… on working from home



Working from home is a way more complicated problem than it seems. Here are some reasons why you are not allowed to work from home.

 

Most people work just to get in a paycheck and not because they like their work or care to do a better job. For them, if your company sold last month just enough to pay for everything, it’s enough. No need to improve, no need to change. For them, work is just a necessarily evil, not a way to accomplish something. Their “work” is being in the office for 8 hours and the actual work they do is just an afterthought. These are the people that want to be promoted because of the perks of the higher position and not because they feel they can do a better job. These are the people that expect automatic promotion or rises after a set amount of time. You know these people exist, but everywhere you look, on the Internet, on TV, you see only the guys that did exactly the opposite of them and you might be tempted to believe the “regular” guys are a minority. This is not true because there is nothing one can write about them, thus there is nothing you can read about them either. Keep this in mind, while your primary goal at the company you work for is to improve your work, the others just want their paycheck and go home with it.

 

While there are some people that can properly work from home, most can’t. And it’s not because you can’t communicate face to face with your coworkers, but most of us can’t focus properly when at home. You need a great deal of self discipline to work from home. There are plenty of distractions, from TV to kids, pets and daily home routine (do the dishes, cook, get out the garbage, do the laundry etc). Also, some of us are pretty much lost if there is no senior to tell them what to do. Also, most people won’t find something rewarding and fun in the work they do, but in the things they do while “at work”: speak with coworkers during lunch breaks, the usual chit-chat from the office, the stuff they are used to see as fun from the school days. And you can’t do all that if you are at home.

 

There are two reasons why you are not allowed to work from home.

 

 

The first reason is the impact of you working from home will have on the “regular” workers. They will fail, because of the numerous distractions and when being denied to do it again, they will conclude that “working from home” is just a perk, not a way to work. As their only work measurement unit is the amount of time you spend in the office, the manager will end up with a bunch of disgruntled workers and nobody wants that. So, instead of making you as productive as you can get, the manager will try to keep the full team as productive as it can get, even if this means he is wasting you. 

 

The second reason is the simple fact that today’s managers are yesterday regular workers. They simply can’t imagine there are smart ways to improve productivity and they genuinely believe that the only way to get more work done is to stay more in the office. These guys are the ones that will deny you having a second display, or a better chair, or a better desk. These are the guys that will push 20 people in a small space reasoning that you need space only for a keyboard and a display and the office noise is just something you get to deal with. These are the guys that will try to apply to your problems, solutions from a totally different and irrelevant industry.