3 great WFH benefits, and how to maximise them

Many professionals will say that the best thing about the pandemic is that it has allowed us to discover that we can actually achieve great many things right from home. For instance, does it surprise you that the daily news you are reading is put together by journalists who have been working from home almost entirely since early last year?

You can say that journalists are old hands at this because there are colleagues who have been working from their homes all over the world, either as foreign correspondents or copy editors, long before work from home was even a thing.

The reason we can do this: There is a daily tangible target and everyone has to do his part to deliver or there will be hell to pay if stories cannot be out in print and online. So our bosses seldom ask us where we are because the result is the only thing that matters.

Indeed, some of the best journalists have quirky work habits – they will inform their editors they are checking a lead and then become incommunicado for a couple of days. When they resurface, they will deliver a story that will usually wow the readers.

The lesson here is that bosses should learn to treat employees like adults and not kids who need watching over. Working from home can work brilliantly if everyone is given tangible results that they have to deliver, such as sales or project-related targets. Instead of berating and watching over them like a hawk, you can use the opportunity to spot the top performers, those who need more guidance or training to do better, and those who are just plain lazy and ineffective.

Let’s admit it – working from home has reduced much of the toxicity of office politics as everyone is working on their own most of the time. And if the output from individual employees can be measured, you would do well to use this opportunity to identify and groom the star employees who can make your outfit shine.

You can say that it is no longer fashionable for top executives to be given spacious rooms that used to take up a lot of premium office space. Many leaders of global financial institutions have turned their large rooms into open-plan offices or meeting rooms. This can translate into millions of dollars in rental and utility savings annually if the companies cut office space usage.

Take Standard Chartered Bank. It aims to turn all 881 offices used by senior staff around the world into meeting rooms by the end of this year. “The events of the last year have brought into sharp focus the fact that the concept of dedicated offices is incompatible with the emergent need for flexibility, collaboration and space-efficiency,” said chief financial officer Andy Halford. “The concept of the dedicated office is fast being consigned to history.”

And after over a year of holding virtual meetings with people from different countries, many bosses have realised can save a lot of time and money by reducing overseas business travels. Unless it is absolutely critical to meet face to face, many executives now prefer virtual meetings because they save them from the costly and time-consuming process of flying around the world.

Some employees complain that working from home means they toil for longer hours because not only have the routine office meetings not changed, but they have also become longer as there is less urgency to end them. As a result, their normal work has to be done past office hours.

So while companies are reviewing the use of office space in the new normal, bosses should also review their overall work processes to achieve two important results from their employees – better output and work-life balance.

For instance, never hold routine team meetings for the sake of having an audience. You should know that meetings are not productive unless you have a clear objective and outcome for doing so. If you want to discuss and seek input for different projects, do so in several shorter meetings with relevant members instead of involving the whole team.

As for employees, working from home means you have been elevated to an independent operator and this means you have more control over how you spend your time.

So discuss targets and outputs with your supervisor. Once these are clear, you should be free to decide how to deliver them. Your work may no longer keep to the usual nine to five routine but hours that allow you to be most productive.

That said, while working from home should have a role in the post-pandemic world, it should not replace office work totally. Otherwise, how else will young workers learn to become better if they are deprived of the benefits of social interaction with their more experienced seniors?

So what lessons can we gain from working from home? It shows that you need to be versatile and have good ability to interact with people, either in person or virtually, so that you can produce good work no matter where you are.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.

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