clothes you would wear for your next meeting with your boss.
No office distractions.
If you have always disliked the conversation about cricket that you overhear from your colleagues or that buzzing sound of telephone ringing on adjacent desk irritated you, you going to be happy about being at home.
No long distance Travelling
You save lot of time and money by working from home. Give a miss to 1 hour commute and save money on the fuel and vehicle maintenance too. Plus you wouldn’t have to deal with sweaty crowd and noise on public transport. Nothing can be better than this.
Save money and stay healthy
Staying at home and relying on home-cooked fresh food can be good choice to stay healthy. And also save money spend on store bought sandwiches. Making salads or sandwiches at home is easy and economical. Keep stock of fresh fruits, bread, cheese, yoghurt and you are good to go even on the busiest day.
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More time with loved ones.
Wouldn’t your daughter love to be picked up from her school bus? She is going to be so excited to share with you how happy she was when her teacher congratulated her on her essay. You can assist her in her homework too. This seems to good to be true, isnt it?
Avoid office politics
No matter how fair and unbiased you try to be, you cannot help become a victim or maybe a confidante of a victim suffering from office politics. Keep that negativity away. Stay at home and be focused on your tasks and to-do list.
Stay more focused
When there is less distractions and less people around, you can focus better on the tasks at hand. That’s only if your tasks are not dependent on the other situations happening around you. Set your own time and knock it off your to-do list.
Complete some household chores
Finishing that laundry every two days during the break can be an excellent example of multitasking. You finish your dishes during lunch break. And can assist your little one with her homework too as you continue with your work. These small tasks can knock off many things off your to-do list and save you so much time.
While work from home seems good to be true, there is a dark side to it too. Working from home has its own demands which can negate all the benefits that you actually reap from it.
Challenges of working from home
We all face unique challenges, not only because we have different personalities, but also due to our various lifestyles and the kind of work we do. Working from home is a great option as it saves time and money but is it practically beneficial in real world as it is in theory. Let’s find out the challenges of working from home.
Procrastination
What really happens when you have no supervision and no deadlines is that you may decide to finish the task later. After lunch maybe or after that 10 min nap or after the cricket match. It still is on your to-do list next day. Procrastination may become biggest challenge in working from home.
Difficulty sticking to a routine
When you are at home you end up handling responsibilities at work and home together. This may create chaos. It will be difficult to balance the schedule at work and timings of household activities. Clash of schedules can be really tug of war.
Lack of trust
When you are out of sight, it shall be difficult for colleagues or superiors to guage the reasons for delay in completion of your task. You may end up giving ‘unsatisfactory’ explanations for the incomplete tasks.
Spending more money
Though you save the money on food and travel, you may actually end up spending more money on setting up technical resources for working from home. Generally offices have shared internet connections, printers and such other gadgets which are shared by staff. Setting up these individually may be expensive.
Some of the companies provide budget for setting up of technical resources at home. You may benefit from such policy of your company.
Lesser socializing with colleagues
No more celebration of monthly birthday celebrations or team lunches. This is going to get boring. May be you can pitch it with your management to keep some team building socializing once a month. That’s the way you shall know your colleagues better.
Technical resources
The quality of resources may not be same. For commercial institutions, the wi-fi services provided are uninterrupted. Same cannot be assured for residential connections or even in café. To set the same kind of technical stuff in your home is going to cost a bomb.
Difficulty in dependent actions
When you have sent email to your colleague with requirehoments of the tasks, and you have to wait for an eternity till the reply trickles in your email box, you realize how painful can working in isolation be. For work that requires team efforts, you may end up spending more time.
Isolation
Loneliness can be miserable. When you do not get out of your home for days at end, you may be sucked up in loneliness and depression. We are social beings and sharing is caring. When you have no one to interact for days at end, it can become stressful.
Dual responsibilities
Attending a meeting in pyjamas may seem to be fun but managing to keep your kids from making noise during that meeting is not. Working from home is no fun and play all time. It is a constant juggle between managing your home and work at the same time. This can be stressful.
Demarcation between work time and family time
This is an obvious situation when you step on two stones at same time. When you pick your kids from school in your work hour, you feel guilty for not finishing your work in time. So you decide to skip the evening time with your family and try to complete your work. Slowly this become order of the day.
And then the line of demarcation of time when work ends and family time begins just seems to fade away. Eventually you end up working late at night, early in morning and all the time in between. This can lead to burnout.
Final note :
Working from home has its own pros and cons. Read best tips of working from home so that you can make best out of it. You may figure out if working from home is a good idea for you to follow. If you are a new mom or have a toddler, working from home may be good option so that you can balance work and baby-care. For someone who is working in technical industry or living in big family, it may be challenging.
Let me know your experience about working from home in the comments below.
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[…] its own pros and cons. Before you take big leap towards quitting your job, you may like to weigh the benefits and challenges of working from home. Is it suitable as per your lifestyle? Can you cope up with it and make […]