The Benefits Of Working From Home
February 28, 2013 in Daily Bulletin
There’s been a bit of a kerfuffle over Marissa Mayer’s decision to ban employees from working from home. Farhad Manjoo believes that this is a mistake and pointed out all the benefits of working remote:
- By taking away the commute workers have more time to be productive.
- Workers also no longer have to worry about office distractions such as small talk or figuring out where to get lunch.
- When attending a meeting in person individuals are forced to pay attention. If they dial into a conference call they only have to pay attention if the meeting is actually useful for them.
- For employees that work remotely managers are forced to focus on the quality of the employee’s work rather than arbitrary metrics such as how much time they spend at the office to evaluated their performance.
Read more about Manjoo’s thoughts as well as why Mayer might have taken the decision over here.
Source: Slate
My company wants all of us to be in the office — not to “police” us or to squeeze more work out of us, but because collaboration is the heart of how we work. Every few months we move to different floors and areas of the building, so over time we get to know many more of our colleagues than we would in most companies, and meet people in a more diverse range of jobs, functions, and projects than is typical when one stays a long time in the same team, in the same location.
You can count on finding anyone at their desk most of the time, which encourages us to stand up and walk over (instead of emailing someone who sites in the same building!) In the process we pass many other people (some of whom just moved there…), increasing familiarity and connection.
This is the best working environment I’ve ever had.
Is the office a powerful concept? Definitely. And it should continue. You’re right that face to face meetings are at times important and that collaboration can be done – perhaps even best done – through in person meetings.
However there are some advantages to the flexibility of working remotely. Not every single task requires collaboration and some are best done in our own time in the environment that we feel comfortable in. People aren’t upset with Myer because she wants people to come to the office, they’re upset because she’s banned them from staying at home. Workers should be allowed a good mix – and it’s the workers themselves that are best placed to determine that, not the c-suit execs at the very top of the chain.
“By taking away the commute workers have more time to be productive.”
The last time I checked, commute time was not considered part of the work day. People choose where to work and where to live, and must accept the consequences of their choices.
however, people who occasionally work from home often will use the time normally used for the commute to work. some companies have this as a requirement to work from home.
“When attending a meeting in person individuals are forced to pay attention.”
This would seem like a *good* thing.
That’s an out of date conception of what workers are like. People used to assume that workers wanted to short-change the company of every dollar and work as little as possible. But that’s no longer true, if it ever was. Workers that are successful enjoy their job and they do it well. If they’re not paying attention to a meeting it’s not because they’re lazy or whatnot – it’s because the meeting, quite honestly, isn’t relevant to them. In corporations you get invited to lots of meetings that are only tangentially relevant to you – because the costs of adding an extra person to a meeting are really low. Most of the meetings though are useless, and it’s worth it to only have to passively listen while you work on more useful things.
If the problem is useless meetings or people being invited to meetings that are not relevant, then address that problem. Having people “attending” a meeting and then not be paying attention is far, far worse.
i don’t think the meeting itself is irrelevant. people are often invited to meetings in which a relatively small part of the meeting is relevant to them. we get this all the time in our company – we have a new product bring up, and everyone involved is invited, but hardware issues aren’t in my section, but software issues are – so i pay closer attention to the software issues, and just lightly listen to the hardware issues, while i do other work. this has enabled a lot more productivity.