What's Better For Your Business? Working From Home Or Office?

Flexible working and remote employees and teams are becoming an ever more prevalent conversation in the IT Solutions & Services Provider sector.

We speak to clients every day on the motivations and needs of Cloud & IT Infrastructure professionals, including whether remote working is possible for their live roles.

But which is better for your business? Working from home or in the office?

Will Martin give us his insights into what may be right for you:

“Working from home has always been a topic a lot of businesses have had reservations around.

Over 2020 into 2021, working from home seems to have been shown to be a success.

More and more employees are proving to be as productive, if not more productive, than usual.

Many people have their own theories as to why this is the case.

One theme may be that workers can start earlier in the day.

With no commute while working from home it’s possible for workers to feel more energised and refreshed at the starting of the day.

Secondly, it’s the case for all of us from time-to-time that at 5:30pm in the office you may have one eye on the clock waiting to leave for your commute home. This means workers are almost always less productive towards the end of the day as tiredness sets in.

At home however, 5:30pm isn’t as much of a bother as there’s no commute to worry about. This means workers have been more consistently productive for longer during the day while working from home.

Thirdly, improvements in video conferencing technologies have been fantastic.

Video calls have enabled people to stay in touch far more easily, and employees have embraced and adapted well to the shift thanks to this technology.

Fourthly, employees have been left to their own devices far more often while working from home.

This means they have been able to work under their own drive, feeling less like they are under constant scrutiny from their managers and team leads.

As a result, employees have grown both professionally and personally as they are trusted to structure their own day and motivate themselves to succeed.

Fifthly, there are generally less distractions at home.

Of course for families this is slightly different thanks to the implementation of home-schooling during lockdown, but working from home has allowed employees to focus better on their work.

Lastly, from a business perspective the biggest benefit has been the cost savings.

Office maintenance costs have fallen, with some businesses even going fully remote or moved into smaller premises as they adopt a 50/50 work from anywhere policy.

Of course, there also negatives to working from home instead of the office. These include more work needed to improve and implement company culture and values, a lack of face-to-face interaction, difficulty for younger members of staff to learn the key skills to progress into more senior positions and also a disjointedness across the organisation.

In order to know if working from home or from the office is right for your business, you need to weigh up the pros and cons whilst thinking about what you need to do in order to exceed the expectations of your customers.

By doing that, you will be able to see where you can implement some of these ideas.”