While
working from home is certainly not new, 2020 has forced millions of people to
work remotely as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and it has sparked some
interesting debate into the benefits and drawbacks and whether or not this is
the future of working. It has largely been successful in many different
industries, but there are also limitations and many employees are not enjoying
it as much as they had previously thought.
Pros
In
terms of the advantages of working from home, there are obvious
benefits
like no commute, greater work flexibility, comfortable clothing, no office
distractions and the ability to look after kids/other large responsibilities.
Additionally, many people have found that they are more productive working from
home and are able to get more done, but this is not true across the board and
comes down to the type of worker.
Cons
There
are a handful of drawbacks to working from home from an employee’s perspective
and many people are looking forward to getting back in the office. The main
disadvantages are that people are missing colleague interaction, office
chit-chat and having a change of scenery during the day. Isolation can be a
major issue with people working from home so those that are not used to it have
found this a difficult area to manage. On top of this, some people struggle to work
unsupervised and some work is much harder to carry out without being in the
same office as staff.
Missing
the Office?
A
recent survey of 1000 Brits conducted by Yorkshire-based online poster print
specialist instantprint about remote working during the pandemic, found that
there are many places that are working more productively than before, such as
Bristol, Glasgow and London. Despite this, it is clear that there are other
cities like Sheffield and departments like operations that are working much
less, but this could be attributed to the type of work and the limitations
created by the pandemic.
Additionally,
the survey revealed some interesting statistics in relation to what people
missed about the office. 35% of respondents
stated that they were missing the people that they work with and it was men missing
their coworkers more than women, while 32% stated that they missed office small
talk and this is something that more women missed than men. Of course, there
are also things that people do not miss about the office such as activities
like team meetings (6%), birthday celebrations (6%) and feeling that you have
to justify every minute (5%).
It
is interesting to see how some people have taken to remote working and seem to
be able to be more productive, but this is not the case for all as some are struggling
to be as productive and miss many aspects about the office. It will be
interesting to see what the future holds in terms of remote work
and whether or not staff will have more flexibility about the way in which they
work.
