The Pros and Cons of Working From Home
What are The Pros and Cons of Working From Home? We recently supplied and installed some DAMS Maestro Wave Desk in to a clients home. Our client, Albert Taylor, was happy to share this image and his feedback on the product and our services:
“Really pleased with the desk, service and installation which all went very well”
So let’s look at some of the common attributes associated with working from home exclusively during this lockdown:
The Pros and Cons of Working From Home
Pro: You have flexibility to take care of appointments and errands.
One of the hardest things about committing to a 9-to-5 desk job is that it prevents you from being able to handle almost anything else that comes up in your life. This could be attending a routine dentist appointment or picking a sick child up from school. When you work from home you generally have greater flexibility to tend to other responsibilities without it affecting or jeopardising your job.
Con: There is no physical separation between work and leisure time.
Working from home you can often find yourself working around the clock, since the working day has no definite start or end times. As a result, you sometimes feel like you are literally always at work. This can make it difficult to shift to the post-work relaxation mode that many office workers take for granted.
The absence of an obvious division between the personal and professional boundaries means some remote workers get distracted by housework.
Pro: There are fewer interruptions from meetings and chitchat.
It’s easier to get into a good flow of deep work when you’re in your home office without colleagues dropping by and sitting down impromptu to talk about their weekends. Limiting unnecessary interruptions from your colleagues and boss is a big plus of working from home and is one reason why many remote workers are more productive than office-based workers. Although you may need to dial in for specific meetings, you’ll likely get a break from attending several others. This can leave you more time to concentrate on achieving your daily or weekly goals.
Con: It is easy to misinterpret messages via electronic communications.
There can be a feeling of ‘loneliness’ whilst working from home. However the biggest difficulty can be getting the tone right in digital communication systems such as email, chat, social media and text.
It can be easy to misconstrue the tone of someone’s messages. People are often blind without body language and facial expressions to rely on and it is easy to assume the worst.
Pro: There is no commute time or expense.
You can save a lot of money and avoid wasting hours that others spend simply getting to and from work when your office is just in the other room. Avoiding the daily traffic battle and long-distance travel tops the list of benefits for some of those who work from home.
Con: You have to make the effort to get a change of scenery.
What can be a blessing can also become a curse in the form of cabin fever. Some freelancers and others who work from home described the place they work during the day as the exact same place they’ll be sitting later that evening. And that getting involved in their work often leads to spending a huge portion of the day indoors. This makes the importance of scheduling lunches and other meetings to keep you in the mix a top priority.
How can we help?
Remote work has clear benefits, but no situation is perfect. Understanding the reasons to work from home – as well as the reasons not to – can go a long way in learning how to work from home successfully.
You don’t have to have a mansion in order to make space for a designated work from home office desk within your home. It could be a desk that doubles up as a sideboard when you are not working. Or a beauty station. We have various different options of desks for the home – the perfect addition to making you feel like you’re at work whilst you’re at home.
Please visit us at our Glasgow Showroom or call us on 0141-880-6600 to discuss
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