Recently, Automattic, the company behind the extremely popular blogging website WordPress, made the unusual decision of shutting down its San Francisco office. Its employees will directly work full-time from their homes, coffee shops, or wherever else they choose.
The decision was taken once the management figured that fewer employees were beginning to show up at the office since they always had the option of working from home. Life coach Khyati Birla says this isn’t a brand-new concept. “Internationally, this is standard practice. Several years ago, Yahoo used to give their employees the benefit of working from the comfort of their homes,” she recalls. She also mentions another online company that has its presence in 27 countries, but all their employees don’t essentially work in a workplace; they work from home.
Undoubtedly, the benefits of working from home are aplenty. From being an environment-friendly option for allowing the employee to spend more time with their family, working from home has its advantages. “Another benefit of working from home is that it completely rules out long commuting hours. This saves not only the employee time but also energy — that can be focused on work,” she explains. Chetna Mehrotra, a life coach who has been working from home for several years, points out the biggest advantage of having such a flexible work schedule, the elusive work-home balance. “Being a theatre artist, a lot of my practices are conducted at home. And I feel that the biggest advantage of this arrangement is that it allows me to maintain a work-life balance. You are connected to more aspects of your life, and there is no constant stress to work all the time,” she explains.
While internationally this isn’t an up and coming concept, both Chetna and Khyati believe that it will take a long while till it makes its way
to India. And even so, it won’t turn into a healthy work culture because working from home isn’t a clear option for all fields. “India is largely into the service and the IT industry. This doesn’t exactly allow a work from home arrangement. Whereas a creative field allows employees to work full time from home,” Khyati tells us. For companies to adopt a work from home strategy, Chetna says that the conditioning needs to change. “We often feel that when people are working from home, they are not giving their hundred percent and are easily distracted with lower productivity. But this isn’t true,” she says. Khyati points out that once companies realise that working from home could work in their favour, they will start implementing it. “Not only is the employee at the benefit but so are the companies. The company saves on infrastructure maintenance and electricity bills, for starters. However, I don’t see the brick and mortar business shutting down anytime soon,” she concludes.
