Reasons To Keep Working From Home

The pandemic was not a good time for the planet. Travel was halted, people died, we all discovered that people will hoard toilet paper and sanitizer if the world was feeling like it was going to end. A lot of companies folded. A lot of people lost their jobs. Hospitals were buckled under the pressure of maintaining their health care statuses. And yet there is some good stuff that came out of the pandemic and is still coming out of it even now three years on. 

Working from home has been a revelation. Employers who previously refused to allow people to work from home discovered that actually, people could be productive if they were relaxed while they worked. In fact, working from home has borne the four day workweek which has by all accounts, surpassed all expectations so far. A lot of companies and departments have discovered that they can save money on their business expenses simply by allowing people to work remotely from home.

In roles that are all led by computers, nobody needs to commute into an office. More employees than ever are requesting to work from home from employers knowing full well that when the world was crippled this was a possibility, so what’s the difference now? Unfortunately, a small circle of employers still believe that people prefer to commute for two hours either way to work and sit in an office all day long that smells like boiled fish in the microwave. It’s not the case. These studies are honestly false. 

There are always going to be a handful of people who prefer this social aspect of working in an office, and yet the majority of people would rather spend their time working at home. If it is something that you have been considering and you haven’t had the chance to do it yet, we’ve got some of the best reasons you should ask for it.

• You can reinvest your commuting time. If your working hours are 9:00 AM until 5:00 PM, but you spend 2 hours either side of those times commuting to and from work, longer in traffic, is this a good use of your time? Absolutely not. Who is having a good time while they sit in traffic when it’s raining outside? Who wants to be crushed onto a commuter train and stand under somebody else’s armpit for an entire hour because there is not enough seating. Nobody. Nobody wants to do this, so instead, you could easily spend more time being productive in your home and starting work at a decent time and finishing earlier purely because you have made your time a good investment.

• You can be more productive. You would think that working from home makes you less productive because there are more distractions. And yet when you don’t have a water cooler to gather at, and you don’t have friends sitting beside you talking about having drinks after work, you can find yourself far more productive. You will be able to get out of bed in the morning and sit in your Home Office knowing that your bedroom is not that far away. Knowing that you work for an employer who’s quite happy for you to work from home is also a big incentive.

• You can maintain that work life balance you’ve been trying to hold onto. People request working from home because the personal commitments of life no longer seem to get in the way. Nipping out of the house to pick up the kids from school, attending a doctor’s appointment, being able to go to the shop before it closes for the evening, are all things that are possibilities when you work from home. In terms of employee satisfaction, you are a much happier and more invested employee and more loyal to your workplace if you know that they are giving you that leeway to be able to maintain a good balance. You are no longer just a robot churning out the work, you are a valued human being. This can make all the difference to the way in which you feel about your job and the way in which you feel about your career future.

There are hundreds of benefits to working from home, but the biggest one is you being happier. We get one life. You spend a third of that time sleeping and a third of that time on hygiene and eating and activities that you may enjoy. The last thing that you need is for your job to be encroaching on all of that other time you could be spending.

I don’t know who it was who woke up one day and decided that human beings needed to be productive five days a week for money, but working from home is giving people back a little bit of slack that they needed.