The colleagues, the coffee rounds, the staff room banter and the soundtrack of fingers tapping away on keyboards. But many modern workers are choosing to cast aside traditional ideas of the 9-5 routine, and work from home instead. In fact, one in five workers have made the push from office to home.
A top furniture retailer has conducted a survey in order to find out why people are making this choice, a choice that defies older ideas of how a person’s career should go. Flexible working is becoming more and more normal, so what are the top reasons people cited for working from home? It can’t just be the solitude.
The highest reason, of course, was flexibility. Modern life demands flexibility in almost all areas. From delivery companies to bin collections – nothing has a set routine anymore. In order to adapt to this lifestyle, working from home provides the flexibility needed. Another top reason was the lack of a commute. Since commuting eats up time, energy and money from the day’s work, erasing that from the routine is a huge bonus for many workers.
Many people have an image in their heads of working from home. This image is of a person sitting cross-legged in their pyjamas with a cup of coffee perched on their leg and a laptop in front of them. It is unsurprising that comfort was also a contender for the biggest reason to work at home. Office setups have been known to cause RSI, back pain and posture difficulties, so many welcome the chance to position themselves in their own way and work in comfort.
This has led to many believing that working from home increases their productivity. 21% of survey respondents cited increased productivity as a reason to work at home. The level of productivity is bound to be a concern to anyone looking at home working. While most of it is to do with self-discipline, environment also plays a part. Sitting cross-legged in your pyjamas may be the appealing part, but home workers are also finding that they must, to some degree, still treat their working space like an office and behave as though they are in one.
Working from home is an incredibly appealing idea to so many people. Skipping the commute and the daily stressors of office life can, and does, have a huge effect on workers’ productivity. While not the norm just yet, this surge in popularity for home working could change the dynamic of the country’s workforce for the better.
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