Opinion: 5 Interesting things about Working from Home

Why Work From Home (WFH) has become a new normal?

With the threat of COVID19 pandemic looming all over the World, companies across sectors are being forced to adopt WFH as the new normal.

Previously, WFH option was a distant dream for employees in many sectors such as manufacturing. Now, that becoming a reality, I thought of analysing few interesting things about working from home.

Interesting things about working from home:

i) Do not stretch yourself:

Many people who didn’t get this option earlier had thought that people can finish their work soon and spend more time with the family while availing this option. But it has proved them the other way.

People tend to stretch themselves over extended periods of time while working from home. We can view this phenomenon from both employer and employee sides.

Employers tend to think that there is nothing wrong in employees working for extra hours as employees are already in their comfort zones. Employees on the other hand, in the absence of face to face interactions, tend to get anxious about happenings at the work-space in their physical absence.

A practical solution to this would be to have a start line and finish line for everyday work to avoid unnecessary conflicts and stress.

ii) Know your accountability:

Managers normally feel that employees lose their accountability while working from home. Actually it is the reverse which happens when working from home. This is because the employees due to their physical absence tend to show more accountability to avoid bias. Now, how can we overcome this conflict?

A simple way for the employees to express accountability while working from home is to send in advance weekly and daily plans to their Managers. Also, the employees can update the Managers with status reports frequently to express adherence to accountability.

iii) Behave professionally:

There is a great possibility for employees to lose their professionalism while working from home.

A simple example would be attending meetings from home. People normally tend to lose basic etiquette of a meeting such as attending on time, staying focused throughout, taking down important points etc., while attending meetings from home.

In order to avoid this, it is better to get connected through a video call as much as possible. The reason being people normally get extra cautious when they know that they are being watched.

iv) Relax yourself:

While working from office, I used to take a break for drinking water (or) to go for a walk after 60–90 minutes of working continuously. While working from home, people tend to operate at the extremes. Either people relax so much (or) feel guilty to relax while working from home.

A good approach to overcome this is do to something very interesting (or) very dear to you for 10- 20 minutes after every 90–120 minutes of uninterrupted work. By doing this, our mind and body will get energised for prolonged duration of work. This is the best time to either cultivate a new hobby (or) resurrect an old one.

v) Managers’ Dilemma:

As I had mentioned earlier, many managers feel uncomfortable to award WFH for employees. Managers feel that the productivity and quality of output might go for a toss when employees work from home. I have seen many managers and organisations finding various ways to monitor the employees who work from home in every possible way.

When some countries and organisations are experimenting 4 day work week (It has provided marvelous results by the way) the attitude of managers not trusting the employees who are working from home seems to be archaic.

Final words:

I came across a social media post by a CEO of a popular product company mentioning that he is planning to make more people work from home even after the pandemic ends. This is a welcome step in my opinion.

I really wish many more organisations to follow the path.

Please share your thoughts..☺