Those of you who follow my posts with relative frequency will surely be aware that I am not a really big fan of remote working. I believe it reduces employee productivity so much, that it may not worth the savings that a company may make by not having to cater for its people.
The main reason for this is related to the fact that most homes aren’t really built, or organized in a way that accommodates working.
I believe that the recent CoViD-19 outbreak that has forced millions of people to work from home, has strengthened my point. Having a quick look at the pictures posted by people on social media, I see exactly what I was expecting: People working on cramped, makeshift desks, under suboptimal lighting conditions, with insufficient equipment and (owing to the special days that we are all living in) kids roaming around somewhere along the edges of the pictures.
With the exception of the latter issue which arises just because schools are closed at the moment, everything else mentioned above, are issues that one would encounter every time they would decide to work from home.
Even if we put aside the lack of proper equipment and assume that the employer would be willing to cover its cost, there’s still the issue of space.
The fact of the matter is that modern cities aren’t particularly friendly to middle class people. The advent of real estate investing means that landlords in major cities are increasingly people who buy properties with the intention to use as investments, and not as homes. This naturally drives prices / m2 up, leading to middle class people renting smaller and smaller properties. I think it goes without saying that having a dedicated room to be used as a proper office, is out of the question for these people.
I have a dedicated office room in my house and as a result, the above don’t apply to me. On the contrary, my productivity increases when I am working from home. But I live in Cyprus, where our homes have the largest surface / inhabitant in the EU.
So next you think about sending your people to work from home in order to conserve money, just think that their homes, may not be as accommodating to working as yours is.
