The Effect of Work from Home (WFH) Arrangement from Perspective of Both Organisation and Employees

Abstract

Work from Home or WFH, as it is commonly called, is an arrangement were workers cut down commuting to the office daily and work from their residence or place of choice using modern communication mediums like internet, mobile telephone, etc. Though in practice from at least 1970s when Jack Nilles coined the terms telecommuting and teleworking which meant the same thing as WFH, the work arrangement has in recent years caught the attention of many due to various reasons.

The WFH has particularly caught on Post Corona but even before that, it had started making its place in the mainstream. IT industries in particular offered it to their employees. With changes in work patterns where most of the modern office work is driven by computers, WFH has been increasingly turned as a viable option for both the organizations offering it and employees working under the arrangement. While WFH helps the organization to cut down costs for physically renting an office place and developing all the required office infrastructure like table, chairs and centralized air conditioning systems; it also is particularly helpful for employees who dont find a need to commute daily to any physical place just to work. The arrangement can be helpful for a working mother who needs to take care of her child, a person with some sort of temporary or permanent disability in moving, for environmental reasons where harmful fuel emissions are cut by cutting down the traveling or plainly for cost-saving intentions where an individual can save up on the cost of travel by working from home.

Though there are immediate benefits that appear on the surface level under a WFH arrangement, there are some drawbacks as well. From the organizations perspective, it becomes hard to maintain effective team management as people are working remotely and do not gel in collectively like the way they could if working physically from some office i.e. less facetime can mean less teamwork in certain cases. Since WFH relies on Employees' home devices for connecting, there can be connectivity issues or hiccups in that regard. Also, since employees are not in front of their bosss eyes, reporting authority might have a misconception that his/her juniors are simply slacking at their homes and not working at all. This feeling over time creates trust issues and render teams ineffective. Through this paper, we will try to find out the WFH arrangement from the perspective of both Organisations and employees. Also, we will look into what best practices are currently being taken up globally and what can be a possible future road ahead.