re: Is working from home more beneficial?

As someone who has worked from home for 25 years I can tell you it has a significant impact on your work AND personal life.

Negatives

You take up personal space for work.

You can never, truly leave work.

You wake up and work is there.

You can get sick, but never take a sick day unless you're actually hospitalized.

You are constantly bombarded with annoyances and diversions.
Learning to ignore everything is not easily accomplished.

You will work at night.

You may work in the early AM.

Your privacy is invaded.

Conference calls are generally time wasting crap because of micro managing bullshite or people who are narcissistic and want everyone to listen their awesome report.

IT support isn't someone down the hall anymore. Good luck getting help.

Developing key personal interaction with people that can help your career or to get things done is not possible.

If your spouse doesn't work, or also works from home, you see them too much.

Young children at home at the same time makes you feel guilty that you are there and they don't understand why you're not having fun with them.

Things you would normally do, like work on the house, fish, play golf, etc.. falls to the side because your damn job is at home and you will find yourself being tasked with more and more to do, because you aren't visible to management and they can't physically see what your load is really like, so they give you more to do. *studies have shown this is a fact.

You will have higher utility bills.

Advantages:

No commute to work. Saves wear and tear on your car. Lowers your fuel cost.

No dry cleaning bill.

No need to get up early, shower and dress nice.

You can conference call in your undies.

No having to look at / deal with overweight, cranky old women during the day.

You can go to medical appointments and do other things because you can adjust your work hours.

So, there's good and bad to it.

I am commercial and have worked from home for years. My wife is back office management and has never worked from home consistently.

We are fortunate to have a very nice home office with doors to close it off. So she has a work space that is comfortable and productive. I can setup my laptop and work any where so we are good.

We both love it so far, seeing each other more, she is way more relaxed without commuting

she usually gets up at 4AM on normal days for her commute and not having to do that is a game changer

quote:

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But if you work in an office where you like your co-workers, you start to miss them. (Of course, conversely if you have bad co-workers, you don't miss them at all.)

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I don't think it has to be as cut and dry as work from home or not.

I think some companies will begin to move towards 1-2 days in the office for meetings early in the week, the rest of the week get your stuff done from home. Or a portion of the office comes in for a couple days, and the other works from home. If you want to come in to the office because you work better come in. If you like the freedom to take a walk around the block or water your garden after you finish a project, then work from home.

I do think the idea of a butt in the seat for 8hrs a day=working will be phased out after this.

My productivity hasn't suffered and our tools are more than sufficient (I spent my whole morning talking to people in Europe w/ no issues) but I'm going a little batty from the limited social interaction relative to what I'm accustomed to.

All are interesting responses

I was asking more from the societal benefit as opposed to personal benefit.