Work from home: Should you let your employee’s work remotely?
They want to work from home, why not let them.
Working from home is an option that has becoming more
popular with employers as the information age has come into play. Allowing your employee’s the ability to work
from home is a trending method of reducing costs and increasing employee
reward. The decision to let your employees work from home however needs to be
balanced with organizational demands. There are many factors that go into play
when making this decision including: facilities savings, professional
isolation, employee turnover, job performance, employee satisfaction, and organizational
flexibility. After analyzing these factors, a decision will need to be made and
company policy formulated. Many possible decisions could come from this
analysis including allowing only partial work from home or having the employees
work from home full time. A review of new research into the effects of remote
work and its impact on job performance, job satisfaction, and employee
turnover.
Employee Turnover/Job Satisfaction
Allowing employees’ to work from home gives them the ability
to better balance work/home life demands. According to the article Why Some
Firms Adopt Telecommuniting While Others Do Not: A contingency Perspective by
Mayo, Pastor, Gomez-Mejia and Cruz “Telecommuting offers much greater employee
autonomy than other types of family-friendly plans such as flexible work hours,
parental leave, and on-site child care facilities” (Mayo, Pastor,
Gomez-Mejia, & Cruz, 2009) . These benefits
including the ability to work from home grant employees much more control over
their daily lives and give them the ability to take care of the needed of their
family while still being productive in the work environment. Having these
options available greatly increase employee satisfaction and offer a
significant benefit over traditional benefits offered by employers. (American Psychological Association, 2007) These benefits must
be weighed against the potential negatives that these benefits induce.
Professional Isolation/Job Performance
Working from home has a significant impact on an employee in
particular employees are more likely to feel isolated from their coworkers and
their supervisor and as a result feel that they are working inside a bubble and
their good work will go unnoticed. Golden, Veiga, and Dino have suggested that
there are ways to mitigate but not completely reduce these effects. In
particular they have concluded that greater the “access to communication-enhancing
technology,” the more significant reduction in these negative feelings the
employees have (Golden, Veiga, & Dino, 2008) . In their research
they have concluded that job performance for individuals that spend limited
time teleworking compared to full time work from home that job performance
increases but will significantly drop off if they work from home full time.
Their research also has a surprise indicating that “the impact of professional
isolation on turnover intentions, we found that teleworkers who experienced
greater professional isolation expressed less of a desire to leave the
organization, which was contrary to expectations” (Golden,
Veiga, & Dino, 2008) .
After reviewing the information available a decision should
be made on whether or not to let your employees work remotely. Many factors
come to play in this decision and they will be specific to the corporation.
However we can conclude that allowing employees the ability to work remotely up
to two times a week will not harm their productivity and give them some much
needed flexibility and improve job satisfaction. Whichever way you choose to
guide your corporation will now be an informed decision on the effect and
result of remote workers.
-Andy
References
American Psychological Association. (2007, November
20). Telecommuting Has Mostly Positive Consequences For Employees And
Employers. Retrieved from ScienceDaily:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071119182930.htm
Golden, T. D., Veiga, J. F., & Dino, R. N.
(2008). The Impact of Professional Isolation on Teleworker Job Performance
and Turnover Intentions: Does Time Spent Teleworking, Interacting
Face-to-Face, or Having Access to Communication-Enhancing Technology Matter? Journal
of Applied Psychology, 1412-1421.
Mayo, M., Pastor, J.-C., Gomez-Mejia, L., &
Cruz, C. (2009). WHY SOME FIRMS ADOPT. Human Resource Management,
918-939.
5 comments:
Working from home is a growing trend. It is great as long as employees are able to get work done at home. I for one would be able to accomplish my work at home but, for some people there would be to many distractions. I think your suggestion of working a couple days a week from home would be a great solution to balance home and work.
You make some very valid points. I think that the cost savings could be very large for many companies that have technical people that do all their work from a computer and don't need direct live supervision. We are seeing more and more people doing this, and many giant tech companies have large buildings with very little office space being occupied.
I also wanted to make a quick not about the layout of your blog. I like how you had separate mini titles above your paragraphs. It reminded me of reading a good magazine article.
Jesse
I love teleworking. It is quite funny, I live about 8 minutes from the office and I still telework at least once a week. I always thought I would be unable to get things done if I worked from home, it is quite the opposite. When I work from home, there are no distractions. I can close the door to my man cave and just focus on my job. It never feels like I am work, teleworking can take the stress out of one's work life.
This was a very interesting read, I enjoy remote work, and have done it in the past. The one thing you do loose is human interaction when you are working remotely full time, I would find myself at Safeway walking around so I could plug back into society and people. I do agree it does make a better more faithful worker for the company, it tells the worker the company trusts them. I have no idea why more companies do not encourage teleworking, it also cuts down on their costs.
I'm 100% for employees working at home. From my personal experience working at home best. I run my entire company virtually. All of my staff are virtual contractors that I find on sites like Elance or Odesk. I agree when you mentioned employees working at home have control over their daily lives. Employee satisfaction leads to employee actually liking their job and getting more work done. Not the other around.
Despite the statistic of employees feeling isolated, I think it all depends on what field and the profession. Teleworkers such as call agents might feel isolated because they are use to a call center type vibe where there are background noises. Versus a composer who actually needs silence and isolation in order to work.
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