Work from home

It was common for people to work more than 12 hours a day and 365 days in a year before the labor law came into its existence. This change has helped to achieve a balanced life for the employees. Business further developed and allowed their employees to take leaves, enjoy company paid holidays along with decreasing the number of working hours and working days. The next step for the employees’ betterment and business continuity plus cost saving was Work From Home policy.

Work from home policy allows the employee to connect remotely to the company and perform their day to day activities. Many big companies, especially the IT industries and media industries are allowing their employees to WFH. In most of the cases it does beneficial to the company, where as in some cases, employees are abusing it.  The WFH policy is a mutual agreement between both, employee and the employer, where the managers are playing a very critical role to make WFH as success or failure.

Let’s take an example of a manager who mostly interested in micro management. There are chances that he’ll keep on checking by e-mails, phones or chat, whether the employee is available or not. He might want to satisfy his ego by assuring that as soon as the employee moves out from his seat, will inform him or take permission from him, even for a cup of tea. Whereas couple of managers are letting team free and owning everything on his own shoulders. In both the cases, company will be at the loss side, as the employee will not as productive as it was expected during WFH.

If we talk about the benefit of the WFH, I think the beauty of it is, 24×7 availability, especially for the managed support projects. Employee does have the pressure of the severity 1 issues though. On the other hand if we talk about the drawback of WFH, then the major one is communication and discussion gaps especially for the development projects.

I believe that if any company is allowing the WFH to their employees, employee should give more respect to that company because it is allowing their employee to be free from the 9 to 6 regress physical availability in the office premises. On the other hand company is blindly trusting their employees by providing WFH facility. Those who are taking WFH for granted, may loss self-confidence and prefer to always be in their comfort zone, which means they might be out dated soon.

Thanks!!