A bad hangover from the pandemic days, when public health told everyone to camp at home, is the Working From Home (WFH) practice.
In the words of Boris Johnson, “Working from home doesn’t work”! Spot on, Boris.
Unfortunately, some employees have sadly developed a kind of sense of entitlement when it comes to WFH comfort. What workers/employees don’t realise is that if this continues, productivity will go down, meaning the country as a whole loses its competitiveness.
This could eventually lead to employers opting for ‘offshoring’ options and this in search for cheaper and more productive workers. To be blunt and brutally honest, I don’t entirely blame employers for trying to source cheaper labour from overseas, if the local labour market insists on WFH.
To my mind, the job is at the place of work and this is where workers/employees need to be and here are my top four reasons:
1. Physical distance creates physiological distance
The organisation is strong when people are brought together for in-person work. We are, after all, human beings and being able to share problems or have face-to-face contact is crucial to the esprit de corps. Research tends to show that over the medium-to-long term, people are more engaged, dynamic and motivated when working in-person at the place of work, while WFM tends to lead to weak work relations, silo thinking and static work behaviour. It also means that WFH employees increasingly feel left out or left behind, as more and more people return to physical work.
Read more here.
2. Team dynamics and creativity
In order for teams to gel and collaborate, team members need to have real physical contact. A team can’t go through the five phases of team development (Forming > storming > norming > performing > adjourning) if everyone works from home. The fundamental rule of high-performing teams is that the organisation must maximise time, intensity and proximity of team members spent together. It is only through such contact that team members feel involved, bond with each other, have key conversations, share information and stimulate their imagination/creativity.
Moreover, cross-functional teams are becoming the norm in the working world which means that project teams are constantly being formed and disbanded. This can only be done successfully if companies maximise the time, intensity and proximity that team members spend together and WFM is not conducive to this.
I am not saying that companies can’t have hybrid working arrangements or flexible working arrangements. In fact, I believe this is one way companies can attract and retain the best talent
3. Productivity
In the immediate short term, until the novelty wears off, people can be more productive when WFH. In fact, they can actually work longer hours (evenings) and even over the weekend but this makes ‘disconnecting’ very hard which eventually leads to burn-out or long-term fatigue, which results in productivity levels and the quality of work plummeting.
The beauty of going to the physical workplace is that it creates a natural boundary. For instance, when you leave the office at the end of the day and commute back home, you have the opportunity to ‘decompress’ and ‘unplug’. When you work in your living room or on the kitchen table, it is very hard to ‘unplug’.
Read more here.
4. Home facilities tend to be inappropriate
Apologies for stating the bleeding obvious but not everyone is lucky enough to have a fully-equipped ‘home office’ which is separate from the living space at home. People either don’t have the space to dedicate a room for a home office or study and/or family members (especially children) do not permit a conducive environment to quality work. The home is the place family members chill/relax, be it to watch TV, play music, invite family/friends, play, etc. My point is that unless you live alone, you can’t work at optimal level because home is too busy and noisy being a family home.
Conclusion
I really don’t want to be misunderstood. Yes, there are times when working from home ‘works’ or when it is necessary. However, the general principle of work must be to ‘work at the workplace’ and ‘rest and play at home’. We should never confuse or merge the two since this is detrimental to our health and that of our families.
In addition, I am not saying that companies can’t have hybrid working arrangements or flexible working arrangements. In fact, I believe this is one way companies can attract and retain the best talent. Put another way, employees/workers don’t just look at the money but also how/where work takes place. So there is plenty of scope for competitive advantage if HR people use their imagination and innovate how/where people do their work in hybrid models.
This notwithstanding, people need human contact and the secret to having an engaged and motivated workforce is by bringing them together in a physical workplace for the majority of their working time.
More information is available here.