Permanent work from home plans: Good or Bad?

 

The pandemic has hit us hard and made sure that we all are restricted to our homes. It has made most of us work from home. The urban-centric workforce did not have any issue with it. The internet was able to connect all the corporate executives and government officers with their office mates. The Human Resource teams, who were always sceptical of working from home, have understood that place of work doesn’t make much of a difference in the desired output from an employee. Infact, office goers around me believe that working from home is better because they can concentrate better as there are less disturbance and noise. The time spent on travelling is also saved, leading to spending the same amount of time more productively.

The IT industry was the first to move to work from home. It was a problem for a few, who worked on PCs present in the offices but is convenient for most of the rest. Now over time, a lot of them have thought of making it a permanent one. The OSP (Other Services Provider) companies, especially the IT services had asked the govt to make the work from home a permanent one as a change in their policy, which has been accepted recently. As an organisation, they are going to save a lot of money in that process. The entire cost of running the office: the rent which is huge in number, the infrastructure establishment and running cost including the electricity.
A few non-IT companies are thinking of making work from home permanent because of the amount of savings they can have! Tata Steel recently announced that they are going to try this for a year for their white-collar jobs. They said one can work from any part of the world, the decision of the renewal of which can be taken a year later.

I personally like the idea of work from home. Apart from the benefits listed above, there is an added benefit to it. The cities have been congested due to people travelling to offices, to work on a computer and the internet. The less travel will make the road easier to travel for production centric work and essential travel. The smaller number of vehicle movement will reduce pollution drastically as well. One does not have to be troubled about house repairs and leaving elderly/children alone at home. The added time, as mentioned earlier, is always a bonus.

The only issue is our teammates and partners understanding the fact that if someone is working from home, it doesn’t mean he/she is available as and when required. He/she should only be contacted during the office hours and beyond that, only if it is extremely important and if he/she is comfortable with it. This mindset has to go, to make working hours a maximum of 9 per day.
The case with students (studying from home) is however different. I will talk about them in the next blog. You tell me, how do you feel about working from home in the comments below!