working from home advantages essay

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Working From Home Essay

In this working from home essay for IELTS you have to discuss whether you think that working from home has more advantages or disadvantages.

This was a recent question from the test. Take a look at the essay question:

These days, many people have their own computer and telephone, so it is quite easy for them to do their job at home.

Does working at home have more advantages or more disadvantages?

In this essay you have the following task:

Does working at home have more advantages or disadvantages?

This suggests that there are both pros and cons of working from home as you are asked which there are more of.

So in your answer to this working from home essay it's better to discuss both but write more about the side that you think there are more of so that the essay content reflects your opinion.

Try then to think of one reason for one side of the argument and two for the other side.

Organisation

It's usual in academic writing to start with the opinion that is the one you don't support so start with that one.

So based on this, the sample working from home essay is organised as follows:

Have more control of time ( advantage)
Loneliness (disadvantage)
Less influence in the company ( disadvantage)

So in this case, the writer thinks of course that there are more disadvantages and this should be clearly stated when you give your opinion in the introduction and / or conclusion.

Now take a look at the model answer.

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task.

Write about the following topic:

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own experience or knowledge.

Write at least 250 words.

Model Answer:

In the present age it is common for people to work from home because of advances in technology. On balance, I would argue that this has more negative impacts than positive.

One advantage of working from home is the freedom it provides. Home workers can organise their work around their home life as they can stop or start work as they please, and thus if, for example, they have children, they can easily arrange to take them and pick them up from school. They can also undertake any other tasks that they need to do during the day, such as doing the laundry or shopping, and then finish work later. Overall then, employees have more control over their lives.

Despite these positive factors, however, there are a number of disadvantages. The first of these is the fact that those who work at home nearly all the time will not be mixing with colleagues. When people are at work, they are always surrounded by others, but at home, an employee is likely to be alone most the time. This may lead to feelings of loneliness due to a lack of interaction.

Another drawback is the fact that one may have less influence in the company. It is often the case that important decisions arise on the spur of the moment as unexpected issues arise. If an employee is not there, others may have to step in. If this occurs on a regular basis, the employees contribution to the company may decline, meaning a higher probability of getting overlooked for things such as promotion.

In conclusion, although there are positives and negatives related to working from home, there are more negative impacts. Employees should therefore consider carefully whether working from home is the best choice.

(293 Words)

This working from home essay would get a high score as it meets the requirements of the task, which is to discuss the pros and cons of working from home and state which there are more of.

It is also coherent and cohesive, with paragraphing used to good effect and good linking within and between sentences.

There is a good range of lexis (vocabulary) in the essay and it is used accurately with good collocations.

There is also a good mix of complex sentences and structures and again the grammatical accuracy is very good.

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11 Pros and Cons of Work from Home: Exploring the Advantages and Disadvantages

This advantages and disadvantages of work from home essay will explain the pros and cons of working from home.

Discover the advantages of flexibility and increased productivity, alongside the challenges of isolation and blurred work-life boundaries.

Gain valuable insights into the work-from-home phenomenon and make informed decisions about your own professional journey.

Dive into the advantages and disadvantages of remote work, and unlock the key considerations for finding the right balance in this engaging blog post.

Let’s dive into the advantages and disadvantages of work from home essay.

Ah, the glorious freedom of working from home!

Picture this: You roll out of bed, grab a cup of joe, and dive into your work without ever facing the dreaded commute or office small talk.

It’s a dream come true for many of us, and it’s not just about the convenience of staying in our pajamas all day (although that’s definitely a perk).

In this part of the article, we’ll explore the numerous benefits of working from home that go beyond the comfy attire, showing you why embracing the pajama professional life might be the best decision you’ll ever make.

advantages and disadvantages of work from home essay

https://unsplash.com/photos/g9KFpAfQ5bc

From bidding farewell to the dreaded commute to enjoying increased productivity, improved work-life balance, and even saving money, the perks of working from home are undeniable. It’s a lifestyle that grants you the freedom and flexibility to design your work environment and schedule tailored to your preferences and needs.

So, if you’re still on the fence about embracing the pajama professional life, consider the advantages we’ve explored.

The absence of a daily commute allows you to reclaim valuable time, reduce stress, and engage in activities that truly matter to you.

The ability to focus in a distraction-free environment leads to heightened productivity and a sense of accomplishment.

Integrating work and personal commitments seamlessly ensures a healthier work-life balance, nurturing your overall well-being.

Moreover, remote work not only benefits you personally but also has a positive impact on the environment. Reduced transportation results in cost savings and a smaller carbon footprint, making it a win-win for your wallet and the planet.

Of course, working from home has its challenges. Loneliness, the need for self-discipline, and potentially blurred boundaries between work and personal life require careful navigation. However, these challenges can be overcome with the right strategies, such as establishing a dedicated workspace, maintaining regular communication with colleagues , and setting clear boundaries.

More about the disadvantages of working from home later.

In recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift towards remote work, with many companies recognizing its benefits and embracing hybrid work models. As the world becomes more interconnected, technology advancements make remote collaboration seamless, enabling professionals to thrive in their homes.

Advantages of Working from Home Essay

Say goodbye to the commute.

Let’s face it—commuting can be a soul-sucking experience. Spending hours stuck in traffic or crammed into a crowded train is not exactly the ideal way to start or end your workday.

When you work from home, you bid farewell to the daily commute and say hello to extra time and reduced stress. Imagine reclaiming and using those lost hours for more productive or enjoyable activities. Whether catching up on sleep, exercising, or simply spending quality time with your loved ones, the lack of commuting opens up a world of possibilities.

Increased Productivity

Working from home offers a prime environment for enhanced productivity. You can focus on your tasks without interruptions without the usual office distractions. No more impromptu meetings or colleagues popping by your desk for a chat about the latest reality TV show. Instead, you can create a dedicated workspace tailored to your needs, free from distractions.

Moreover, the flexibility of remote work allows you to structure your day in a way that suits your preferences and energy levels. If you’re an early bird, you can tackle important tasks in the morning; if you’re a night owl, you can burn the midnight oil. You’ll accomplish more in less time by aligning your work hours with peak productivity periods, giving you a sense of achievement and a better work-life balance.

Let’s further explore the pros and cons in this advantages and disadvantages of work from home essay.

Improved Work-Life Balance

One of the most significant advantages of working from home is achieving a healthier work-life balance. Traditional office settings often blur the lines between professional and personal life, making switching off from work-related stress and responsibilities challenging.

When your office is just a few steps from your living room, you have greater control over your schedule. You can integrate personal commitments, such as attending family events, exercising, or pursuing hobbies, into your workday. This flexibility allows you to design a routine that aligns with your individual needs, leading to increased job satisfaction and overall well-being.

Furthermore, remote work saves precious time that would otherwise be spent commuting or getting ready for the office. This newfound time can be utilized for self-care, pursuing personal passions, or engaging in activities that bring you joy.

The result? You feel more fulfilled and energized, ready to enthusiastically tackle professional and personal challenges.

Cost and Environmental Benefits

Working from home can be kind to both your wallet and the environment. When you’re no longer commuting, you save on transportation costs, whether it’s fuel for your car or public transportation fares. Additionally, remote work eliminates the need for a separate work wardrobe, saving you money on professional attire.

Moreover, remote work significantly reduces carbon emissions associated with commuting. Fewer cars on the road translate to cleaner air and a smaller carbon footprint. By embracing remote jobs, you contribute to a more sustainable future and help protect the planet.

Also, one of the small benefits of working from home is that you can spend more time with your pets. Sometimes your dog or cat can feel lonely and that you don’t spend enough time with them. Remote work allows getting to know your pet closer and having quality time together. Basepaws review can also help you to know your pet better.

So, whether you’re a freelancer, a remote employee, or considering negotiating a flexible work arrangement with your employer, the benefits of working from home are waiting for you to embrace them. Say goodbye to the mundane office routine and embrace the freedom, flexibility, and personal fulfillment that come with the pajama professional life.

https://unsplash.com/photos/FHnnjk1Yj7Y

The Disadvantages of Working from Home: Balancing Flexibility with Challenges

Let’s continue our advantages and disadvantages of work from home essay by exploring the disadvantages of working from home.

The concept of remote work has gained significant traction in recent years, revolutionizing the traditional office environment.

While working from home offers numerous benefits, such as increased flexibility and reduced commuting time, it is important to recognize that it also comes with its fair share of disadvantages.

In this part of the article, we will explore the potential downsides of working from home, shedding light on the challenges individuals may face in this ever-evolving professional landscape.

Isolation and Lack of Social Interaction

One of the most common drawbacks of working from home is the feeling of isolation and limited social interaction. When employees are physically distanced from their colleagues, they miss out on the spontaneous conversations, brainstorming sessions, and the overall camaraderie that can foster creativity and collaboration. The absence of face-to-face interactions may lead to a sense of disconnection, which can impact job satisfaction and mental well-being.

Blurred Boundaries Between Work and Personal Life

Working from home often blurs the line between professional and personal life, making it challenging for individuals to maintain a healthy work-life balance. With no clear separation between the office space and home environment, it becomes tempting to work longer hours, leading to burnout and decreased productivity. Moreover, the lack of physical boundaries may result in constant interruptions from family members or the inability to switch off work-related thoughts, thereby adding to stress levels.

Distractions and Lack of Focus

The home environment can be full of distractions, ranging from household chores to family responsibilities. The presence of tempting diversions, such as household tasks, television, or social media , can significantly impact an individual’s ability to concentrate on their work tasks. Procrastination becomes easier, and maintaining focus becomes a constant challenge, potentially hampering productivity and overall performance.

Limited Access to Resources and Technology

While technological advancements have made remote work more feasible, it is undeniable that not all employees have equal access to the necessary resources and technology.

In some cases, employees may lack a stable internet connection, have outdated equipment, or face other technological limitations. These disparities can create barriers to effective communication, collaboration, and access to vital tools or software, thus hindering productivity and professional growth.

Reduced Career Development Opportunities

Working remotely can limit an individual’s exposure to various career development opportunities. In a traditional office setting, employees have the advantage of face-to-face interactions, networking events, and informal learning experiences. Remote workers may miss out on these crucial avenues for professional growth, potentially impacting their chances of career advancement and skill development.

Strained Communication and Collaboration

Despite the advancements in communication technology, remote work can still present challenges when it comes to effective collaboration.

Remote employees heavily rely on digital communication tools, such as email, instant messaging, and video conferencing. However, misinterpretations, technical glitches, and limited non-verbal cues can hamper effective communication, leading to misunderstandings and reduced team cohesion.

Building trust and maintaining strong relationships with colleagues and supervisors can be more challenging when working remotely.

Impact on Mental Health and Well-being

The work-from-home setup can have a significant impact on an individual’s mental health and overall well-being. The lack of social interaction, feelings of isolation, and increased blurring of boundaries can lead to heightened stress levels, loneliness, and even depression.

Additionally, the absence of a physically separate workspace may contribute to difficulties in disconnecting from work, preventing individuals from fully unwinding and recharging during their personal time.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Work from Home Essay: FAQ

What are advantages and disadvantages of work from home.

Advantages: No commute, work in your pajamas. Disadvantages: Lack of digital resources, feeling of isolation, home life and work life becomes blurred.

What are disadvantages of working from home?

Lack of digital resources, feeling of isolation, home life and work life becomes blurred.

Conclusion: Advantages and Disadvantages of Work from Home Essay

While working from home offers undeniable benefits, it is crucial to acknowledge and address the disadvantages that come along with it.

The isolation, blurred boundaries, distractions, limited resources, reduced career development opportunities, strained communication, and potential impact on mental health highlight the need for proactive measures to counter these challenges.

Employers and employees must work together to find solutions that foster connectivity, establish clear boundaries, and promote a healthy work-life balance. By recognizing and addressing the disadvantages, we can strive towards a more balanced and productive remote work experience.

As you can see, working from home offers numerous advantages beyond the absence of a dress code. Remote work has become a preferred choice for many professionals thanks to eliminating the commute to improve productivity, achieving a better work-life balance, and contributing to a greener planet.

So, go ahead and embrace the perks of working from home. Your pajamas will thank you! However, working from home offers many benefits that extend far beyond lounging in your favorite PJs.

To recap: The advantages and disadvantages of working from home bring both opportunities and challenges to individuals and organizations alike.

On the positive side, remote work offers flexibility, increased productivity, and reduced commuting time. It allows individuals to create a better work-life balance and offers opportunities for those with physical disabilities or caregiving responsibilities. Moreover, it enables companies to tap into a global talent pool and save costs on office space.

However, there are also downsides to consider. Working from home can blur the boundaries between work and personal life, leading to longer working hours and burnout. The lack of face-to-face interaction may hamper collaboration and team bonding, affecting creativity and innovation. Additionally, the absence of a dedicated workspace can create distractions and hinder productivity.

Ultimately, the decision to embrace remote work depends on individual preferences, job requirements, and the nature of the organization. It is crucial to strike a balance between the advantages and disadvantages, implementing strategies to overcome the challenges while leveraging the benefits.

Whether it’s a hybrid model or a fully remote setup, clear communication, efficient task management, and regular check-ins become crucial to maintaining a productive and connected workforce.

Overall, the rise of work from home represents a significant shift in the way we work. It offers unique opportunities for individuals and organizations to adapt to the changing landscape of the modern workplace.

By carefully weighing the advantages and disadvantages presented in this advantages and disadvantages of work from home essay and implementing effective strategies, we can harness the potential of remote work while mitigating its challenges, ultimately fostering a more flexible, efficient, and balanced work environment.

Readers, please share this advantages and disadvantages of work from home essay so people considering abandoning the 9 to 5 traditional workday discover this post.

This post was contributed and made possible by the support of our readers.

Why Working From Home Is Better Essay

Introduction.

Working from home, a worker is at a greater advantage with several benefits than those who work in the office. Employees working remotely have less stress because they do not have to commute daily to work. Besides, working from home guarantees better work-life balance since workers are more flexible in deciding when to open and close their work. In addition, workers operating remotely save more finance and spend less. Overall, employees working from home are likely to be more productive and experience higher growth than those performing their duties directly from the office.

During the COVID-19 period, individuals were forced to work from home following the global lockdown undertaken by most governments as a measure to mitigate the spread of the deadly virus. Despite the restriction, the approach proved essential since many staff found it easier and more convenient to work remotely as opposed to the workplace. Besides, workers recorded a higher productivity rate compared to the periods when they worked in the offices (Ozkan et al. 3). During the short period and the subsequent adoption by most organizations, it demonstrated that numerous hidden advantages characterize working from home and that most people benefited greatly from the measure (Parker et al. 12). While there could be some disadvantages of remote working, recent experience showed that people benefited and enjoyed working from their homes and would still prefer working remotely even after the end of the pandemic.

Benefits of Working Remotely

Saves money.

Additionally, employees working from home save more money and spend less than their colleagues going to the offices. When performing duties at home, a worker is spared unnecessary expenses such as transportation costs. Whether one uses public or private means, the daily movement cost to the workplace is always exorbitant. These costs translate to money (Purwanto et al. 6238). Remote working, therefore, comes with the relief of not incurring the daily transport cost and the related costs of traveling (Wolfer and Sondra). The money meant for transport costs can be channeled to other development projects for personal growth or saved for other things.

Besides the transport cost, individuals going to the workplace incur other expenses, such as refreshments during lunchtime, since not all organizations provide meals for their staff. For enterprises that do not offer food, workers are forced to purchase the meals on their own leading to more expenditure. Even for the businesses which provide mealtimes for their employees, the foodstuffs are never sufficient and often supplemented by other items bought with money from personal accounts (Ojala and Satu 78). Professional wardrobes are additional costs that characterize the workplace since many office jobs require cabinets. Therefore, remote working facilitates money saving by avoiding such expenses.

Improved mental health

Workers working remotely have proven to enjoy better mental health compared to their counterparts working in offices. This is attributed to the peace and relaxation they have at home because they are alone with no manager to bother and quarrel with them. In addition, employees working from home enjoy better mental health because they can have enough sleep, a thing denied by staff in offices (Wolfer). Remote work allows a worker to close work at a convenience and have enough rest.

Facilitates Flexibility and Work Balance

Additionally, employees working from home enjoy more flexibility than those in offices because they can have a personal schedule to balance both official and domestic work. Workers have various errands which they must perform, and at the same time, they are obligated to perform official duties designated by their employees. At the workplace, the staff is confined to one area and a typical work schedule, which makes it challenging to balance both responsibilities. However, remote working provides suppleness as one can set their timetables, which allows them to balance both duties (Ipsen et al. 2). Since an individual is able to organize private plans, they can end their day as they choose and resort to other domestic duties. Similarly, a colleague working remotely can multitask and achieve success domestically and at their respective organizations (Oskarsson et al. 39). For example, staff can suspend their official duties for a while and do laundry work or kitchen work and resume later, a privilege that cannot be obtained while going to the formal workplace.

Working from home is also flexible in the context of providing enough family time. Often, employees who visit the workplace in the morning and return in the evening need more time to spend with family members, leading to a family gap (Oskarsson et al. 40). Family bonds are strengthened by physical presence; be it a parent-kid bond or couple bond, the partners must at least spend some time together (Purwanto et al. 6239). This, however, is different with many families whose members do not work remotely because they spend most of their time in their workplaces and the remaining time sleeping due to exhaustion. After spending time in the workplace and traveling back home, it is evident that one gets tired and takes a nap (Galanti et al. 2). The ripple effect is then felt in the family, which will be the continued absence of the member. A father, for instance, will be considered absent by his kids and even his wife. Such mysteries are therefore prevented by working from home, which provides the needed flexibility and time for family members. Individuals working remotely have enough time with their family members and are always available whenever needed.

Provides Comfort

Furthermore, working from home grants employees some sort of comfort following limited supervision. While performing duties remotely, a worker is comfortable because they are free to do anything at any time and can choose any position for their workstation. Whether under a tree shade, in the bedroom, or wherever, an employee working from home is of their own volition to choose and can relocate the workstation whenever necessary (Wolfer & Sondra 2). Moreover, employees working from home enjoy the comfort of serenity and peace that the home environment provides. At the offices, a worker is likely to engage in brawls with colleagues or managers, something which is avoidable while working remotely. And since they work in comfort, employees are more productive while working from home. Besides, the comfort also gives workers at home a greater chance of personal growth and numerous opportunities.

Less Commuter Stress

Lastly, daily commuting is full of stressors, such as traffic jams and rude travelers. While this is not an everyday occurrence, on bad days, the workers will likely experience long traffic jams or face rude travelers who do not care about their feelings. Such experiences are dull and affect one’s productivity (Oskarsson et al. 40). Remote working, therefore, saves employees from facing such experiences and ensures they remain in high spirits for their respective duties. At home, a colleague will not meet a rude traveler or be held in a long traffic jam which will lower their productivity.

While it is not perfect due to minor challenges like lack of concentration due to possible distractions from family members, especially kids, which might lower one’s efficiency and effectiveness, such challenges can be easily avoided by setting up a home office far from the children’s reach. Another minor challenge that might be attributed to working from home is the lack of creativity and innovation since staff does not share ideas. However, that can be sorted by telephone consultation and engagement among colleagues (Ozkan et al. 2). After all, employees normally have communication outside of the workplace; thus, such information can be used for the same. Some may also argue that working remotely is difficult to supervise, but that is not a problem, provided a worker understands what is required of them. Some employees work well under minimum supervision, as they should. Despite these challenges, working from home remains the better option for many individuals owing to the comfort and tranquility it provides.

Despite the end of the Corona pandemic, workers in America and other countries would still prefer to work from home than work in the offices because it offers flexibility for easier work-life balance. In addition, working from home provides comfort and tranquility facilitated by the home environment. Furthermore, individuals working from home are spared of the commuter stressors like traffic jams that accompany staff going to the workplace daily. Lastly, working from home is economical as it helps employees to save money by avoiding unnecessary expenses like transport costs.

Works Cited

Galanti, Teresa, et al. Work from Home during the COVID-19 Outbreak: The Impact on Employees’ Remote Work Productivity, Engagement, and Stress .” Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, vol. 63, no. 7, 2021, p. e426, Web.

Ipsen, Christine, et al. “ Six Key Advantages and Disadvantages of Working from Home in Europe during COVID-19 .” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, vol. 18, no. 4, 2021, p. 1826, Web.

Ojala, Satu. “ Supplemental Work at Home among Finnish Wage Earners: Involuntary Overtime or Taking advantage of Flexibility? ” Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies , vol. 1, no. 2, 2011, pp. 77-97, Web.

Oskarsson, Emma, et al. “Work-Life Balance among Newly Employed Officers – A Qualitative Study.” Health Psychology Report , vol. 9, no. 1, 2021, pp. 39-48.

Ozkan, Necmettin, Oya Erdil, and Mehmet Şahin Gök. “ Agile Teams Working from Home During the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Literature Review on New Advantages and Challenges .” International Conference on Lean and Agile Software Development . Springer, Cham, 2022, Web.

Parker, Kim, et al. “How the Coronavirus Outbreak Has – and Hasn’t – Changed the Way Americans Work.” Pew Research Center , 2020, pp. 1-31.

Purwanto, Agus, et al. “ Impact of Work from Home (WFH) on Indonesian Teachers’ Performance during the Covid-19 Pandemic: An Exploratory Study .” International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology, vol. 29, no. 5, 2020, pp. 6235-6244, Web.

Wolfer, Sondra. “ 9 Best Benefits of Working from Home (and 5 Potential Drawbacks) .” The Muse, Web.

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Working from home (Corrected Essay)

Some say that it would be better if the majority of employees worked from home instead of traveling to a workplace every day. Do you think the advantages of working from home outweigh the disadvantages?

Office has no longer been the only work place since many people are considering working from home. Some may argue the majority of employees should change their work place from office to home. In my opinion, the benefits of working from home can surely surpass the drawbacks due to the following reasons:

The first sentence is not accurate. It implies that people did not work from home in the past; however, throughout history, many people did work from home, for example, the classical novelists and artists.

“ Can surely ” is an informal expression and does not contribute anything to the preciseness of your writing.

The correct verb to follow the word “benefit” is not “ to surpass ”, but rather “ to offset ”, “ to outweigh ”, or “ to exceed ”.

Do not end your sentence with a colon ( “:” ), unless you want to provide a list of items immediately after that.

Working from home is a lot more comfortable for lots of people. Employees can save a great deal of time and money since they do not have to travel so often, which means people will have more time for work and for themselves, too. Less travelling will also help reduce traffice traffic jam congestion and pollutants to our environment environmental pollution . Besides, working at home does not mean staying inside all day long, people can choose to work in their garden or backyard, wherever makes them feel convenient to work. Moreover, employees are under less stresses stress since they get to decide when to work and when to take rest with a flexible working schedule . These things will help giving out better perfomance to tasks.

Words like “comfortable”, or “convenient” are too generic to use in an IELTS writing context. Generally, it’s better to use other words.

Lengthy phrases like “a great deal of time and money” (7 words) are considered as informal and ambiguous. Try to use shorter expressions, for example “time-saving and cost-efficient” (3 words only).

In a formal context, “ traffic congestion ” is more preferrable than “ traffic jam ”. When being alone, the word “ jam ” can be understood as a type of food. It’s always better to use a word that only has one meaning, regardless of the context.

The third sentence in this body paragraph is an example of poor cohesion. “ Traffic jam ” is not parallel to “ pollutants to our environment ”. “ Traffic jam ” is a condition (abstract), not a physical material (touchable by human) like “ pollutants ”. Therefore, you need to use another condition that is parallel to “ traffic jam ” (“ environmental pollution ”)

The fourth sentence (“ Besides, working at… ”) should be placed in the second body paragraph. The author is tailoring his ideas by providing the advantages of working from home in the first body paragraph, then listing the disadvantages in the second body paragraph while attacking those disadvantages notion at the same time. This kind of idea (“ to play the devil’s advocate ”) is good, but the execution isn’t. Insufficient coherence like this will hamper your score in Coherence & Cohesion criterion.

“Stress” as in “psychological stress” is an uncountable noun.

Try to improve the conciseness of your essay by rewritting a sentence clause (S+V) into a noun phrase. For example, “ since they get to decide when to work and when to take rest ” can be shorten into “ with a flexible working schedule ”.

The last sentence is redundant and ungrammatical.

To be fair, There are still some disadvantages that home-working could bring of teleworking . For instance, working from personal space will reduce direct face-to-face interactions among colleagues. But However, the problem is solved thanks to the Internet. As for now, people from around the globe can easily contact and work with others from distances. Another drawback is that some people may get distracted from work by external factors. This situation requires employees to be highly awared awarded of what they should and should not do for their paid jobs.

The accurate way to describe the act of working from home is not “ home-working ”, but rather “ teleworking ” or “ telecommuting ”. The author has miss his chance to improve the Lexical Resource score.

Generally, in a writing context, do not start your sentence with a short subordinate conjuction (“ and ”, “ or ”, “ but ”, “ for ”).

The third sentence in this paragraph is very unclear, especially when the followed sentence does not provide a good explanation. The author has to elaborate more on the Internet’s merits (social softwares such as “ instant messaging ”, “ collaborative software ”, etc)

The author has failed to provide a counter-argument for the notion of “ people may get distracted from work by external factors ”. Not to mentions he does not elaborate what is the “ external factors ”. Again, weak cohesion.

Do not simply stating “ this ” as a sentence subject. This type of grammatical mistake is called “unclear antecedent”, or “unclear aphoric noun”, and should be avoid by extending the subject with a word like “ condition ”, “ situation ”, “ issue ”, etc.

In conclusion, working from home should be encouraged because the advantages overcome the disadvantages.

The conclusion is coherent with the introduction and the two body paragraphs. Though, it is a little bit too short.

(Words: 261)

Overall: 6.0

Task Response: 6

✓ addresses all parts of the task although some parts may be more fully covered than others (the author has written more than 250 words and addressed the topic question)

✓ presents a relevant position although the conclusions may become unclear or repetitive

✓ presents relevant main ideas but some may be inadequately developed/unclear

Coherence and Cohesion: 6

✓ arranges information and ideas coherently and there is a clear overall progression (the ideas in each paragraphs are coherent with eachother)

✓ uses cohesive devices effectively, but cohesion within and/or between sentences may be faulty or mechanical

✓ may not always use referencing clearly or appropriately (the author usually fails at providing good supporting evidence for his argument)

✓ uses paragraphing, but not always logically (the fourth sentence in Body Paragraph 1 should be placed in Body 2 instead)

Lexical Resource: 5

✓ uses a limited range of vocabulary, but this is minimally adequate for the task (all the vocab used in this essay are very generic) ✓ may make noticeable errors in spelling and/or word formation that may cause some difficulty for the reader

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: 6

✓ uses a mix of simple and complex sentence forms

✓ makes some errors in grammar and punctuation but they rarely reduce communication

----------------------------------------------------------

This essay is corrected by Anh Tran - Let's Write Something Group .

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Work-Life Balance — Working from Home: Pros, Cons, and Strategies for Success

Working from Home: Pros, Cons, and Strategies for Success

Categories: Work-Life Balance Workplace

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Words: 660 |

Published: Sep 7, 2023

Words: 660 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Advantages of working from home, disadvantages of working from home, strategies for success in working from home.

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The Realities of Remote Work

Laura Amico

Work-life boundaries are blurring and managers worry about productivity. What can be done?

The Covid-19 pandemic sparked what economist Nicholas Bloom calls the “ working-from-home economy .” While some workers may have had flexibility to work remotely before the pandemic, this unprecedented shift to remote work looks like it could be here to stay in some form.

Laura Amico is a former senior editor at Harvard Business Review.

Partner Center

The bright future of working from home

There seems to be an endless tide of depressing news in this era of COVID-19. But one silver lining is the long-run explosion of working from home. Since March I have been talking to dozens of CEOs, senior managers, policymakers and journalists about the future of working from home. This has built on my own personal experience from running surveys about working from home and an experiment published in 2015 which saw a 13 percent increase in productivity by employees at a Chinese travel company called Ctrip who worked from home.

So here a few key themes that can hopefully make for some good news:

Mass working from home is here to stay

Once the COVID-19 pandemic passes, rates of people working from home will explode. In 2018, the Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show that 8 percent of all employees worked from home at least one day a week.

I see these numbers more than doubling in a post-pandemic world. I suspect almost all employees who can work from home — which is estimated at about 40 percent of employees — will be allowed to work from home at least one day a week.

Why? Consider these three reasons

Fear of crowds.

Even if COVID-19 passes, the fear of future pandemics will motivate people to move away from urban centers and avoid public transport. So firms will struggle to get their employees back to the office on a daily basis. With the pandemic, working from home has become a standard perk, like sick-leave or health insurance.

Investments in telecommuting technology

By now, we have plenty of experience working from home. We’ve become adept at video conferencing. We’ve fine-tuned our home offices and rescheduled our days. Similarly, offices have tried out, improved and refined life for home-based work forces. In short, we have all paid the startup cost for learning how to work from home, making it far easier to continue.

The end of stigma

Finally, the stigma of working from home has evaporated. Before COVID-19, I frequently heard comments like, “working from home is shirking from home,” or “working remotely is remotely working.” I remember Boris Johnson, who was Mayor of London in 2012 when the London Olympics closed the city down for three weeks, saying working from home was “a skivers paradise.” No longer. All of us have now tried this and we understand we can potentially work effectively — if you have your own room and no kids — at home.

Of course, working from home was already trending up due to improved technology and remote monitoring. It is relatively cheap and easy to buy a top-end laptop and connect it to broadband internet service. This technology also makes it easier to monitor employees at home. Indeed, one senior manager recently told me: “We already track our employees — we know how many emails they send, meetings they attend or documents they write using our office management system. So monitoring them at home is really no different from monitoring them in the office. I see how they are doing and what they are doing whether they are at home or in the office.”

This is not only good news for firms in terms of boosting employee morale while improving productivity, but can also free up significant office space. In our China experiment, Ctrip calculated it increased profits by $2,000 per employee who worked from home.

Best practices in working from home post pandemic

Many of us are currently working from home full-time, with kids in the house, often in shared rooms, bedrooms or even bathrooms. So if working from home is going to continue and even increase once the pandemic is over, there are a few lessons we’ve learned to make telecommuting more effective. Let’s take a look:

Working from home should be part-time

I think the ideal schedule is Monday, Wednesday and Friday in the office and Tuesday and Thursday at home. Most of us need time in the office to stay motivated and creative. Face-to-face meetings are important for spurring and developing new ideas, and at least personally I find it hard to stay focused day after day at home. But we also need peaceful time at home to concentrate, undertake longer-term thinking and often to catch-up on tedious paperwork. And spending the same regular three days in the office each week means we can schedule meetings, lunches, coffees, etc., around that, and plan our “concentration work” during our two days at home.

The choice of Tuesday and Thursday at home comes from talking to managers who are often fearful that a work-from-home day — particularly if attached to a weekend — will turn into a beach day. So Tuesday and Thursday at home avoids creating a big block of days that the boss and the boss of the boss may fear employees may use for unauthorized mini-breaks.

Working from home should be a choice

I found in the Ctrip experiment that many people did not want to work from home. Of the 1,000 employees we asked, only 50 percent volunteered to work from home four days a week for a nine-month stretch. Those who took the offer were typically older married employees with kids. For many younger workers, the office is a core part of their social life, and like the Chinese employees, would happily commute in and out of work each day to see their colleagues. Indeed, surveys in the U.S. suggest up to one-third of us meet our future spouses at work.

Working from home should be flexible

After the end of the 9-month Ctrip experiment, we asked all volunteers if they wanted to continue working from home. Surprisingly, 50 percent of them opted to return to the office. The saying is “the three great enemies of working from home are the fridge, the bed and the TV,” and many of them fell victim to one of them. They told us it was hard to predict in advance, but after a couple of months working from home they figured out if it worked for them or not. And after we let the less-successful home-based employees return to the office, those remaining had a 25 percent higher rate of productivity.

Working from home is a privilege

Working from home for employees should be a perk. In our Ctrip experiment, home-based workers increased their productivity by 13 percent. So on average were being highly productive. But there is always the fear that one or two employees may abuse the system. So those whose performance drops at home should be warned, and if necessary recalled into the office for a couple of months before they are given a second chance.

There are two other impacts of working from home that should be addressed

The first deals with the decline in prices for urban commercial and residential spaces. The impact of a massive roll-out in working from home is likely to be falling demand for both housing and office space in the center of cities like New York and San Francisco. Ever since the 1980s, the centers of large U.S. cities have become denser and more expensive. Younger graduate workers in particular have flocked to city centers and pushed up housing and office prices. This 40-year year bull run has ended .

If prices fell back to their levels in say the 1990s or 2000s this would lead to massive drops of 50 percent or more in city-center apartment and office prices. In reverse, the suburbs may be staging a comeback. If COVID-19 pushed people to part-time working from home and part-time commuting by car, the suburbs are the natural place to locate these smaller drivable offices. The upside to this is the affordability crisis of apartments in city centers could be coming to an end as property prices drop.

The second impact I see is a risk of increased political polarization. In the 1950s, Americans all watched the same media, often lived in similar areas and attended similar schools. By the 2020s, media has become fragmented, residential segregation by income has increased dramatically , and even our schools are starting to fragment with the rise of charter schools.

The one constant equalizer — until recently — was the workplace. We all have to come into work and talk to our colleagues. Hence, those on the extreme left or right are forced to confront others over lunch and in breaks, hopefully moderating their views. If we end up increasing our time at home — particularly during the COVID lock-down — I worry about an explosion of radical political views.

But with an understanding of these risks and some forethought for how to mitigate them, a future with more of us working from home can certainly work well.

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How to write an opinion essay, employees should be able to work from home more often essay sample, example.

To allow employees to work from home means to balance the eternal “work-family” scales. According to a Penn State study, being able to work outside of the office (at home, mostly) helps to avoid typical conflict situations that arise when a person cannot spend enough time with their family. Besides, working from home relieves an employee of the daily stress connected to the necessity to get to their office regardless of health conditions, weather, family circumstances, and so on (Salary.com).

According to the Work Without Walls survey, among the benefits connected to working from home are the following: a less stressful environment (38%), a quieter atmosphere (43%), an elimination of a long commute (44%), less distractions (44%), increased productivity (45%), saving money on gas (55%), and a great work/home balance (60%). At the same time, according to the survey, the lack of control and the inability to see results of work in practice may negatively affect productivity of those employees who work from home (Forbes).

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Working from home generally improves employees’ satisfaction with their lives and workplace ; reduces attrition and the number of unscheduled absences due to poor health conditions and other reasons; increases productivity due to fewer distracting factors, more comfortable working conditions; saves employer’s (and employee’s) money and minimizes chances of workplace discrimination; provides employees with opportunities for underemployment, and so on (Globalworkplaceanalytics.com).

The Internet allows millions of employees whose duties do not require them to be present in the office to work from home. Although many employers do not seem to be enthusiastic about letting their employees work from home, this practice is in many ways beneficial for both the employer and the worker. In particular, working from home allows employees to successfully maintain a work-family balance; an increased level of productivity, decreased stress, less discrimination, economy, and opportunities for freelancing and underemployment are among the most frequently named benefits of working from home. Therefore, employers should consider enabling this practice more often.

Persuasive essays are not just a school type of work. You might need this style of writing on many occasions, maybe even to get a promotion at work. This text is a good example to get inspired. Nevertheless, when you find yourself struggling a bit, you can search through the best online essay writing services for help and useful advice.

“Top 10 Benefits of Working from Home (Survey Results).” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, n.d. Web. 13 Jan. 2015. <http://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2012/12/18/benefits-working-from-home/>

“5 Reasons to Let Employees Work from Home.” Salary.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Jan. 2015. <http://business.salary.com/5-reasons-to-let-employees-work-from-home/slide/2/>

“Advantages of Telecommuting for Companies.” Global Workplace Analytics. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Jan. 2015. <http://globalworkplaceanalytics.com/resources/costs-benefits>

*Note: Make sure your Reference Page formatting alignes with your requirements. If you need ACM citations don’t hesitate to use acm format generator tool to help with those.

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COVID-19 COVID-19 Future of Work Future of Work Workforce and Employment Workforce and Employment

Have you been working from home? Image: Corinne Kutz/Unsplash

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Stay up to date:.

A new survey highlights what Americans have enjoyed the most when working from home.
68% benefitted from no longer having to commute, 63% enjoyed more flexible hours, while not having to dress in smart clothes came third.
Many workers will now be reluctant to give up these perks as workplaces begin to reopen.

As vaccination rates climb and case numbers drop in many parts of the world, companies are preparing for life after the pandemic. In many cases, that involves bringing workers back to their offices. And while a return to the pre-pandemic working model may have been considered a foregone conclusion at the onset of the pandemic, things have changed over the past 16 months as many workers have developed a taste for a more flexible working model.

According to a YouGov survey among remote workers in the United States, the lack of a commute is the most obvious benefit of working from home. Flexible hours and the ability to dress more casually are also high on the list, with the ability to do simple chores during working hours and spending more time with family following close behind.

Have you read?

Is it time remote workers are given the ‘right to disconnect’ while at home, home-office, hq, hybrid or work-from-anywhere this is what businesses are planning.

Overall it can be said that many employees have embraced the new situation and are reluctant to give up their new freedoms. And while many executives would certainly prefer to return to the old model, getting the genie back into the bottle looks close to impossible at this point.

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World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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Are We Really More Productive Working from Home?

Data from the pandemic can guide organizations struggling to reimagine the new office..

By Rebecca Stropoli
August 18, 2021
CBR - Economics
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Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn’t your typical office worker. He was No. 3 on the 2020 Forbes list of the richest Americans, with a net worth of $125 billion, give or take. But there’s at least one thing Zuckerberg has in common with many other workers: he seems to like working from home. In an internal memo, which made its way to the Wall Street Journal , as Facebook announced plans to offer increased flexibility to employees, Zuckerberg explained that he would work remotely for at least half the year.

“Working remotely has given me more space for long-term thinking and helped me spend more time with my family, which has made me happier and more productive at work,” Zuckerberg wrote. He has also said that he expects about half of Facebook’s employees to be fully remote within the next decade.

The coronavirus pandemic continues to rage in many countries, and variants are complicating the picture, but in some parts of the world, including the United States, people are desperate for life to return to normal—everywhere but the office. After more than a year at home, some employees are keen to return to their workplaces and colleagues. Many others are less eager to do so, even quitting their jobs to avoid going back. Somewhere between their bedrooms and kitchens, they have established new models of work-life balance they are loath to give up.

This has left some companies trying to recreate their work policies, determining how best to handle a workforce that in many cases is demanding more flexibility. Some, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Spotify, are leaning into remote work. Others, such as JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, are reverting to the tried-and-true office environment, calling everyone back in. Goldman’s CEO David Solomon, in February, called working from home an “aberration that we’re going to correct as quickly as possible.” And JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said of exclusively remote work: “It doesn’t work for those who want to hustle. It doesn’t work for spontaneous idea generation. It doesn’t work for culture.”

This pivotal feature of pandemic life has accelerated a long-running debate: What do employers and employees lose and gain through remote work? In which setting—the office or the home—are employees more productive? Some research indicates that working from home can boost productivity and that companies offering more flexibility will be best positioned for success. But this giant, forced experiment has only just begun.

An accelerated debate

A persistent sticking point in this debate has been productivity. Back in 2001, a group of researchers from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon, led by Robert E. Kraut , wrote that “collaboration at a distance remains substantially harder to accomplish than collaboration when members of a work group are collocated.” Two decades later, this statement remains part of today’s discussion.

However, well before Zoom, which came on the scene in 2011, or even Skype, which launched in 2003, the researchers acknowledged some of the potential benefits of remote work, allowing that “dependence on physical proximity imposes substantial costs as well, and may undercut successful collaboration.” For one, they noted, email, answering machines, and computer bulletin boards could help eliminate the inconvenience of organizing in-person meetings with multiple people at the same time.

Two decades later, remote-work technology is far more developed. Data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that, even in pre-pandemic 2019, more than 26 million Americans—approximately 16 percent of the total US workforce—worked remotely on an average day. The Pew Research Center put that pre-pandemic number at 20 percent, and in December 2020 reported that 71 percent of workers whose responsibilities allowed them to work from home were doing so all or most of the time.

The sentiment toward and effectiveness of remote work depend on the industry involved. It makes sense that executives working in and promoting social media are comfortable connecting with others online, while those in industries in which deals are typically closed with handshakes in a conference room, or over drinks at dinner, don’t necessarily feel the same. But data indicate that preferences and productivity are shaped by factors beyond a person’s line of work.

The productivity paradigm

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom was bullish on work-from-home trends. His 2015 study, for one—with James Liang , John Roberts , and Zhichun Jenny Ying , all then at Stanford—finds a 13 percent increase in productivity among remotely working call-center employees at a Chinese travel agency.

But in the early days of the pandemic, Bloom was less optimistic about remote work. “We are home working alongside our kids, in unsuitable spaces, with no choice and no in-office days,” Bloom told a Stanford publication in March 2020. “This will create a productivity disaster for firms.”

To test that thesis, Jose Maria Barrero of the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, Bloom, and Chicago Booth’s Steven J. Davis launched a monthly survey of US workers in May 2020, tracking more than 30,000 workers aged 20–64 who earned at least $20,000 per year in 2019.

Companies that offer more flexibility in work arrangements may have the best chance of attracting top talent at the best price.

The survey measured the incidence of working from home as the pandemic continued, focusing on how a more permanent shift to remote work might affect not only productivity but also overall employee well-being. It also examined factors including how work from home would affect spending and revenues in major urban centers. In addition to the survey, the researchers drew on informal conversations with dozens of US business executives. They are publishing the results of the survey and related research at wfhresearch.com .

In an analysis of the data collected through March 2021, they find that nearly six out of 10 workers reported being more productive working from home than they expected to be, compared with 14 percent who said they got less done. On average, respondents’ productivity at home was 7 percent higher than they expected. Forty percent of workers reported they were more productive at home during the pandemic than they had been when in the office, and only 15 percent said the opposite was true. The researchers argue that the work-from-home trend is here to stay, and they calculate that these working arrangements will increase overall worker productivity in the US by 5 percent as compared with the pre-pandemic economy.

“Working from home under the pandemic has been far more productive than I or pretty much anyone else predicted,” Bloom says.

No commute, and fewer hours worked

Some workers arguing in favor of flexibility might say they’re more efficient at home away from chatty colleagues and the other distractions of an office, and that may be true. But above all, the increased productivity comes from saving transit time, an effect overlooked by standard productivity calculations. “Three-quarters or more of the productivity gains that we find are coming from a reduction in commuting time,” Davis says. Eliminate commuting as a factor, and the researchers project only a 1 percent productivity boost in the postpandemic work-from-home environment, as compared with before.

It makes sense that standard statistics miss the impact of commutes, Davis explains. Ordinarily, commuting time generally doesn’t shift significantly in the aggregate. But much like rare power outages in Manhattan have made it possible for New Yorkers to suddenly see the nighttime stars, the dramatic work-from-home shift that occurred during the pandemic made it possible to recognize the impact traveling to and from an office had on productivity.

Before the pandemic, US workers were commuting an average of 54 minutes daily, according to Barrero, Bloom, and Davis. In the aggregate, the researchers say, the pandemic-induced shift to remote work meant 62.5 million fewer commuting hours per workday.

People who worked from home spent an average of 35 percent of saved commuting time on their jobs, the researchers find. They devoted the rest to other activities, including household chores, childcare, leisure activities such as watching movies and TV, outdoor exercise, and even second jobs.

Infographic: People want working from home to stick after the pandemic subsides

With widespread lockdowns abruptly forcing businesses to halt nonessential, in-person activity, the COVID-19 pandemic drove a mass social experiment in working from home, according to Jose Maria Barrero of the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom , and Chicago Booth’s Steven J. Davis . The researchers launched a survey of US workers, starting in May 2020 and continuing in waves for more than a year since, to capture a range of information including workers’ attitudes about their new remote arrangements.

Remote-work technology goes mainstream

The widespread implementation of remote-working technology, a defining feature of the pandemic, is another important factor for productivity. This technology will boost work-from-home productivity by 46 percent by the end of the pandemic, relative to the pre-pandemic situation, according to a model developed by Rutgers’s Morris A. Davis , University of North Carolina’s Andra C. Ghent , and University of Wisconsin’s Jesse M. Gregory . “While many home-office technologies have been around for a while, the technologies become much more useful after widespread adoption,” the researchers note.

There are significant costs to leaving the office, Rutgers’s Davis says, pointing to the loss of face-to-face interaction, among other things. “Working at home is always less productive than working at the office. Always,” he said on a June episode of the Freakonomics podcast.

One reason, he says , has to do with the function of cities as business centers. “Cities exist because, we think, the crowding of employment makes everyone more productive,” he explains. “This idea also applies to firms: a firm puts all workers on the same floor of a building, or all in the same suite rather than spread throughout a building, for reasons of efficiency. It is easier to communicate and share ideas with office mates, which leads to more productive outcomes.” While some employees are more productive at home, that’s not the case overall, according to the model, which after calibration “implies that the average high-skill worker is less productive at home than at the office, even postpandemic,” he says.

How remote work could change city centers

What will happen to urban business districts and the cities in which they are located in the age of increasing remote work?

About three-quarters of Fortune 500 CEOs expect to need less office space in the future, according to a May 2021 poll. In Manhattan, the overall office vacancy rate was at a multidecade high of 16 percent in the first quarter of 2021, according to real-estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield.

And yet Davis, Ghent, and Gregory’s model projects that after the pandemic winds down, highly skilled, college-educated workers will spend 30 percent of their time working from home, as opposed to 10 percent in prior times. While physical proximity may be superior, working from home is far more productive than it used to be. Had the pandemic hit in 1990, it would not have produced this rise in relative productivity, per the researchers’ model, because the technology available at the time was not sufficient to support remote work.

A June article in the MIT Technology Review by Stanford’s Erik Brynjolfsson and MIT postdoctoral scholar Georgios Petropoulos corroborates this view. Citing the 5.4 percent increase in US labor productivity in the first quarter of 2021, as reported by the BLS, the researchers attribute at least some of this to the rise of work-from-home technologies. The pandemic, they write, has “compressed a decade’s worth of digital innovation in areas like remote work into less than a year.” The biggest productivity impact of the pandemic will be realized in the longer run, as the work-from-home trend continues, they argue.

Lost ideas, longer hours?

Not all the research supports the idea that remote work increases productivity and decreases the number of hours workers spend on the job. Chicago Booth’s Michael Gibbs and University of Essex’s Friederike Mengel and Christoph Siemroth find contradictory evidence from a study of 10,000 high-skilled workers at a large Asian IT-services company.

The researchers used personnel and analytics data from before and during the coronavirus work-from-home period. The company provided a rich data set for these 10,000 employees, who moved to 100 percent work from home in March 2020 and began returning to the office in late October.

Total hours worked during that time increased by approximately 30 percent, including an 18 percent rise in working beyond normal business hours, the researchers find. At the same time, however, average output—as measured by the company through setting work goals and tracking progress toward them—declined slightly. Time spent on coordination activities and meetings also increased, while uninterrupted work hours shrank. Additionally, employees spent less time networking and had fewer one-on-one meetings with their supervisors, find the researchers, adding that the increase in hours worked and the decline in productivity were more significant for employees with children at home. Weighing output against hours worked, the researchers conclude that productivity decreased by about 20 percent. They estimate that, even after accounting for the loss of commuting time, employees worked about a third of an hour per day more than they did at the office. “Of course, that time was spent in productive work instead of sitting in traffic, which is beneficial,” they acknowledge.

Regardless of what research establishes in the long run about productivity, many workers are already demanding flexibility in their schedules.

Overall, though, do workers with more flexibility work fewer hours (as Barrero, Bloom, and Davis find) or more (as at the Asian IT-services company)? It could take more data to answer this question. “I suspect that a high fraction of employees of all types, across the globe, value the flexibility, lack of a commute, and other aspects of work from home. This might bias survey respondents toward giving more positive answers to questions about their productivity,” says Gibbs.

The findings of his research do not entirely contradict those of Barrero, Bloom, and Davis, however. For one, Gibbs, Mengel, and Siemroth acknowledge that their study doesn’t necessarily reflect the remote-work model as it might look in postpandemic times, when employees are relieved of the weight of a massive global crisis. “While the average effect of working from home on productivity is negative in our study, this does not rule out that a ‘targeted working from home’ regime might be desirable,” they write.

Additionally, the research data are derived from a single company and may not be representative of the wider economy, although Gibbs notes that the IT company is one that should be able to optimize remote work. Most employees worked on company laptops, “and IT-related industries and occupations are usually at the top of lists of those areas most likely to be able to do WFH effectively.” Thus, he says, the findings may represent a cautionary note that remote work has costs and complexities worth addressing.

As he, Mengel, and Siemroth write, some predictions of work-from-home success may be overly optimistic, “perhaps because professionals engage in many tasks that require collaboration, communication, and innovation, which are more difficult to achieve with virtual, scheduled interactions.”

Attracting top talent

The focus on IT employees’ productivity, however, excludes issues such as worker morale and retention, Booth’s Davis notes. More generally, “the producer has to attract workers . . . and if workers really want to commute less, and they can save time on their end, and employers can figure out some way to accommodate that, they’re going to have more success with workers at a given wage cost.”

Companies that offer more flexibility in work arrangements may have the best chance of attracting top talent at the best price. The data from Barrero, Bloom, and Davis reveal that some workers are willing to take a sizable pay cut in exchange for the opportunity to work remotely two or three days a week. This may give threats from CEOs such as Morgan Stanley’s James Gorman—who said at the company’s US Financials, Payments & CRE conference in June, “If you want to get paid New York rates, you work in New York”—a bit less bite. Meanwhile, Duke PhD student John W. Barry , Cornell’s Murillo Campello , Duke’s John R. Graham , and Chicago Booth’s Yueran Ma find that companies offering flexibility are the ones most poised to grow.

Working policies may be shaped by employees’ preferences. Some workers still prefer working from the office; others prefer to stay working remotely; many would opt for a hybrid model, with some days in the office and some at home (as Amazon and other companies have introduced). As countries emerge from the pandemic and employers recalibrate, companies could bring back some employees and allow others to work from home. This should ultimately boost productivity, Booth’s Davis says.

Or they could allow some to work from far-flung locales. Harvard’s Prithwiraj Choudhury has long focused his research on working not just from home but “from anywhere.” This goes beyond the idea of employees working from their living room in the same city in which their company is located—instead, if they want to live across the country, or even in another country, they can do so without any concern about being near headquarters.

Does remote work promote equity?

At many companies, the future will involve remote work and more flexibility than before. That could be good for reducing the earnings gap between men and women—but only to a point.

“In my mind, there’s no question that it has to be a plus, on net,” says Harvard’s Claudia Goldin. Before the pandemic, many women deemphasized their careers when they started families, she says.

Research Choudhury conducted with Harvard PhD student Cirrus Foroughi and Northeastern University’s Barbara Larson analyzes a 2012 transition from a work-from-home to a work-from-anywhere model among patent examiners with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The researchers exploited a natural experiment and estimate that there was a 4.4 percent increase in work output when the examiners transitioned from a work-from-home regime to the work-from-anywhere regime.

“Work from anywhere offers workers geographic flexibility and can help workers relocate to their preferred locations,” Choudhury says. “Workers could gain additional utility by relocating to a cheaper location, moving closer to family, or mitigating frictions around immigration or dual careers.”

He notes as well the potential advantages for companies that allow workers to be located anywhere across the globe. “In addition to benefits to workers and organizations, WFA might also help reverse talent flows from smaller towns to larger cities and from emerging markets,” he says. “This might lead to a more equitable distribution of talent across geographies.”

More data to come

It is still early to draw strong conclusions about the impact of remote work on productivity. People who were sent home to work because of the COVID-19 pandemic may have been more motivated than before to prove they were essential, says Booth’s Ayelet Fishbach, a social psychologist. Additionally, there were fewer distractions from the outside because of the broad shutdowns. “The world helped them stay motivated,” she says, adding that looking at such an atypical year may not tell us as much about the future as performing the same experiment in a typical year would.

Before the pandemic, workers who already knew they performed better in a remote-working lifestyle self-selected into it, if allowed. During the pandemic, shutdowns forced remote work on millions. An experiment that allowed for random selection would likely be more telling. “The work-from-home experience seems to be more positive than what people believed, but we still don’t have great data,” Fishbach says.

Adding to the less optimistic view of a work-from-home future, Booth’s Austan D. Goolsbee says that some long-term trends may challenge remote work. Since the 1980s, as the largest companies have gained market power, corporate profits have risen dramatically while the share of profits going to workers has dropped to record lows. “This divergence between productivity and pay may very well come to pass regarding time,” he told graduating Booth students at their convocation ceremony. Companies may try to claw back time from those who are remote, he says, by expecting employees to work for longer hours or during their off hours.

And author and behavioral scientist Jon Levy argues in the Boston Globe that having some people in the office and others at home runs counter to smooth organizational processes. To this, Bloom offers a potential solution: instead of letting employees pick their own remote workdays, employers should ensure all workers take remote days together and come into the office on the same days. This, he says, could help alleviate the challenges of managing a hybrid team and level the playing field, whereas a looser model could potentially hurt employees who might be more likely to choose working from home (such as mothers with young children) while elevating those who might find it easier to come into the office every day (such as single men).

Gibbs concurs, noting that companies using a hybrid model will have to find ways to make sure employees who should interact will be on campus simultaneously. “Managers may specify that the entire team meets in person every Monday morning, for example,” he says. “R&D groups may need to make sure that researchers are on campus at the same time, to spur unplanned interactions that sometimes lead to new ideas and innovations.”

Sentiments vary by location, industry, and culture. Japanese workers are reportedly still mostly opting to go to the office, even as the government promotes remote work. Among European executives, a whopping 88 percent reportedly disagree with the idea that remote work is as or more productive than working at the office.

Regardless of what research establishes in the long run about productivity, many workers are already demanding flexibility in their schedules. While only about 28 percent of US office workers were back onsite by June 2021, employees who had become used to more flexibility were demanding it remain. A May survey of 1,000 workers by Morning Consult on behalf of Bloomberg News finds that about half of millennial and Gen Z workers, and two-fifths of all workers, would consider quitting if their employers weren’t flexible about work-from-home policies. And additional research from Barrero, Bloom, and Davis finds that four in 10 Americans who currently work from home at least one day a week would look for another job if their employers told them to come back to the office full time. Additionally, most employees would look favorably upon a new job that offered the same pay as their current job along with the option to work from home two to three days a week.

The shift to remote work affects a significant slice of the US workforce. A study by Chicago Booth’s Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman finds that while the majority of all jobs in the US require appearing in person, more than a third can potentially be performed entirely remotely. Of these jobs, the majority—including many in engineering, computing, law, and finance—pay more than those that cannot be done at home, such as food service, construction, and building-maintenance jobs.

Barrero, Bloom, and Davis project that, postpandemic, Americans overall will work approximately 20 percent of full workdays from home, four times the pre-pandemic level. This would make remote work less an aberration than a new norm. As the pandemic has demonstrated, many workers can be both productive and get dinner started between meetings.

Works Cited

Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis, “Why Working from Home Will Stick,” Working paper, April 2021.
———, “60 Million Fewer Commuting Hours per Day: How Americans Use Time Saved by Working from Home,” Working paper, September 2020.
———, “Let Me Work From Home Or I Will Find Another Job,” Working paper, July 2021.
John W. Barry, Murillo Campello, John R. Graham, and Yueran Ma, “Corporate Flexibility in a Time of Crisis,” Working paper, February 2021.
Nicholas Bloom, James Liang, John Roberts, and Zhichun Jenny Ying, “Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics , October 2015.
Prithwiraj Choudhury, Cirrus Foroughi, and Barbara Larson, “Work-from-Anywhere: The Productivity Effects of Geographic Flexibility,” Strategic Management Journal , forthcoming.
Morris A. Davis, Andra C. Ghent, and Jesse M. Gregory, “The Work-at-Home Technology Boon and Its Consequences,” Working paper, April 2021.
Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman, “How Many Jobs Can Be Done at Home?” White paper, June 2020.
Allison Dunatchik, Kathleen Gerson, Jennifer Glass, Jerry A. Jacobs, and Haley Stritzel, “Gender, Parenting, and the Rise of Remote Work during the Pandemic: Implications for Domestic Inequality in the United States,” Gender & Society , March 2021.
Michael Gibbs, Friederike Mengel, and Christoph Siemroth, “Work from Home & Productivity: Evidence from Personnel & Analytics Data on IT Professionals,” Working paper, May 2021.
Robert E. Kraut, Susan R. Fussell, Susan E. Brennan, and Jane Siegel, “Understanding Effects of Proximity on Collaboration: Implications for Technologies to Support Remote Collaborative Work,” in Distributed Work , eds. Pamela J. Hinds and Sara Kiesler, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.
Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia and Victoria Vernon, “Telework and Time Use in the United States,” Working paper, May 2020.

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Pros and Cons of Working From Home

Be aware of the benefits and drawbacks of working from home when considering your ideal work environment.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home may have seemed like a perk that only freelancers got to do. Now, many more full-time employees have experienced working remotely or in a hybrid role.

Smiling young male entrepreneur browsing the internet with a laptop while sitting on a sofa working from home

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According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the pandemic has resulted in over one-third of companies across a wide range of industries increasing telework for some or all of their employees. The BLS also reports that around 60% of the organizations that expanded their telework options are planning to keep them indefinitely.

If you recently joined the ranks of virtual staff, your visions of the remote working life may have been dashed by reality. Working from home may sound like an ideal situation, if you've imagined simply rolling out of bed and arriving at your home office in moments, without the hassles of first making yourself presentable and then commuting to a workplace with a boss and colleagues who may drive you crazy .

In reality, though, just like working in an office, remote work comes with pros and cons. The following pros and cons list emerged after conducting informal interviews with more than 100 people with remote jobs. Read on for some positive aspects of telecommuting and the challenges that come with a work-from-home lifestyle.

Benefits of Working From Home

Pro: more flexibility to take care of appointments and errands. .

Pro: Fewer interruptions from meetings and chitchat.
Pro: No commute time or expense.
Pro: More time spent with family.

Pro: You can often do your work when you're most productive.

Pro: you can get more done., pro: you can save money on your work wardrobe., pro: the ability to live where you want to..

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, whether attending a routine dentist appointment or picking a sick kid up from school. When you work from home, while you still have to meet your deadlines and be available when you say you will be, you generally have wider bandwidth to tend to other responsibilities without jeopardizing your job.

Pro: There are fewer interruptions from meetings and chitchat.

It's easier to get into a deep state of focused 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 many remote workers are often more productive than office-based workers. While you may need to dial in for specific meetings, you'll likely get a break from attending several others – many of which may be unnecessary to your role – that confront staff workers daily.

Pro: There is no commute time or expense.

You can save a lot of money and avoid wasting hours spent getting to and from work when your office is right down the hall. Avoiding traffic battles tops the list of benefits for some of those who work from home. Many remote workers also mentioned saving money by eschewing a pricey professional wardrobe unless they meet with clients.

Pro: More time spent with family.

Office workers must kiss their loved ones goodbye each morning when heading off to work; not so for virtual workers, who can work side by side with a work-from-home spouse or with kids who are learning in a digital classroom . By doing away with the commute time, there is more time to be spent with loved ones.

When you work in an office, your schedule is rarely your own. Between the aforementioned interruptions from colleagues and meetings, plus your boss hovering nearby with agenda items and to-dos, accomplishing your focus work may be a "catch as catch can" situation, grabbing time to think and compose important reports and communications between events that others have imposed.

It's still always essential when working from home to be mindful of your team's needs and be available to dial in for virtual meetings. But remote employees generally have greater latitude to select their time of peak productivity to do their most important work and – depending on who else is working at home with them – have more quiet time to hone in on tasks that require concentration.

A number of recent studies have confirmed the growing body of research that prove working from home can help you be more productive than you can in an office, with stats showing productivity increases of up to 77%. It makes sense when you consider the above points that you have fewer interruptions and can work when you’re at your best while working remotely.

In addition to saving drive time and gas expenses, the work-from-home crowd can generally save on clothing costs as well. While you may need to have professional garb at the ready for video calls (at least for your top half on camera), most who work from home have more freedom to wear what they want while they work.

While some employers have restrictions about where you can live as a remote employee and may change your pay according to the area you reside in, a huge perk of the remote life is the ability to choose your location without needing to worry about a daily commute. Even if you’re in a hybrid role or need to make occasional visits to the office for meetings, if you don’t need to drive in each day, you have a wider range of possible places to settle besides right near the office.

Cons of Working From Home

Con: no physical separation between work and leisure time. .

Con: Easy to misread cues via electronic communications.

Con: You have to make the effort to get a change of scenery.

Con: Less in-person contact with co-workers.

Con: You are not on-site for in-office perks.

Con: you have to be more self-motivated., con: some bosses may be biased against those who aren’t in the office..

Many who work from home lamented that they often find themselves working around the clock, since their labor has no definite start or end times; those lines can often be blurred. As a result, they sometimes feel as if they are always at work, making 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 realms means some remote workers get distracted by housework. Setting boundaries and sticking to them is important when you're working from home.

Con: It's easy to misread cues via electronic communications.

While few who work from home expressed feeling "lonely," as is typically assumed, many did point to the difficulty of getting the tone right through digital communication systems, such as email, chat, social media and text. Without body language, facial expressions and other cues, remote employees have to put in extra effort to maintain positive communications.

What can be a blessing can also become a curse in the form of cabin fever. Some freelancers and others who work from home lamented that where they work during the day is the exact same place where they'll be sitting later that evening; getting involved in their work often translates to spending a huge portion of the day indoors. Pre-pandemic, many stressed the importance of scheduling lunches and other meetings to keep them in the mix and avoid the rut of never leaving the house.

Con: There is less in-person contact with co-workers.

While you may have more time with loved ones when working from a home office, the flipside is less opportunity for face time (minus a screen) with people at your company. If your co-workers drive you crazy, then reduced time on-site might be a perk for you. But if you enjoy office-based camaraderie and like to be able to socialize with your team in person, then the remote life might make you miserable.

You can't swing by the break room and grab a doughnut or hit the company gym if you're working from home. This may be more of a disadvantage for workers in industries such as tech, with impressive on-site offerings like game rooms and chef-made food among their company benefits. If there's a perk you like about being in the office, then working from home may make you miss it.

If you’re the type of person who procrastinates working unless a boss is breathing down your neck, then you might find yourself underperforming in a work-from-home role. Remote workers have to motivate themselves to get the job done, which puts more onus on people working from home to manage their time wisely to complete their projects, instead of having someone else setting the timelines and spurring them along.

A study by researchers at the University of California at Davis and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that “face time” – the amount of time that you’re seen at work either within normal business hours or outside of them – can affect how your boss and others perceive you at work. If you’re not in the office and others are, some managers may be either intentionally or unintentionally biased against you. You may find that your contributions aren’t noticed or appreciated as much by your team and may feel compelled to make extra efforts to keep on everyone’s radar screen.

Weighing the pros and cons of working from home has become even more important in the wake of the pandemic, since many companies are now giving their employees the option to not come back into the office. If you are given the choice to consider working from home permanently, be sure to think through each of the pros and cons of working from home to land on a solution that matches your priorities. 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 .

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Working from home is a lot more comfortable for lots of people. Employees can save a great deal of time and money since they do not have to travel so often, which means people will have more time for work and for themselves, too. Less travelling will also help reduce traffice jam and pollutants to our environment. Besides, working at home does not mean staying inside all day long, people can choose to work in their garden or backyard, wherever makes them feel convenient to work. Moreover, employees are under less stresses since they get to decide when to work and when to take rest. These things will help giving out better perfomance to tasks.

There are still some disadvantages that home-working could bring. For instance, working from personal space will reduce direct interactions among colleagues. But the problem is solved thanks to the Internet. As for now, people from around the globe can easily contact and work with others from distances. Another drawback is that some people may get distracted from work by external factors. This requires employees to be highly awared of what they should and should not do for their paid jobs.

In conclusion, working from home should be encouraged because the advantages overcome the disadvantages.

(Written by Chloe Đặng)

Corrected essay

The first sentence is not accurate. It implies that people did not work from home in the past; however, throughout history, many people did work from home, for example, the classical novelists and artists.
“ Can surely ” is an informal expression and does not contribute anything to the preciseness of your writing.
The correct verb to follow the word “benefit” is not “ to surpass ”, but rather “to offset”, “to outweigh”, or “to exceed” .
Do not end your sentence with a colon ( “:” ), unless you want to provide a list of items immediately after that.

Working from home is a lot more comfortable for lots of people. Employees can save a great deal of time and money since they do not have to travel so often, which means people will have more time for work and for themselves, too. Less travelling will also help reduce traffice traffic jam congestion and pollutants to our environment environmental pollution. Besides, working at home does not mean staying inside all day long, people can choose to work in their garden or backyard, wherever makes them feel convenient to work. Moreover, employees are under less stresses stress since they get to decide when to work and when to take rest with a flexible working schedule . These things will help giving out better perfomance to tasks.

Words like “comfortable”, or “convenient” are too generic to use in an IELTS writing context. Generally, it’s better to use other words.
Lengthy phrases like “a great deal of time and money” (7 words) are considered as informal and ambiguous. Try to use shorter expressions, for example “time-saving and cost-efficient” (3 words only).
In a formal context, “ traffic congestion ” is more preferrable than “ traffic jam ”. When being alone, the word “ jam ” can be understood as a type of food. It’s always better to use a word that only has one meaning, regardless of the context.
The third sentence in this body paragraph is an example of poor cohesion. “ Traffic jam ” is not parallel to “ pollutants to our environment ”. “ Traffic jam ” is a condition (abstract), not a physical material (touchable by human) like “ pollutants ”. Therefore, you need to use another condition that is parallel to “ traffic jam ” (“ environmental pollution ”)
The fourth sentence (“ Besides, working at… ”) should be placed in the second body paragraph. The author is tailoring his ideas by providing the advantages of working from home in the first body paragraph, then listing the disadvantages in the second body paragraph while attacking those disadvantages notion at the same time. This kind of idea (“ to play the devil’s advocate ”) is good, but the execution isn’t. Insufficient coherence like this will hamper your score in Coherence & Cohesion criterion.
“Stress” as in “psychological stress” is an uncountable noun.
Try to improve the conciseness of your essay by rewritting a sentence clause (S+V) into a noun phrase. For example, “ since they get to decide when to work and when to take rest ” can be shorten into “ with a flexible working schedule ”.
The last sentence is redundant and ungrammatical.

The accurate way to describe the act of working from home is not “ home-working ”, but rather “ teleworking ” or “ telecommuting ”. The author has miss his chance to improve the Lexical Resource score.
Generally, in a writing context, do not start your sentence with a short subordinate conjuction (“and”, “or”, “but”, “for” ).
The third sentence in this paragraph is very unclear, especially when the followed sentence does not provide a good explanation. The author has to elaborate more on the Internet’s merits (social softwares such as “instant messaging”, “collaborative software” , etc)
The author has failed to provide a counter-argument for the notion of “ people may get distracted from work by external factors ”. Not to mentions he does not elaborate what is the “ external factors ”. Again, weak cohesion.
Do not simply stating “ this ” as a sentence subject. This type of grammatical mistake is called “unclear antecedent”, or “unclear aphoric noun”, and should be avoid by extending the subject with a word like “condition”, “situation”, “issue” , etc.
The conclusion is coherent with the introduction and the two body paragraphs. Though, it is a little bit too short.

(Words: 261)

Overall: 6.0

Task Response: 6

✓ addresses all parts of the task although some parts may be more fully covered than others (the author has written more than 250 words and addressed the topic question)

✓ presents a relevant position although the conclusions may become unclear or repetitive

✓ presents relevant main ideas but some may be inadequately developed/unclear

Coherence and Cohesion: 6

✓ arranges information and ideas coherently and there is a clear overall progression (the ideas in each paragraphs are coherent with eachother)

✓ uses cohesive devices effectively, but cohesion within and/or between sentences may be faulty or mechanical

✓ may not always use referencing clearly or appropriately (the author usually fails at providing good supporting evidence for his argument)

✓ uses paragraphing, but not always logically (the fourth sentence in Body Paragraph 1 should be placed in Body 2 instead)

Lexical Resource: 5

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: 6

✓ uses a mix of simple and complex sentence forms

✓ makes some errors in grammar and punctuation but they rarely reduce communication

———————————————————-

This essay is corrected by Anh Tran

corrected essay
writing-correction

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Essay on Work From Home

Students are often asked to write an essay on Work From Home in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Work From Home

Introduction.

Work from home is a flexible work arrangement where employees perform their job duties from their homes. It’s also known as telecommuting or remote work.

Working from home has several benefits. It saves commuting time, provides a comfortable work environment, and offers flexibility.

However, it also has challenges like distractions, lack of social interaction, and difficulty in separating work and personal life.

Despite the challenges, work from home is becoming increasingly popular due to advancements in technology and the need for flexible work arrangements.

Also check:

10 Lines on Work From Home

250 Words Essay on Work From Home

The concept of ‘Work From Home’ (WFH) has gained significant momentum in the wake of the digital revolution and more recently, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It involves performing job duties from home or a location other than a traditional office setup, leveraging technology to stay connected.

Advantages of WFH

WFH offers numerous advantages. Firstly, it eliminates commuting, saving time and reducing carbon footprints. Secondly, it offers a flexible schedule, allowing individuals to balance work and personal life more effectively. Thirdly, it can lead to increased productivity as employees work in their comfort zones, free from office distractions.

Challenges of WFH

However, WFH is not without its challenges. The lack of physical interaction can lead to feelings of isolation and loneliness. It also blurs the line between personal and professional life, potentially leading to burnout. Additionally, it requires self-discipline and time management skills, which not everyone may possess.

The Future of WFH

The future of WFH is promising. Companies are realizing that remote work does not compromise productivity and can, in fact, reduce operational costs. However, to make WFH truly effective, organizations need to invest in digital tools and foster a culture of trust and accountability.

In conclusion, WFH is a significant trend shaping the future of work. It offers numerous benefits but also poses unique challenges. As the world continues to navigate the digital age, it is imperative to understand and adapt to this new work paradigm.

500 Words Essay on Work From Home

Introduction to work from home.

The concept of Work From Home (WFH) has been a significant paradigm shift in the modern corporate world. It is a flexible working arrangement that allows employees to perform their tasks from their homes, leveraging technology and digital platforms. This essay delves into the intricacies of WFH, its advantages, drawbacks, and the future implications.

Advantages of Work From Home

WFH offers numerous benefits to both employees and employers. For employees, it eliminates the need for commuting, saving time and reducing stress. It provides a more flexible schedule, allowing individuals to balance their professional and personal lives more effectively. This flexibility often results in increased productivity, as employees can work during their peak energy times.

For employers, WFH can lead to cost savings in terms of reduced office space and utility bills. It also widens the talent pool as geographical restrictions are no longer a barrier in hiring. Furthermore, with the reduction in commuting, it contributes to environmental sustainability by reducing carbon emissions.

Drawbacks of Work From Home

Despite its advantages, WFH is not without its challenges. A significant issue is the blurring of boundaries between work and personal life, leading to the risk of overworking. The lack of face-to-face interaction can also result in feelings of isolation and may impact team cohesion and communication.

For employers, managing a remote workforce can be challenging. It requires robust technology infrastructure, effective communication tools, and new management styles. There are also concerns about data security and maintaining the confidentiality of sensitive information.

The Future of Work From Home

The future of WFH looks promising, with many companies planning to adopt hybrid models, combining remote and office work. This approach aims to maximize the benefits of both arrangements while minimizing their drawbacks.

However, it also necessitates a rethinking of traditional work models. It requires a shift in organizational culture, with an emphasis on results rather than hours worked. It also demands the development of digital competencies, both for employees and managers.

In conclusion, WFH is a complex phenomenon with multifaceted implications. While it offers numerous benefits, it also presents significant challenges. As we move forward, the key lies in finding a balanced approach that maximizes the advantages of WFH while mitigating its drawbacks. The future of work is likely to be a blend of remote and office-based work, requiring adaptability, resilience, and digital proficiency from all stakeholders.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Essay on Work Ethics and Professionalism
Essay on Work and Leisure
Essay on Women’s Rights

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

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The massive surge in the number of people working from home may be the largest change to the U.S. economy since World War II, says Stanford scholar Nicholas Bloom .

And the shift to working from home, catalyzed by the pandemic, is here to stay, with further growth expected in the long run through improvements in technology.

Looking at data going back to 1965, when less than 1% of people worked from home, the number of people working from home had been rising continuously up to the pandemic, doubling roughly every 15 years, said Bloom, the William D. Eberle Professor in Economics in the School of Humanities and Sciences and professor, by courtesy, at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Before the pandemic, only around 5% of the typical U.S. workforce worked from home; at the pandemic’s onset, it skyrocketed to 61.5%. Currently, about 30% of employees work from home.

“In some ways, one of the biggest lasting legacies of the pandemic will be the shift to work from home,” said Bloom.

Bloom shared his research on working from home at the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute ’s “The Future of Work” Winter 2023 Colloquium, which focused on how the ways we work are changing.

DCI Director Richard Saller moderated the event , which featured scholars from Stanford and beyond discussing working arrangements and attitudes, challenges to office real estate, learned lessons about the power of proximity, and more.

Below are seven takeaways from Bloom’s discussion:

The employees. About 58% of people in the U.S. can’t work from home at all, and they are typically frontline workers with lower pay. Those who work entirely from home are primarily professionals, managers, and in higher-paying fields such as IT support, payroll, and call centers. The highest paid group includes the 30% of people working from home in a hybrid capacity, and these include professionals and managers.
The move. Almost 1 million people left city centers like New York and San Francisco during the pandemic. Those who used to go to the office five days a week are now willing to commute farther because they are only in the office a couple days a week, and they want larger homes to accommodate needs such as a home office. This has changed property markets substantially with rents and home values in the suburbs surging, Bloom said. Home values in city centers have risen but not by much.
The commute. Public transit journeys have plummeted and are currently down by a third compared to pre-pandemic levels. This sharp reduction is threatening the survival of mass transit, Bloom said. These are systems that have relatively fixed costs because the hardware and labor, which is largely unionized, are relatively hard to adjust. A lot of the revenues come from ticket sales, and these agencies are losing a lot of money.
The office. Offices are changing, with cubicles becoming less popular and meeting rooms more desirable. As some companies incorporate an organized hybrid schedule in which everyone comes in on certain days, they are redesigning spaces to support more meetings, presentations, trainings, lunches, and social time.
The startups. Startup rates are surging, up by 20% from pre-pandemic numbers. The reasons: working from home provides a cheaper way to start a new company by saving a lot on initial capital and rent. Also, people can more easily work on a startup on the side when their regular job offers the option to work from home.
The downtime. The number of people playing golf mid-week has more than doubled since 2019. People used to go before or after work, or on the weekends, but now the mid-day, mid-week golf game is becoming more common. The same is probably true for things like gyms, tennis courts, retail hairdressers, ski resorts, and anything else that consumers used to pack into the weekends.
The organization. More and more, firms are outsourcing or offshoring their information technology, human resources, and finance to access talent, save costs, and free up space. There has been a big increase in part-time employees, independent contractors, and outsourcing. “After seeing how well it worked with remote work at the beginning of the pandemic, companies may not see a need to have employees in the country,” Bloom said.

Interested in hearing more about the future of work? Stanford Continuing Studies will feature Bloom as he discusses “The Future of and Impact of Working from Home” on May 1 as part of the Stanford Monday University web seminar series .

Bloom is also co-director of the Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a fellow at the Centre for Economic Performance, and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research .

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Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Researchers working from home: Benefits and challenges

Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Institute of Psychology, ELTE Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary

Roles Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Resources, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Institute of Psychology, ELTE Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary, Doctoral School of Psychology, ELTE Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary

Roles Conceptualization, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Department of Sociology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Supervision, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Balazs Aczel,
Marton Kovacs,
Tanja van der Lippe,
Barnabas Szaszi

Published: March 25, 2021
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127
Peer Review
Reader Comments

The flexibility allowed by the mobilization of technology disintegrated the traditional work-life boundary for most professionals. Whether working from home is the key or impediment to academics’ efficiency and work-life balance became a daunting question for both scientists and their employers. The recent pandemic brought into focus the merits and challenges of working from home on a level of personal experience. Using a convenient sampling, we surveyed 704 academics while working from home and found that the pandemic lockdown decreased the work efficiency for almost half of the researchers but around a quarter of them were more efficient during this time compared to the time before. Based on the gathered personal experience, 70% of the researchers think that in the future they would be similarly or more efficient than before if they could spend more of their work-time at home. They indicated that in the office they are better at sharing thoughts with colleagues, keeping in touch with their team, and collecting data, whereas at home they are better at working on their manuscript, reading the literature, and analyzing their data. Taking well-being also into account, 66% of them would find it ideal to work more from home in the future than they did before the lockdown. These results draw attention to how working from home is becoming a major element of researchers’ life and that we have to learn more about its influencer factors and coping tactics in order to optimize its arrangements.

Citation: Aczel B, Kovacs M, van der Lippe T, Szaszi B (2021) Researchers working from home: Benefits and challenges. PLoS ONE 16(3): e0249127. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127

Editor: Johnson Chun-Sing Cheung, The University of Hong Kong, HONG KONG

Received: September 24, 2020; Accepted: March 11, 2021; Published: March 25, 2021

Copyright: © 2021 Aczel et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All research materials, the collected raw and processed anonymous data, just as well the code for data management and statistical analyses are publicly shared on the OSF page of the project: OSF: https://osf.io/v97fy/ .

Funding: TVL's contribution is part of the research program Sustainable Cooperation – Roadmaps to Resilient Societies (SCOOP). She is grateful to the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) for their support in the context of its 2017 Gravitation Program (grant number 024.003.025).

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Fleeing from the Great Plague that reached Cambridge in 1665, Newton retreated to his countryside home where he continued working for the next year and a half. During this time, he developed his theories on calculus, optics, and the law of gravitation—fundamentally changing the path of science for centuries. Newton himself described this period as the most productive time of his life [ 1 ]. Is working from home indeed the key to efficiency for scientists also in modern times? A solution for working without disturbance by colleagues and being able to manage a work-life balance? What personal and professional factors influence the relation between productivity and working from home? These are the main questions that the present paper aims to tackle. The Covid-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to analyze the implications of working from home in great detail.

Working away from the traditional office is increasingly an option in today’s world. The phenomenon has been studied under numerous, partially overlapping terms, such as telecommuting, telework, virtual office, remote work, location independent working, home office. In this paper, we will use ‘working from home’ (WFH), a term that typically covers working from any location other than the dedicated area provided by the employer.

The practice of WFH and its effect on job efficiency and well-being are reasonably well explored outside of academia [ 2 , 3 ]. Internet access and the increase of personal IT infrastructure made WFH a growing trend throughout the last decades [ 4 ]. In 2015, over 12% of EU workers [ 5 ] and near one-quarter of US employees [ 6 ] worked at least partly from home. A recent survey conducted among 27,500 millennials and Gen Z-s indicated that their majority would like to work remotely more frequently [ 7 ]. The literature suggests that people working from home need flexibility for different reasons. Home-working is a typical solution for those who need to look after dependent children [ 8 ] but many employees just seek a better work-life balance [ 7 ] and the comfort of an alternative work environment [ 9 ].

Non-academic areas report work-efficiency benefits for WFH but they also show some downsides of this arrangement. A good example is the broad-scale experiment in which call center employees were randomly assigned to work from home or in the office for nine months [ 10 ]. A 13% work performance increase was found in the working from home group. These workers also reported improved work satisfaction. Still, after the experiment, 50% of them preferred to go back to the office mainly because of feeling isolated at home.

Home-working has several straightforward positive aspects, such as not having to commute, easier management of household responsibilities [ 11 ] and family demands [ 12 ], along with increased autonomy over time use [ 13 , 14 ], and fewer interruptions [ 15 , 16 ]. Personal comfort is often listed as an advantage of the home environment [e.g., 15 ], though setting up a home office comes with physical and infrastructural demands [ 17 ]. People working from home consistently report greater job motivation and satisfaction [ 4 , 11 , 18 , 19 ] which is probably due to the greater work-related control and work-life flexibility [ 20 ]. A longitudinal nationally representative sample of 30,000 households in the UK revealed that homeworking is positively related with leisure time satisfaction [ 21 ], suggesting that people working from home can allocate more time for leisure activities.

Often-mentioned negative aspects of WFH include being disconnected from co-workers, experiencing isolation due to the physical and social distance to team members [ 22 , 23 ]. Also, home-working employees reported more difficulties with switching off and they worked beyond their formal working hours [ 4 ]. Working from home is especially difficult for those with small children [ 24 ], but intrusion from other family members, neighbours, and friends were also found to be major challenges of WFH [e.g., 17 ]. Moreover, being away from the office may also create a lack of visibility and increases teleworkers’ fear that being out of sight limits opportunities for promotion, rewards, and positive performance reviews [ 25 ].

Importantly, increased freedom imposes higher demands on workers to control not just the environment, but themselves too. WFH comes with the need to develop work-life boundary control tactics [ 26 ] and to be skilled at self-discipline, self-motivation, and good time management [ 27 ]. Increased flexibility can easily lead to multitasking and work-family role blurring [ 28 ]. Table 1 provides non-comprehensive lists of mostly positive and mostly negative consequences of WFH, based on the literature reviewed here.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.t001

Compared to the private sector, our knowledge is scarce about how academics experience working from home. Researchers in higher education institutes work in very similar arrangements. Typically, they are expected to personally attend their workplace, if not for teaching or supervision, then for meetings or to confer with colleagues. In the remaining worktime, they work in their lab or, if allowed, they may choose to do some of their tasks remotely. Along with the benefits on productivity when working from home, academics have already experienced some of its drawbacks at the start of the popularity of personal computers. As Snizek observed in the ‘80s, “(f)aculty who work long hours at home using their microcomputers indicate feelings of isolation and often lament the loss of collegial feedback and reinforcement” [page 622, 29 ].

Until now, the academics whose WFH experience had been given attention were mostly those participating in online distance education [e.g., 30 , 31 ]. They experienced increased autonomy, flexibility in workday schedule, the elimination of unwanted distractions [ 32 ], along with high levels of work productivity and satisfaction [ 33 ], but they also observed inadequate communication and the lack of opportunities for skill development [ 34 ]. The Covid-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to study the WFH experience of a greater spectrum of academics, since at one point most of them had to do all their work from home.

We have only fragmented knowledge about the moderators of WFH success. We know that control over time is limited by the domestic tasks one has while working from home. The view that women’s work is more influenced by family obligations than men’s is consistently shown in the literature [e.g., 35 – 37 ]. Sullivan and Lewis [ 38 ] argued that women who work from home are able to fulfil their domestic role better and manage their family duties more to their satisfaction, but that comes at the expense of higher perceived work–family conflict [see also 39 ]. Not surprisingly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, female scientists suffered a greater disruption than men in their academic productivity and time spent on research, most likely due to demands of childcare [ 40 , 41 ].

In summary, until recently, the effect of WFH on academics’ life and productivity received limited attention. However, during the recent pandemic lockdown, scientists, on an unprecedented scale, had to find solutions to continue their research from home. The situation unavoidably brought into focus the merits and challenges of WFH on a level of personal experience. Institutions were compelled to support WFH arrangements by adequate regulations, services, and infrastructure. Some researchers and institutions might have found benefits in the new arrangements and may wish to continue WFH in some form; for others WFH brought disproportionately larger challenges. The present study aims to facilitate the systematic exploration and support of researchers’ efficiency and work-life balance when working from home.

Materials and methods

Our study procedure and analysis plan were preregistered at https://osf.io/jg5bz (all deviations from the plan are listed in S1 File ). The survey included questions on research work efficiency, work-life balance, demographics, professional and personal background information. The study protocol has been approved by the Institutional Review Board from Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary (approval number: 2020/131). The Transparency Report of the study, the complete text of the questionnaire items and the instructions are shared at our OSF repository: https://osf.io/v97fy/ .

As the objective of this study was to gain insight about researchers’ experience of WFH, we aimed to increase the size and diversity of our sample rather than ascertaining the representativeness of our sample. Therefore, we distributed our online survey link among researchers in professional newsletters, university mailing lists, on social media, and by sending group-emails to authors (additional details about sampling are in S1 File ). As a result of the nature of our sampling strategy, it is not known how many researchers have seen our participation request. Additionally, we did not collect the country of residence of the respondents. Responses analyzed in this study were collected between 2020-04-24 and 2020-07-13. Overall, 858 individuals started the survey and 154 were excluded because they did not continue the survey beyond the first question. As a result, 704 respondents were included in the analysis.

We sent the questionnaire individually to each of the respondents through the Qualtrics Mailer service. Written informed consent and access to the preregistration of the research was provided to every respondent before starting the survey. Then, respondents who agreed to participate in the study could fill out the questionnaire. To encourage participation, we offered that upon completion they can enter a lottery to win a 100 USD voucher.

This is a general description of the survey items. The full survey with the display logic and exact phrasing of the items is transported from Qualtrics and uploaded to the projects’ OSF page: https://osf.io/8ze2g/ .

Efficiency of research work.

The respondents were asked to compare the efficiency of their research work during the lockdown to their work before the lockdown. They were also asked to use their present and previous experience to indicate whether working more from home in the future would change the efficiency of their research work compared to the time before the lockdown. For both questions, they could choose among three options: “less efficient”; “more efficient”, and “similarly efficient”.

Comparing working from home to working in the office.

Participants were asked to compare working from home to working from the office. For this question they could indicate their preference on a 7-point dimension (1: At home; 7: In the office), along 15 efficiency or well-being related aspects of research work (e.g., working on the manuscript, maintaining work-life balance). These aspects were collected in a pilot study conducted with 55 researchers who were asked to indicate in free text responses the areas in which their work benefits/suffers when working from home. More details of the pilot study are provided in S1 File .

Actual and ideal time spent working from home.

To study the actual and ideal time spent working from home, researcher were asked to indicate on a 0–100% scale (1) what percentage of their work time they spent working from home before the pandemic and (2) how much would be ideal for them working from home in the future concerning both research efficiency and work-life balance.

Feasibility of working more from home.

With simple Yes/No options, we asked the respondents to indicate whether they think that working more from home would be feasible considering all their other duties (education, administration, etc.) and the given circumstances at home (infrastructure, level of disturbance).

Background information.

Background questions were asked by providing preset lists concerning their academic position (e.g., full professor), area of research (e.g., social sciences), type of workplace (e.g., purely research institute), gender, age group, living situation (e.g., single-parent with non-adult child(ren)), and the age and the number of their children.

The respondents were also asked to select one of the offered options to indicate: whether or not they worked more from home during the coronavirus lockdown than before; whether it is possible for them to collect data remotely; whether they have education duties at work; if their research requires intensive team-work; whether their home office is fully equipped; whether their partner was also working from home during the pandemic; how far their office is from home; whether they had to do home-schooling during the pandemic; whether there was someone else looking after their child(ren) during their work from home in lockdown. When the question did not apply to them, they could select the ‘NA’ option as well.

Data preprocessing and analyses

All the data preprocessing and analyses were conducted in R [ 42 ], with the use of the tidyverse packages [ 43 ]. Before the analysis of the survey responses, we read all the free-text comments to ascertain that they do not contain personal information and they are in line with the respondent’s answers. We found that for 5 items the respondents’ comments contradicted their survey choices (e.g., whether they have children), therefore, we excluded the responses of the corresponding items from further analyses (see S1 File ). Following the preregistration, we only conducted descriptive statistics of the survey results.

Background information

The summary of the key demographic information of the 704 complete responses is presented in Table 2 . A full summary of all the collected background information of the respondents are available in S1 File .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.t002

Efficiency of research work

The results showed that 94% (n = 662) of the surveyed researchers worked more from home during the COVID-19 lockdown compared to the time before. Of these researchers, 47% found that due to working more from home their research became, in general, less efficient, 23% found it more efficient, and 30% found no difference compared to working before the lockdown. Within this database, we also explored the effect of the lockdown on the efficiency of people living with children (n = 290). Here, we found that 58% of them experienced that due to working more from home their research became, in general, less efficient, 20% found it more efficient, and 22% found no difference compared to working before the lockdown. Of those researchers who live with children, we found that 71% of the 21 single parents and 57% of the 269 partnered parents found working less efficient when working from home compared to the time before the lockdown.

When asking about how working more from home would affect the efficiency of their research after the lockdown, of those who have not already been working from home full time (n = 684), 29% assumed that it could make their research, in general, less efficient, 29% said that it would be more efficient, and 41% assumed no difference compared to the time before the lockdown ( Fig 1 ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.g001

Focusing on the efficiency of the subgroup of people who live with children (n = 295), we found that for 32% their research work would be less efficient, for 30% it would be no different, and for 38% it would be more efficient to work from home after the lockdown, compared to the time before the lockdown.

Comparing working from home to working in the office

When comparing working from home to working in the office in general, people found that they can better achieve certain aspects of the research in one place than the other. They indicated that in the office they are better at sharing thoughts with colleagues, keeping in touch with their team, and collecting data, whereas at home they are better at working on their manuscript, reading the literature, and analyzing their data ( Fig 2 ).

The bars represent response averages of the given aspects.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.g002

Actual and ideal time spent working from home

We also asked the researchers how much of their work time they spent working from home in the past, and how much it would be ideal for them to work from home in the future concerning both research efficiency and well-being. Fig 3 shows the distribution of percentages of time working from home in the past and in an ideal future. Comparing these values for each researcher, we found that 66% of them want to work more from home in the future than they did before the lockdown, whereas 16% of them want to work less from home, and 18% of them want to spend the same percentage of their work time at home in the future as before. (These latter calculations were not preregistered).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.g003

Feasibility of working more from home

Taken all their other duties (education, administration, etc.) and provided circumstances at home (infrastructure, level of disturbance), of researchers who would like to work more from home in the future (n = 461), 86% think that it would be possible to do so. Even among those who have teaching duties at work (n = 376), 84% think that more working from home would be ideal and possible.

Researchers’ work and life have radically changed in recent times. The flexibility allowed by the mobilization of technology and the continuous access to the internet disintegrated the traditional work-life boundary. Where, when, and how we work depends more and more on our own arrangements. The recent pandemic only highlighted an already existing task: researchers’ worklife has to be redefined. The key challenge in a new work-life model is to find strategies to balance the demands of work and personal life. As a first step, the present paper explored how working from home affects researchers’ efficiency and well-being.

Our results showed that while the pandemic-related lockdown decreased the work efficiency for almost half of the researchers (47%), around a quarter (23%) of them experienced that they were more efficient during this time compared to the time before. Based on personal experience, 70% of the researchers think that after the lockdown they would be similarly (41%) or more efficient (29%) than before if they could spend more of their work-time at home. The remaining 30% thought that after the lockdown their work efficiency would decrease if they worked from home, which is noticeably lower than the 47% who claimed the same for the lockdown period. From these values we speculate that some of the obstacles of their work efficiency were specific to the pandemic lockdown. Such obstacles could have been the need to learn new methods to teach online [ 44 ] or the trouble adapting to the new lifestyle [ 45 ]. Furthermore, we found that working from the office and working from home support different aspects of research. Not surprisingly, activities that involve colleagues or team members are better bound to the office, but tasks that need focused attention, such as working on the manuscript or analyzing the data are better achieved from home.

A central motivation of our study was to explore what proportion of their worktime researchers would find ideal to work from home, concerning both research efficiency and work-life balance. Two thirds of the researchers indicated that it would be better to work more from home in the future. It seemed that sharing work somewhat equally between the two venues is the most preferred arrangement. A great majority (86%) of those who would like to work more from home in the future, think that it would be possible to do so. As a conclusion, both the work and non-work life of researchers would take benefits should more WFH be allowed and neither workplace duties, nor their domestic circumstances are limits of such a change. That researchers have a preference to work more from home, might be due to the fact that they are more and more pressured by their work. Finishing manuscripts, and reading literature is easier to find time for when working from home.

A main message of the results of our present survey is that although almost half of the respondents reported reduced work efficiency during the lockdown, the majority of them would prefer the current remote work setting to some extent in the future. It is important to stress, however, that working from home is not equally advantageous for researchers. Several external and personal factors must play a role in researchers’ work efficiency and work-life balance. In this analysis, we concentrated only on family status, but further dedicated studies will be required to gain a deeper understanding of the complex interaction of professional, institutional, personal, and domestic factors in this matter. While our study could only initiate the exploration of academics’ WFH benefits and challenges, we can already discuss a few relevant aspects regarding the work-life interface.

Our data show that researchers who live with dependent children can exploit the advantages of working from home less than those who do not have childcare duties, irrespective of the pandemic lockdown. Looking after children is clearly a main source of people’s task overload and, as a result, work-family conflict [ 46 , 47 ]. As an implication, employers should pay special respect to employees’ childcare situations when defining work arrangements. It should be clear, however, that other caring responsibilities should also be respected such as looking after elderly or disabled relatives [ 48 ]. Furthermore, to avoid equating non-work life with family-life, a broader diversity of life circumstances, such as those who live alone, should be taken into consideration [ 49 ].

It seems likely that after the pandemic significantly more work will be supplied from home [ 50 ]. The more of the researchers’ work will be done from home in the future, the greater the challenge will grow to integrate their work and non-work life. The extensive research on work-life conflict, should help us examine the issue and to develop coping strategies applicable for academics’ life. The Boundary Theory [ 26 , 51 , 52 ] proved to be a useful framework to understand the work-home interface. According to this theory, individuals utilize different tactics to create and maintain an ideal level of work-home segmentation. These boundaries often serve as “mental fences” to simplify the environment into domains, such as work or home, to help us attend our roles, such as being an employee or a parent. These boundaries are more or less permeable, depending on how much the individual attending one role can be influenced by another role. Individuals differ in the degree to which they prefer and are able to segment their roles, but each boundary crossing requires a cognitive “leap” between these categories [ 53 ]. The source of conflict is the demands of the different roles and responsibilities competing for one’s physical and mental resources. Working from home can easily blur the boundary between work and non-work domains. The conflict caused by the intrusion of the home world to one’s work time, just as well the intrusion of work tasks to one’s personal life are definite sources of weakened ability to concentrate on one’s tasks [ 54 ], exhaustion [ 55 ], and negative job satisfaction [ 56 ].

What can researchers do to mitigate this challenge? Various tactics have been identified for controlling one’s borders between work and non-work. One can separate the two domains by temporal, physical, behavioral, and communicative segmentation [ 26 ]. Professionals often have preferences and self-developed tactics for boundary management. People who prefer tighter boundary management apply strong segmentation between work and home [ 57 , 58 ]. For instance, they don’t do domestic tasks in worktime (temporal segmentation), close their door when working from home (physical segmentation), don’t read work emails at weekends (behavioral segmentation), or negotiate strict boundary rules with family members (communicative segmentation). People on the other on one side of the segmentation-integration continuum, might not mind, or cannot avoid, ad-hoc boundary-crossings and integrate the two domains by letting private space and time be mixed with their work.

Researchers, just like other workers, need to develop new arrangements and skills to cope with the disintegration of the traditional work-life boundaries. To know how research and education institutes could best support this change would require a comprehensive exploration of the factors in researchers’ WFH life. There is probably no one-size-fits-all approach to promote employees’ efficiency and well-being. Life circumstances often limit how much control people can have over their work-life boundaries when working from home [ 59 ]. Our results strongly indicate that some can boost work efficiency and wellbeing when working from home, others need external solutions, such as the office, to provide boundaries between their life domains. Until we gain comprehensive insight about the topic, individuals are probably the best judges of their own situation and of what arrangements may be beneficial for them in different times [ 60 ]. The more autonomy the employers provide to researchers in distributing their work between the office and home (while not lowering their expectations), the more they let them optimize this arrangement to their circumstances.

Our study has several limitations: to investigate how factors such as research domain, seniority, or geographic location contribute to WFH efficiency and well-being would have needed a much greater sample. Moreover, the country of residence of the respondents was not collected in our survey and this factor could potentially alter the perception of WFH due to differing social and infrastructural factors. Whereas the world-wide lockdown has provided a general experience to WFH to academics, the special circumstances just as well biased their judgment of the arrangement. With this exploratory research, we could only scratch the surface of the topic, the reader can probably generate a number of testable hypotheses that would be relevant to the topic but we could not analyze in this exploration.

Newton working in lockdown became the idealized image of the home-working scientist. Unquestionably, he was a genius, but his success probably needed a fortunate work-life boundary. Should he had noisy neighbours, or taunting domestic duties, he might have achieved much less while working from home. With this paper, we aim to draw attention to how WFH is becoming a major element of researchers’ life and that we have to be prepared for this change. We hope that personal experience or the topic’s relevance to the future of science will invite researchers to continue this work.

Supporting information

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249127.s001

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Szonja Horvath, Matyas Sarudi, and Zsuzsa Szekely for their help with reviewing the free text responses.

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Working From Home: The Pros and Cons

You wake up at 8 a.m. with the sun streaming through the blinds. As you take a leisurely shower, you listen to the radio and hear rush-hour traffic’s a nightmare. Good thing you don’t have to jump in the car to head to the office. In fact, you don’t have to go to the office at all. Sure, you’ve got two deadlines to make by the end of the day, but that’s nine hours away.

At the moment, the more important question seems to be: coffee at home or a cappuccino from your favorite café down the street?

Does this sound like your typical morning? If so, you’re living the dream—the dream of working from home .

Key Takeaways

Working from home comes with the benefits of no commute, your own personal space, increased flexibility, and more money saved.
The downsides of working from home include social and professional isolation and lack of innovation from in-office interaction.
If you're self-motivated and introverted, working at home might be for you while if you enjoy being in the middle of the action, you might regret going remote.
After the Coronavirus pandemic, working from home has become more common and acceptable.
Recent studies show that employees are more productive when they work from home.

As the Internet has grown and allowed for faster connections, high-quality video calls, and the ability to send larger amounts of data, working from home has become as straightforward as working from the office.

Many employees consider working from home, at least one day out of the week, a work perk. Because an employee doesn't have to get up and get dressed or commute, it allows for more time to sleep, a less rushed morning, and money saved on not eating out during office hours.

For many employees, however, it's not an option. Kindergarten teachers, carpenters, and nurses, among many others, do not work remotely; however, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, where individuals were encouraged to stay at home, working from home became more common for such jobs, such as teachers.

With the right digital equipment, software tools, and mobile devices, more jobs can be performed remotely from home. Before the pandemic , 4.1% of the U.S. employee workforce telecommuted either half of the time or more. At the peak of the pandemic, this rose to 69%, showing that working from home can be done if needed, encouraging a greater shift to working from home once lockdowns eased.

Years before the pandemic, according to a 2013 study by Stanford University in collaboration with Ctrip, a Chinese travel agency, home-based workers said they were more productive, happier , and less likely to quit. The flip side? Those working from home were half as likely to be promoted as their office-based colleagues. They were also more likely to feel lonely. In the end, 50% of the home-based workers in the study requested to return to the office.

In the years since, working from home has become a lot more acceptable, especially by employers, and after the pandemic, a necessity. The pandemic demonstrated that working from home was possible without a reduction in productivity and preferred by employees.

Employees particularly believed working from home was better, with 70% of employees stating virtual meetings were less stressful with 64% preferring hybrid meetings.

Some studies showed that working from home is more productive . Individuals who work from home, on average, are 10 minutes less productive in a day, work one more day per week, and are 47% more productive.

Though working from home has shown to be more productive, it still socially isolates individuals that may gain positive health benefits from in-person interaction in the office.

Before taking the plunge, talk to coworkers, friends, and the people in your network, especially people who work in similar industries . Among your acquaintances who have worked from home, what challenges have they faced? Have they seen a real improvement in their work-life balance and overall quality of life? What have they unexpectedly found they missed?

If possible, it helps to create a separate office space in your living area that can be used for work, thereby separating your work life and home life, allowing for more productivity and less burnout.

Here are a few pros and cons of working at home to consider, whether you work for a single employer, freelance, or run your own small business .

You'll Have Greater Flexibility

Want to take a month off for the whitewater kayaking season in Patagonia every year? By working from home, you just might be able to pull it off, either by working more hours the rest of the year or by working remotely from your holiday spot.

On a less ambitious scale, working at home allows you to adjust your schedule from day to day, taking a three-hour lunch and then making up the hours at night if you want to.

Of course, many appreciate the flexibility for more practical reasons: to provide childcare or eldercare or simply to be at home when the plumber shows up.

You'll Save Money

Commuting costs go away. Your professional wardrobe goes seriously downscale. Whether you're a business owner or an employee, there are incidental costs to showing up at work five days a week that disappear when you stay home.

You May Be More Productive

Are you an introvert who finds social interactions more draining than energy-giving? Then you might thrive in a work environment without other colleagues. If you feel more focused in a quiet environment with few distractions, working from home may give you the opportunity to be your most productive.

Working from home led to more people exercising due to more time available by not commuting, improving physical and mental health.

Your Commute Time Is Zero

In some cities and job sectors, more than two-thirds of workers say they would switch jobs if the change would ease the burden of their commutes. Think about what zero commuting hours a week would do for you.

It Is Isolating

You could be surprised by how much you miss the workplace camaraderie, not to mention the interpersonal drama, the office politics, and the ill-advised romances. And don’t discount the benefits of professional collaboration and social bonds forged in the workplace. They often lead to future opportunities.

Staying Motivated Isn't Easy

Are you an extrovert who thrives on collaborating with others on projects? Do you get energy and inspiration from the kind of impromptu socializing that occurs among colleagues? If so, the solitary nature of working from home might drain rather than augment your energy. It's all too easy to take a break that lasts for hours.

Working at home requires you to motivate yourself.

There Are Distractions

Your home circumstances might have built-in distractions. These might include family members or roommates around the house. They might be tasks that you think you have time for now that you're not going into the office. In any case, if you can't set aside time to devote to work and only work, you can't pull this off.

What Are the Pros and Cons of Working From Home?

The pros of working from home are no commute, more time available to sleep and rest, money saved by not commuting or buying lunch when at the office, greater flexibility, more independence, and no office distractions. The cons of working from home are isolation and loneliness, lack of motivation, at-home distractions, and unmonitored performance.

What Are the Pros and Cons of Working From Home From a Company’s Perspective?

From a company's perspective, the pros of having employees work from home include increased employee satisfaction, which leads to higher employee retention, the ability to hire from a larger pool of talent as opposed to the physical location of the office, increased employee productivity, and lower costs, in regards to rent, operations, and equipment. Some of the cons for employers include lack of team building, lack of team innovation, challenges with communication, and the inability to gauge performance in person.

What Are Some of the Best Work-From-Home Jobs?

Some of the best jobs to work from home include web developer, therapist, teacher, financial analyst, interpreter, computer specialist, writer, editor, social media professional, graphic designer, and computer engineer.

Though working from home comes with many benefits, such as more time, less stress, and more money, the negatives of isolation, at-home distractions, and motivating yourself can make heading to the office seem appealing. In general, employees have found that a mix of working from home and the office is a good solution.

Global Workplace Analytics. " Latest Work-at-Home/Telecommuting/Mobile Work/Remote Work Statistics ."

Bloom, Nicholas and et al. " Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment ." The Quarterly Journal of Economics , vol. 130, no. 1, February 2015, pp. 9. Download PDF.

Owl Labs. " State of Remote Work 2021 ," Page 24.

Airtasker. " The Benefits of Working From Home ."

BusinessWire. " Prodoscore Research from March/April 2020: Productivity Has Increased, Led By Remote Workers ."

Mass Biotechnology Council. " MassBio’s 2019 Transportation Survey Finds 60% of Respondents Would Change Jobs for a Better Commute ."

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10 Undeniable Benefits Of Working From Home, According To Science

Senior Lifestyle Reporter, HuffPost

Among hybrid workers who are not self-employed, 71% say working for home at least partially helps them balance their work and personal lives.

Four years since the COVID-19 pandemic forced businesses to shut down office spaces around the world, remote and hybrid work seems here to stay.

About a third of U.S. workers who can work from home now do so all the time, according to a Pew Research Center survey from March 2023 . (The majority of U.S. workers ― 61% ― do not have jobs that can be done from home, Pew notes.)

Still, there are a lot of work-from-home skeptics out there ― most of them C-level business executives . Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has remarked that engineers “get more done” in-office, and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said that remote work “doesn’t work for those who want to hustle” while calling all U.S.-based employees back into the offices in May 2021.

Companies that insist on mandatory full-time attendance at the office do so at their own peril; today’s employees value the autonomy that comes with remote or hybrid work and are increasingly leaving workplaces that forget they have lives outside their 9-to-5 .

In March 2022, Microsoft’s second annual Worker Trend Index found that 53% of respondents prioritize their health and well-being over work, “and if unhappy, more than half of Gen Z and millennial respondents said [they’d] seriously consider switching employers over the next year.”

Of course, working from home is not without its drawbacks. Many working women say they feel greater conflicts between their job and family roles while teleworking, and studies have shown increased rates of depression and anxiety during remote work . (Though it’s worth noting, most of the research was conducted while respondents were living through an active pandemic ― stressful in its own right.)

Still, with increased social support and systems put in place by managers and organizations trained in managing hybrid teams, research also suggests there’s plenty of benefits to working from home. Below, 10 studies and surveys that quantify just how game-changing remote work can be for employees and companies.

Remote workers experience a better work-life balance.

Prior to the remote work era, a healthy work-life balance often felt like a pie-in-the-sky goal for workers: nice to idly dream about but never quite attainable. Now, it’s more in reach: Among hybrid workers who are not self-employed, 71% say working for home at least partially helps them balance their work and personal lives, according to the Pew Research survey.

They don’t feel micromanaged, either, despite being out of the office and outside the eyeline of their bosses. The same Pew survey found that employees who work from home at least some of the time (71%) say their manager or supervisor trusts them a “great deal” to get their work done when they’re out of the office.

Working remotely can halve an office worker’s carbon footprint.

Working from home isn’t just good for your morale, it’s also pretty good for the planet. According to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year, people who work remotely all the time produce less than half the greenhouse gas emissions of on-site employees.

Hybrid work arrangements help some, too. Working remotely two or four days a week reduced an individual’s emissions by up to 29% compared with office workers.

In 2015, Xerox reported that its teleworkers drove 92 million fewer miles, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 41,000 metric tons.

Working remotely two or four days a week reduced an individual’s emissions by up to 29% compared with office workers.

Remote workers tend to eat more healthy ― up to a point.

Research on remote work can be a little contradictory ― is it good for your mental health or does it lead to depression? ― so in December 2023, British researchers set out to interpret over 1,930 academic papers on teleworking and hybrid work arrangements.

What they found was that people working from home tend to feel lower rates of stress, eat healthier meals and have lower blood pressure.

The study, funded in part by the British National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, pointed out some negatives, too. One of the studies reviewed found that 46.9% of employees working from home had put on weight. Another study put that number around 41%. Remote workers also tended to drink and smoke more.

A downside for workers: Remote employees work longer hours.

Though working from home is often equated with laziness and low productivity, the aforementioned British study found that remote workers tend to work longer hours and that their work is more likely to bleed into evenings and weekends. Regrettably, they’re also less likely to take sick time.

Another study ― this one tracking more than 60,000 Microsoft employees over the first half of 2020 ― found that remote work led to a 10% boost in weekly hours.

One drawback was less collaboration. The Microsoft study, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, found that cross-group collaboration dropped by about 25% of the pre-pandemic level.

Less commuting time means more time for work.

Remote employees are working more because they’re spending less time stuck in traffic. One 2023 University of Chicago study looked at data from 27 countries and found that remote workers saved 72 minutes in daily commuting time. On average, employees spent about half an hour of that extra time engaged in daily work, which comes out to more than two hours a week.

Since the pandemic, some social scientists have highlighted the downside to eliminating the daily commute: In one 2022 study published in the Organizational Psychology Review, researchers argued that commutes are a source of healthy “liminal space” — a time free of constraints from work and home that gives people a chance to recover from the workday and mentally prepare for reentering the home.

“Without the ability to mentally shift gears, people experience role blurring, which can lead to stress,” the study’s co-authors wrote in The Conversation . “Without mentally disengaging from work, people can experience burnout.”

Remote or hybrid work options may help with employee retention.

Worried about losing your employees to more enticing offers? Give them the chance to work from home. In 2019, video conferencing company Owl Labs surveyed 1,200 U.S. workers between the ages of 22 and 65 and found that remote workers were 13% more likely to stay in their current job for the next five years than on-site workers .

When asked if the opportunity to work remotely would make them happier, 83% of the survey respondents agreed, while 80% agreed that working remotely would make them feel like their employer cares.

People of color say they’re able to manage stress better working from home.

More Black professionals want flexible work policies than their white, Asian and Latino colleagues, according to a 2021 study conducted by The Future Forum, a research consortium organized by Slack.

Black workers reported a 50% increase in their sense of workplace belonging and a 64% increase in their ability to manage stress when they began working from home.

In the wake of the pandemic and office closures, many Black Americans spoke of how draining microaggressions in their office environments can be.

“Most of my interactions with my co-workers are very focused on the work that we’re doing, and for me, I appreciate that,” Christina, a Black software engineer, told HuffPost in 2021 after switching to remote work. “Sometimes hearing your co-worker’s opinions on current events are not really the most inclusive opinion. It’s nice that I don’t have to delve into that with them.“

Black workers reported a 50% increase in their sense of workplace belonging and a 64% increase in their ability to manage stress when they began working from home.

Mothers and caregivers report higher rates of well-being with hybrid work.

A March 2023 study out of the University of Melbourne found that women ― especially mothers and caregivers ― reported improved well-being when they’re given the option to work from home. The researchers posited that such flexibility helps women balance paid employment with unpaid caregiving and household duties, which women disproportionately bear the brunt of .

Remote work has been a benefit for people with disabilities, too.

Workers with disabilities appreciate the option to work from home because it reduces transportation and accessibility challenges they face going into the office every day. It also allows them to better manage chronic health conditions.

“Before COVID-19, work from home was generally not popular, and disabled people had to try hard to get these accommodations,” Meenakshi Das, a software engineer focused on accessibility, told HuffPost in 2021 . “It took a pandemic for people to realize how accommodations are low-cost and totally doable, and I hope it stays that way.”

There’s benefits for employers, too. Almost two-thirds of disabled employees believe they were more productive when working from home than at an office or external workplace, according to a 2023 study out of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Workers with disabilities appreciate working from home options because it reduces transportation and accessibility challenges they face going into the office.

Employees with flexible schedules tend to have better mental health.

Employees at workplaces that prioritize flexibility and higher job security are less likely to experience serious psychological distress or anxiety, according to a March 2024 study published in JAMA Network Open. The study, which polled more than 18,000 U.S. workers, defined “job flexibility” as the ability to adjust their own work schedule to meet personal demands.

Workers with flexible schedules were 13% less likely to experience daily anxiety, 11% less likely to experience weekly anxiety and 9% less likely to experience anxiety several times a year. The researchers also found that increased flexibility and job security led to reduced absenteeism ― a win for everyone involved.

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Economic Research - Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Work from Home and Interstate Migration

Working Paper 2024-012A by Alexander Bick, Adam Blandin, Karel Mertens, and Hannah Rubinton

Interstate migration by working-age adults in the US declined substantially during the Great Recession and remained subdued through 2019. We document that interstate migration rose sharply following the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak, nearly recovering to pre-Great recession levels, and provide evidence that this reversal was primarily driven by the rise in work from home (WFH). Before the pandemic, interstate migration by WFH workers was consistently 50% higher than for commuters. Since the Covid-19 outbreak, this migration gap persisted while the WFH share tripled. Using quasi-panel data and plausibly exogenous changes in employer WFH policies, we address concerns about omitted variables or reverse causality and conclude that access to WFH induces greater interstate migration. An aggregate accounting exercise suggests that over half of the rise in interstate migration since 2019 can be accounted for by the rise in the WFH share. Moreover, both actual WFH and pre-pandemic WFH potential, based on occupation shares, can account for a sizable share of cross-state variation in migration.

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Effective work from home and challenges & Advantages
Work From Home Advantages and Disadvantages

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Working From Home Essay: Are there more benefits or drawbacks?
In the present age it is common for people to work from home because of advances in technology. On balance, I would argue that this has more negative impacts than positive. One advantage of working from home is the freedom it provides. Home workers can organise their work around their home life as they can stop or start work as they please, and ...
Advantages and Disadvantages of Work from Home Essay: 11 Pros and Cons
Explore the pros and cons of working from home in this thought-provoking advantages and disadvantages of work from home essay. Discover the advantages of flexibility and increased productivity, alongside the challenges of isolation and blurred work-life boundaries. Gain valuable insights into the work-from-home phenomenon and make informed decisions about your own professional journey.
Why Working from Home Is Better
Oskarsson, Emma, et al. "Work-Life Balance among Newly Employed Officers - A Qualitative Study." Health Psychology Report, vol. 9, no. 1, 2021, pp. 39-48.. Ozkan, Necmettin, Oya Erdil, and Mehmet Şahin Gök.Agile Teams Working from Home During the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Literature Review on New Advantages and Challenges
Working from home (Corrected Essay)
In my opinion, the benefits of working from home can surely surpass offset the drawbacks due to the following reasons: various reasons. The first sentence is not accurate. It implies that people did not work from home in the past; however, throughout history, many people did work from home, for example, the classical novelists and artists.
Working from Home: Pros, Cons, and Strategies for Success
Advantages of Working from Home. 1. Improved Work-Life Balance: One of the most significant benefits of working from home is the potential for an improved work-life balance. Remote work allows employees to better integrate their professional responsibilities with personal life, leading to reduced commuting time and greater flexibility in managing their schedules.
The Realities of Remote Work
The Covid-19 pandemic sparked what economist Nicholas Bloom calls the " working-from-home economy .". While some workers may have had flexibility to work remotely before the pandemic, this ...
The bright future of working from home
Working from home is a privilege. Working from home for employees should be a perk. In our Ctrip experiment, home-based workers increased their productivity by 13 percent. So on average were being highly productive. But there is always the fear that one or two employees may abuse the system.
Work From Home: Persuasive Essay Sample
According to the Work Without Walls survey, among the benefits connected to working from home are the following: a less stressful environment (38%), a quieter atmosphere (43%), an elimination of a long commute (44%), less distractions (44%), increased productivity (45%), saving money on gas (55%), and a great work/home balance (60%).
The benefits of working from home during the pandemic
A new survey highlights what Americans have enjoyed the most when working from home. 68% benefitted from no longer having to commute, 63% enjoyed more flexible hours, while not having to dress in smart clothes came third. Many workers will now be reluctant to give up these perks as workplaces begin to reopen. As vaccination rates climb and case ...
Are We Really More Productive Working from Home?
Infographic: People want working from home to stick after the pandemic subsides With widespread lockdowns abruptly forcing businesses to halt nonessential, in-person activity, the COVID-19 pandemic drove a mass social experiment in working from home, according to Jose Maria Barrero of the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, Stanford's Nicholas Bloom, and Chicago Booth's Steven J. Davis.
Pros and Cons of Working From Home
Cons of Working From Home. Con: No physical separation between work and leisure time. Con: Easy to misread cues via electronic communications. Con: You have to make the effort to get a change of ...
Working from Home and Changes in Work Characteristics during COVID-19
Working from home also seems to increase productivity and work hours, which may be due to less time commuting, less time on social activities, or other benefits of controlling one's work environment (Choudhury, Foroughi, and Larson 2021). There are some downsides to working from home, including reduced connectedness to coworkers.
IELTS Writing Task 2: Working from home (Corrected essay)
In conclusion, working from home should be encouraged because the advantages overcome the disadvantages. The conclusion is coherent with the introduction and the two body paragraphs. Though, it is a little bit too short. (Words: 261) Overall: 6.0. Task Response: 6.
Essay on Work From Home
The concept of Work From Home (WFH) has been a significant paradigm shift in the modern corporate world. It is a flexible working arrangement that allows employees to perform their tasks from their homes, leveraging technology and digital platforms. This essay delves into the intricacies of WFH, its advantages, drawbacks, and the future ...
10 Huge Benefits of Working From Home
5. Money Savings. People who work from home half time can save around $4,000 per year. Gas, car maintenance, transportation, parking fees, a professional wardrobe, lunches bought out, and more can all be reduced or eliminated from your spending entirely. These savings add up and put more money back into your pocket.
9 Work-From-Home Benefits (and 5 Disadvantages)
9 benefits of working from home. If these advantages spark excitement or "I could get used to that" thoughts, WFH may be a good fit for you. But keep your circumstances in mind—remote work isn't ideal for everyone. 1. You get greater flexibility in your schedule and your day-to-day life is easier to manage.
7 key findings about working from home
Below are seven takeaways from Bloom's discussion: The employees. About 58% of people in the U.S. can't work from home at all, and they are typically frontline workers with lower pay. Those ...
17 Benefits for Employees Working From Home (Plus Tips)
17 benefits of working from home. There are many advantages for employees who can work remotely, including: 1. Less time spent commuting. For many people, a daily commute takes an hour or more out of their day. When you work from home, it removes the need to struggle through crowds and traffic to get to the office, giving you more time in the ...
Researchers working from home: Benefits and challenges
The flexibility allowed by the mobilization of technology disintegrated the traditional work-life boundary for most professionals. Whether working from home is the key or impediment to academics' efficiency and work-life balance became a daunting question for both scientists and their employers. The recent pandemic brought into focus the merits and challenges of working from home on a level ...
The Pros and Cons of Working From Home
Here's some of the most common pros and cons of working from home: Pro: More independence. Con: Increased isolation. Pro: No commute. Con: Increased home office costs. Pro: Increased productivity. Con: Risk of overworking. Pro: Increased flexibility. Con: Less face time.
Working From Home: The Pros and Cons
The pros of working from home are no commute, more time available to sleep and rest, money saved by not commuting or buying lunch when at the office, greater flexibility, more independence, and no ...
10 Undeniable Benefits Of Working From Home, According To Science
Workers with flexible schedules were 13% less likely to experience daily anxiety, 11% less likely to experience weekly anxiety and 9% less likely to experience anxiety several times a year. The researchers also found that increased flexibility and job security led to reduced absenteeism ― a win for everyone involved.
Working from home: Findings and prospects for further research
The phenomenon of working from home (WFH) is linked to a variety of megatrends that companies have confronted over many years. These include demographic change, leading to shortages of skilled workers in many regions and professions; the individualisation of needs and lifestyles as a result of changing values; and most particularly, the digitalisation of the world of work (Schmoll and Süß ...
Work from Home and Interstate Migration- Working Papers
Working Paper 2024-012A by Alexander Bick, Adam Blandin, Karel Mertens, and Hannah Rubinton. Interstate migration by working-age adults in the US declined substantially during the Great Recession and remained subdued through 2019. We document that interstate migration rose sharply following the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak, nearly recovering to pre ...
France plans to restrict unemployment benefits
France's Prime Minister Gabriel Attal waits to greet China's President Xi Jinping and his wife, as they arrive for a two-day state visit, at Orly airport, south of Paris, France on May 5, 2024.
I.C.C. Prosecutor Requests Warrants for Israeli and Hamas Leaders
The move sets up a possible showdown between the international court and Israel with its biggest ally, the United States. This week, Karim Khan, the top prosecutor of the International Criminal ...

Working From Home Essay

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11 Pros and Cons of Work from Home: Exploring the Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages of Working from Home Essay

Increased Productivity

Improved Work-Life Balance

Cost and Environmental Benefits

The Disadvantages of Working from Home: Balancing Flexibility with Challenges

Isolation and Lack of Social Interaction

Blurred Boundaries Between Work and Personal Life

Distractions and Lack of Focus

Limited Access to Resources and Technology

Reduced Career Development Opportunities

Strained Communication and Collaboration

Impact on Mental Health and Well-being

Advantages and Disadvantages of Work from Home Essay: FAQ

What are disadvantages of working from home?

Conclusion: Advantages and Disadvantages of Work from Home Essay

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Working from Home: Pros, Cons, and Strategies for Success

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