Working from home has gone from being rare to commonplace during the pandemic. There are positive and negative aspects to this new way of working, and in today’s blog, we will focus on the positive. Working from home is not a new idea, but until the pandemic came along and forced many people to stay home and work, it was never really an idea that employers felt comfortable with. No employer could afford to take the risk of trying to work from home on a large scale and seeing the experiment fail. So the idea remained an idea that employers could not afford to try, and we continued to travel to work in offices, and change remained unlikely.
We haven’t had a choice of course, with the pandemic, and many of us have been working from home as never before. So what has been the effect of wfh?
Now we are faced with some choice perhaps, in the future. Do we want to return to our normal places of work – or do we want to stay wfh? What is lost and what is gained if wfh becomes the norm, the way of working for most of the time?
So today in this blog, I’m going to talk about some of the positives. I know that there are negatives too – there are ways in which wfh doesn’t benefit people or businesses. So I may do a second blog looking at the downside of working from home. But for today, let’s look at the advantages, the upsides of wfh – and why it’s probably here to stay.
It’s worth saying, of course, that some types of work just don’t move to online. It’s estimated that around 50% of job roles can be done from home – so 50% can’t be. And as usual, there’s some inequality in this. One statistic shows that the higher your level of education and the higher your earnings, the greater the likelihood that you can do your job from home. So it’s worth noting that the more privileged in our societies are the ones more able to do wfh. If you work in the service industries – or in manufacturing – that’s where you make goods or make products, wfh is not an option, not a possibility.
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