Is Work from Home a Good Idea in the Long Run?

Is Work from Home a Good Idea in Long Run?

We all are thrown unprepared into unexpected situations. Covid has brought each of our lives to a standstill or if not stand still then to a point where we cannot predict what will happen in the near future. We all are confined to our homes and whoever can work from home is asked to do the same to support their work, family, economy, etc. Recently I was going through the newspaper and there was an article which was published by TCS saying that 75% of their workforce will be doing work from home in the next 2 years. Is this norm that is coming into reality and what will be the consequences of this. Let us look at this with three different aspects

Employer Perspective – What is an advantage that a company gets by asking an employee to do work from home (WFH) and similarly are there any downsides to it, let’s see. Employers will be able to save some of the fixed expenses if they ask employees to do WFH. Fixed Expenses like huge rents, electricity bill, maintenance of electronic peripherals like computer, printer, edible items like tea/coffee, transport facilities, etc can be curtailed easily which will help an employer to increase its margins easily. Downside of it will be an employee might miss important meetings and there won’t be any fixed time for an employee to work which might in long run make them frustrated since you will always be working from home and working.

Employee Perspective – From an employee perspective this can be a nice move is what each one of us thinks, though I don’t agree totally. Employees who stay far and especially in metros where commute eats up half of your time, this move is good as you can save approx. 3-4 hrs daily. The downside of this is since you are at home you will not be interacting much with the team which results in losing the touch between two employees which is not the case up till now. Also, when you are sitting and talking to someone face to face you tend to learn from another person which won’t be the case going forward. Health issues will be seen more often as there will be hardly anybody movement also most of us do not have a good setup to work from home the way we have in the office.

Economy Perspective – This perspective no one has thought about and hardly talked about as well. What will be effective in our economy in our environment if most of the people start working from home? The advantage will be since most of the people will be at home there will be less pollution, fewer vehicles on the road, easy access to transport. The downside of this will be fuel consumption will go down, companies which run cabs for employees will be affected as they won’t be needed, similarly, catering won’t be needed to that extent so hotels will be affected which will result in job cuts for cab drivers, hotel workers, etc. Overall, you will see it will create a negative impact on our economy

It is difficult to say that if we go ahead and see this norm in the future will it affect each one of us in a positive or negative manner. It totally depends on each one of us, how we take it? I leave it to you guys to decide and see the pros and cons of it.