Drawbacks of working from home
The option of working from home entices any employee because who wouldn’t want to work from home, where you can sit on your bed all day and chew on chips while you complete your tasks? You don’t have to worry about having a boss on your back, and you don’t have to worry about the commute. No one can think of drawbacks of working from home. However, as enticing as this can sound, working from home can have grave drawbacks. Since it’s a fairly new trend, remote working can fail. There can be quite a lot the person can miss out on, and this can lead to them feeling at loss. Here are some drawbacks to working from home.
#1. Lack of belonging
Sure, it’s fun to sit on your bed and work in your jammies, but how about that hello in the morning from your favorite co-worker? Nothing can replace the feeling of belongingness when you walk into work and see smiles on peoples faces as you have entered. Working from home takes away your chance to interact with people on a face-to-face basis, and even if video calls can come close, they don’t cut the deal. You’re working on your own, and your computer screen is the only company you have. This can cause your work to become more boring than it actually is, and can drive you against the wall when you make a mistake. There won’t be any meetings where you can learn about how to do a job, now you’ve got to learn most of it on your own. And there isn't a worklife balance to worry about either.
#2. Difficult to communicate
When someone is working remotely, there’s bound to be some communication errors. Something or the other won’t be understood properly and will show up as an error on the work that they were probably working on. When it is a distributed team, with efforts and responsibilities equally distributed, one person working from home can prove to be a challenge. Not being part of meetings can take away a remote worker’s chance of learning it with the team, instead, they are offered a summarized ‘this is what you have to do’ version of the meeting. When someone is working from home, they must learn to balance several communication streams such as messaging applications, video call software, how to manage products online, and of course, email. With so many things being juggled all at once, it’s not news that communication can go wrong anytime.
#3. Reliability is a problem
Remote working can present reliability problems. What if you’ve sent an assignment to someone working from home, and they haven’t yet sent it back? You’ve given them emails and reminders that you will be needing the assignment, however, they’ve not come back to you with the result. How can one make sure that it is the worker who wrote the assignment or if they are working at all? There is no application that can check if they are working constantly as they would have in an office space, and because of this, managers can lose reliability on their remote employees.
#4. Loss of productivity
You can’t ever be sure if the remote worker is being productive. You can’t know when they’re working or if they’re working at all. And with so many distractions at home, not to mention the comforts within your home such as a television or the bed by itself, productivity is a huge challenge. This can lead to several other issues such as payment problems, problems with logistics—these invariably make the remote employee hard to handle and manage. As many benefits available with working from home, one has to keep in mind the several things that can go wrong as well. Keeping these issues in mind, remote working can prove to be a challenge; however, when executed well, it can prove to be a remarkable feat. And not to mention, hassle-free.