10 reasons to work from home and increase productivity

Working from home is a trend of recent years. Why did employers avoid the remote format in the past? And are remote employees really? show the best results?

According to studies by the Pew Research Center, the number of remote employees worldwide will be only 6% by 2020. Is it any wonder that already in 2022 this indicator has increased to 25%. According to the same data, in 2023 more than 60% of specialists will be different companies around the world work or want to work remotely.

In this article, we will look at the main reasons for working from home. Read on to improve your efficiency and how to work at home can improve productivity in general and personal life in particular.

1. Remote employees reinvest time

If you don’t work at home, then you have to go to the office. By the time I got there, I was already tired, and the working day hadn’t started yet. Are we familiar?

The road may take you a different amount of time and effort, but the bottom line is the same - you are wasting a precious worker’s resource day for meetings and travel to the office. The further efficiency of work is automatically reduced. Let’s add a simple y here traffic jams, which residents of big cities cannot avoid.

In 2021, according to the traffic rating of the Dutch portal TomTom, Kyiv was consistently among the TOP-3 world capitals for traffic loading. Residents of the capital city spend about 9.5 days on the road to and from work per year! American researchers also found that over the past 40 years, American citizens’ commute time has increased by an average of 20 minutes per week. Now count how much time you personally spend on your way to/from work?

Working from home helps employees increase their efficiency by taking the stress out of grueling commutes and saving money precious hours. Experts call it a useful reinvestment of time.

But what if you like to spend time on the road? Are you used to reading, watching the news or listening to music on your way to the office? And do fees for work help to switch from a regular mode to a working mode? Here, experts offer a useful life hack!

Bundle up and go for a 15-minute walk before starting your remote work day. So you will acquire a new useful habit, you will be able to improve your health, and at the same time easily switch to work mode upon returning to the home office.

2. Concentration of attention increases

After coming to the office, do you immediately start working? Most likely, the answer is negative. First you say hello to everyone, then make yourself a coffee, discuss last night and the latest news. Then a colleague will definitely come to your table with a question or clarification. Then, perhaps, the hum of the open space will constantly distract you from completing tasks. That is, you will have to switch all the time. How to increase your efficiency in an atmosphere of constantly distracting factors? Question difficult

Psychologist Gerald M. Weinberg, author of Software Quality Management: Systems Thinking, concluded that that switching between tasks takes up to 80% of work efficiency.

What does working from home look like? It’s simple - you don’t greet anyone, you don’t discuss anything, you don’t feel pressure and distracted only occasionally by messages from the work chat. As a result, concentration of attention to the performance of work tasks increases many times! You can simply turn off the same messages and view them at a convenient time after completing the required stage work.

3. Remote meetings become more effective

When you ask how to improve your efficiency, you will definitely remember long and far from always productive office meetings. Awkward silence, long introductory speeches, speeches by unprepared colleagues, postponement of meetings immediately come to mind for a better time due to management force majeure. All this in sum can be called a loss of a working day.

How do remote meetings work? All team members have time to fully prepare. Timlid can always advance collect data for analytics, conduct a survey and prepare a clear timing of the meeting. Discussion time is significantly reduced, after all, everyone speaks briefly and on the topic, if the meetings acquire a standardized format and take place simultaneously for everyone employees

For example, development teams often use the Scrum methodology, which involves daily 15-minute discussion meetings and control of assigned tasks. How to improve the productivity of these meetings? Each of the colleagues clearly knows what he has to submit at tomorrow’s meeting, and strive to complete the necessary tasks within the set deadline. Timlid can filter in advance collected data and show management a list of closed, current and future tasks for the team.

As a result, at remote meetings according to the schedule:

• employees do not waste precious time on introductions and unnecessary dialogues;
• fit into the established timing of the planned meeting;
• increase their productivity and efficiency of the team as a whole.

No more delays and awkward silences, pauses, delays and interruptions of the work process for meetings in a special room. Of course, online meetings cannot completely eliminate force majeure, but a well-planned schedule helps all participants it is better to organize working hours during the process.

4. The balance of work and personal life is restored

Life satisfaction is an important indicator for evaluating the quality of work of any employee on whom it directly depends productivity.

Working in an office often limits a specialist’s ability to successfully combine work and personal life. For example, an employee it can be inconvenient to take and pick up children from school or kindergarten, visit the dentist, make time for after-hours classes or spending time on hobbies. After all, office workers see and spend time with their families much less. All this leads to family conflicts, rapid burnout, dissatisfaction with life and reduced productivity.

Working from home helps to significantly improve the balance between work and personal time. The specialist himself can evaluate the necessary the number of hours to perform work tasks, control your schedule, work at a convenient time, performing at random home routine

Owls and larks can work late at night or early in the morning at their peak productivity. Different employees can decide for yourself when and how to work effectively to achieve a better result. At the same time, there is no constant control not only helps to devote more time to family and hobbies, but also contributes to the comprehensive development of all areas of life, increasing employee satisfaction and level of personal comfort and happiness.

5. Working from home makes introverts more productive

Experienced team leaders always take into account the peculiarities of their subordinates. Often in teams of developers and other professions there are many introverts in the IT field. These are calm and balanced people, for whom a hectic, noisy environment is elevated attention always cause stress. For such colleagues there is nothing better than working at home.

Just imagine how introverts feel in open office spaces. For example, constant attention, questioning, distraction from work with noisy conversations, inappropriate teasing of active colleagues, “obligation” to drink after work “if you are in the team”. Valuable professionals are often forced to change jobs or look for other ways of earning due to all the mentioned circumstances.

How to increase the productivity of introverts? Give them the opportunity to work remotely! Working from home is a great opportunity for specialists with an introverted character to become truly valuable employees and achieve maximum work efficiency. In a calm home environment, without excessive noise, attention and stress, such employees can increase productivity to the maximum

6. Working at home increases the level of health and comfort

What is the point of health and comfort? To everything! Let’s highlight a few obvious and not so factors of work from home that really increase comfort and improve the health of remote employees.

• Saving time and money on the way to the office encourages spending additional resources on morning runs and sports.

• Not being in the office every day reduces your chances of picking up other people’s germs — remote employees get sick much less often (and they do not create precedents when the entire department ends up in quarantine or sick leave due to one employee).

• Working at home allows you to always maintain the optimal temperature regime and ventilate the room (or turn on the air conditioner), whenever you want, without taking into account the comments of those who “blow and blow” all the time.

• The absence of an office dress code helps telecommuters significantly save on constant updating of the wardrobe, as well as comfort feel at work in comfortable favorite clothes and with no makeup.

• Meals become useful and varied — there is no longer a need to snack on the go with sandwiches with cold coffee or to choose from not very healthy dishes in the office canteen.

• If you like to work to music, finally, you can put it in the background with an acceptable volume, and not sit in headphones all day.

• Working from home, you can drink coffee with your favorite flavor as much as you want (regardless of the sweets of colleagues, without management control and without violation of etiquette).

• Finally, you can do a plank, stretch, or do 10 minutes of yoga right in front of your desk, with the only only your pet will be a surprised observer.

Taking care of mental health is also an important factor. The remote work format always allows you to take a break for an online session with a psychologist right at the workplace.

Of course, in the pursuit of how to improve the productivity of working from home, one should not forget that there is also a flip side of the coin. Sometimes you still have to put on a shirt, turn on the camera for important negotiations, and meet with colleagues and partners face to face. However, all this will pass with pleasure, because increased comfort and good health will allow you will get more satisfaction from life, and the absence of a constant office routine will turn rare meetings into a reason to get out of the house and show yourself.

Previously, we talked mainly about the benefits of working from home for professionals. Let’s discuss the benefit of remote cooperation for employers. We will devote the following points of the material to this.

7. Remote employees save the company money

Ask an experienced entrepreneur how much it costs to equip a workplace for an IT (and any other) professional industry. The short answer is a lot!

The remote format of work allows you to save significant money on renting premises, purchasing furniture and equipment, utilities payments, cleaning and maintenance of premises, security, as well as on coffee machines, coolers and fruit and cookies.

Even if a company provides all of its remote employees with tech, insurance, and home delivery, it is still not comparable to the costs of maintaining an office. How to increase the productivity of the company in modern realities? Just switch to a remote work format!

8. Search and hiring of employees is possible all over the world

No suitable professional in your small town? Search elsewhere, or even in another country! HR employees are always happy when the search for the right specialist is not limited by geography.

Remote work from home allows companies to have employees in different parts of the world. If you went through the entire office to a remote format, now your employees can change their place of residence or travel the world without having to long vacations or change of employer.

9. Remote work allows you to hire people for a short period of time

When hiring employees for the office, as a rule, long-term cooperation with career growth opportunities is considered. If you have staff turnover every 2-3 months, the company’s reputation will be permanently damaged.

But what if you need different specialists for short-term projects? Freelancers always come to the rescue here! Experienced professionals can simultaneously work on several projects in remote mode with an agreed payment amount (without payment of monthly salary, as in the case of full-time employees).

That is, working from home allows freelancers to expand earning opportunities, and companies to hire temporary employees for short-term projects without loss of reputation and on mutually beneficial terms. Increased work productivity is ensured to all motivated participants!

10. Now working from home is much easier than ever

Just look at how modern technologies have developed! Working from home today is comfortable, fun and elevated productivity. These days there is no need to figure out how to work effectively from home because of the advantages in a few years remote cooperation has already been appreciated by hundreds of thousands of employees and companies around the world.

We have technologies for work chats and online meetings such as Telegram, Zoom, Slack, Skype, Google Weet. We can organize home time management using effective programs such as Pomodoro. Team leaders and product owners of companies can easily distribute and control tasks using modern CRM systems. Seamless high-speed The Internet allows you to work at home from anywhere on the planet without any problems!

Agree, today remote work from home has become not just a necessity (as during the Covid pandemic), but absolutely an effective solution for comfortable earnings with care for the balance of work and personal life.

Trends and advantages of working from home 2023

We wouldn’t be us if we didn’t offer you more useful content in this article! We offer to consider a few more trends and advantages of working from home.

The main trend revealed by the research of the Robert Half company shows that remote work with us is now forever! The growing demand for remote employees during the Covid-19 period will not abate in 2023 and is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. The data showed that up to 87% of remote vacancies on the market have been established since 2019 and will continue to be relevant in 2023.

According to McKinsey, today 90% of Americans actually have the opportunity to work from home at least 1 day a week. Many companies use a hybrid work system — they work in the office several days a week, giving the rest of the time to work in remote mode.

According to Forbes, the millennial generation, which will make up the largest group of employees worldwide in 2022, ready for a partial or full transition to work from home.

In a Deloitte survey, top managers of various companies named improving well-being as one of the most important business goals employees, which involves a complete transition to a hybrid or remote work format. It is interesting that the search interest to of the phrase “employee well-being” has increased by 380% over the past 5 years.

According to the Test Gorilla portal, in 2023 the indicator of professional mobility, i.e. the ability to work from home, increased for many industries. The number of remote vacancies in the field of customer service, IT, analytics, internet marketing, accounting and auditing.

Another trend is the popularization of freelance exchanges. One of these UpWork projects literally shot during the years of the global quarantine. Here, specialists of the most popular professions can find project work all over the world. According to research from the UpWork platform, up to 65% of company managers plan to completely switch to a remote work format in the next 5 years.

Another study from Hiring Lab shows that the number of remote jobs will almost triple in 2023 compared to the level of 2020. This means that a trained specialist can easily find both a project and a permanent one work from home

Why isn’t everyone ready to work from home yet?

We have already evaluated many statistics and advantages of working from home. Why then many employers are not ready to let go of their own employees to a remote format? And why are the employees in no hurry to switch to remote control?

There are several reasons for this. First, the generations of “old hardening” are used to working in the office. During the worldwide Covid pandemic many of these employees felt isolated and dreamed of returning to “normal life” as soon as possible. That is, the concept the normal life of such people includes decades-developed habits of commuting to work, seeing the team, and communicating with others a cup of coffee with colleagues. They just don’t understand how to work effectively from home.

Often work in the office makes up to 90% of the social life of the generation of office clerks. They just don’t know what to do all the time, who quit while working at home. It also happens that employees from the 70s find it difficult to quickly master new technologies, get used to calls online and discussing work projects in correspondence, rather than face-to-face.

Another common reason is the reluctance of companies to lose complete control over their employees. Managers of the same “Old Hart” people are used to personally observing the process of office work and controlling every step of their employees. Here, we should also not miss the point that not every company can work online due to the specifics of the business or moments data security.

However, it is important to understand that the number of such companies and employees is decreasing. For example, according to the data of 2022, more 37% of company owners were ready to reduce or close their offices and completely switch to a remote work format.

How to increase productivity when working from home: expert life hacks

• Create rituals for starting work at home. For example, a morning walk or warm-up, coffee or special clothes will help you to switch from home rest mode to work from home mode.

• Give up multitasking. Create a list of tasks for the day, week and month. Start the next task only after closing the previous one. This consistent strategy will help you step by step to get the job done without overstressing and reduce the level of procrastination.

• Be sure to take small breaks after each stage of work at home. It can be a break for warm-up, yoga, a walk, coffee or food.

• Reward yourself for completing tasks on time and following the work schedule at home. Small bonuses in the form of sweets or something pleasant will help maintain the settings for observing the work schedule and discipline.

• Set aside time for study. Continuous professional growth is impossible without training. Rate our professional courses and don’t forget register in time!

• Breathe fresh air! Ventilate the room or go outside during your break. This will help to “refresh” thoughts, and will also improve your health.

• Separate and fence off the space for working at home from the common space. Ideal if you have your own office in the house, or at least a personal desk with equipment and a comfortable chair.

• Use modern tools for work and time management, as well as turn off unnecessary messages on gadgets, which can distract you from work.

Conclusions

Working from home is a modern way of earning for specialists in many fields! Every year, the number of remote vacancies increases, as the remote work format has proven to be effective for both employees and employers around the world.