Remote working has become much more common for some employees and has provided significant benefits to employee lifestyle, productivity and has opened up a much more extensive talent pool for employers.

Although working remotely opens doors to both positive and negative aspects – whether you’re avoiding the bumper to bumper traffic in the morning or feeling a little left out of office inside jokes.

As with everything, there’s more than what meets the eye, so we asked one of our remote workers to highlight what they think are the advantages and disadvantages of this sort of working lifestyle.

 

Advantages:

No commute!

One of the most excellent perceived perks of remote working has got to be eliminating your commute time! For some, this could be 20 minutes in a day, but for others, this could be 2 hours. We are losing hours of our day on getting to work and back when we could be spending this time with our loved ones.

You’re in your own space

When you are working out of the comfort of your own home, whether it be a designated office space or in the lounge somewhere, you’re supposedly free from distractions – whether it be your colleagues having a chat about what they did over the weekend or the office music blasting through the speaker.

Feel more engaged to work as you have to quantify your hours

Because you are no longer subject to direct supervision, naturally this often sparks a need to prove you’re working. In turn, often employees do work harder to prove that they are actually doing work at home and as a by-product, they feel more engaged with the work they are doing!

 

Disadvantages:

Watercooler talk is less engaging

The minutes you spend strolling to the water cooler, making casual conversations with colleagues and then back to your desk helps break your workday up and allows you to recharge your batteries at work with your co-workers.

Working remotely can mean that walk to fill your cup up with water might be a little lonelier.

You often feel somewhat removed

Your colleagues may still be dialing you into the weekly meetings or updating you with the latest gossip. But you can’t help it but feel somewhat removed from the team.

When you aren’t there, it’s hard to stay in the loop of things. Meaning you probably won’t be attending the next happy hour with all your colleagues anytime soon.

You have to quantify the hours you work

When you’re working in an office, you could simply be in your office chair, and you would consider yourself “hard at work” but working remotely requires a lot more than that. Working remotely, you need to quantify the amount of work you’re doing – showing your boss that you really are doing work!

 

Got a question? The team at ProWorkflow are happy to help!