Is work from Home a healthy practice?

I quit my Corporate life around 4 years back, though I have not quit completely, I still do take up some HR Consulting projects, but work at my pace and time.
My last job was with the IT giant Accenture and I must say Accenture is one of the best companies to work for. Well being in HR the responsibility was always on Employee Engagement, Motivation, People development. If the Company had presence in Oman I would have still continued working with them, but sadly they did not have. Anyways whatever happens is for the best, else I would have still been running around the 9-6 job in the crazy corporate world.

In our Company we already had the work from home practice need based and I must say that it has been very very helpful for me personally in many instances. But still I would say that it is not a very healthy practice on a longer run.

Need based for a certain period of time, days is perfectly fine, but working from home regularly really disturbs a lot of home environment. Specially if you have children and old people at home, and if it is a small home, it really can get challenging.
First of all to work from home, one needs a private space which they can use for office purpose.

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It is difficult for Children and Old people to really understand the concept of work from home. Once you are home, their feeling is that you are on a holiday and hence you need to divide your time to them and work. And this I would observe with my colleagues also when they would be doing work from home for some or the other reason.

In the current Covid situation a lot of companies are now shifting to the work from home model and many of my friends, who I have been talking to are expressing how uncomfortable it is to do it for a extended period of time.

The disadvantages that I would see for a Work from Home are:

• Firstly your attention gets divided into many things along with your office work.
  In my experience of work from home, I would see that my mother in law would come multiple times to me, to check on something or the other. She would expect that during lunch hours I would be of help to her. Well while I would be working in office, most of the time I would end up with a quick desk lunch to save on time, but that would not be the case at home. An hour would easily pass off and this would really be a distraction for me.

• If you have a small place and there is no dedicated private space for you to work, you would always have a lot of disturbance around you. Specially if you have calls and meetings to attend it would really be very disturbing at times.

• People with small children, for them it is the toughest, because they do not understand at all what is work from home, If you are home, it means for them you are at their disposal and they would want your attention on them.

• If you are in a area of poor network then you would have big challenge attending phone calls and meetings and this could be very annoying for the opposite people, where your call keeps getting dropped off and you keep getting disconnected.

Personally I felt that work from home would also end up me working for extended hours. I would end up working till late evening against when in office, I would leave on time and then spend time on my personal things. And then due to extended working hours I would miss out on my exercise regime. I believe the convenience of work from home depends on person to person. Also it is much easier for men then women.

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I would personally do it only if I would have some important thing to catch up at home, else I would not prefer. Productivity of an employee varies a lot in these situations. Either one ends up working excess or one's attention gets completely divided and it impacts the performance.

At the same time there are many advantages also of work from home culture.
The biggest one is saving up on travelling time and putting that extra time in work.
I had a daily 2 hour travelling to and fro work, so whenever there was work from home, I would see that my body was much rested and relaxed. The travelling stress would not be there, I would save up on my energy and time.

Secondly, if there were important things to catch up at home, I could do it easily without using up my leave balance. If you have a ailing family member or a small child at home it becomes difficult to take leave from work to attend to their matters on and off, so in such times it is the most handy to have such facility at work place.

It is my personal belief again that Work from Home practice is a very good one for a short period of time and need based. It also depends on the individual's set up at their home. If there is not much of disturbance then this practice can really be a blessing. But if you have to do it at the cost of other family members space and time then it cannot be very good for family lives over a extended period of time.

I did enjoy work from home, because it used to be need based, so randomly it would give me a chance to be at home, be with family, even if I am working whole day I still have them around in my sight so that is a good feeling and the little things at home would also get done without much of a hassle.

Overall for a Work from Home culture and understanding is required from all the family members, plus one needs to be very disciplined to follow the practice. It is a very good practice if followed with utmost discipline and balance.

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