Would you work from home if you could? (Poll)
As part of research for my next book, I’m curious about general perceptions of working from home.
Assuming you could keep your same job and pay, would you work from home instead of working in an office?
Leave a comment about why you chose your answer.
i am able to work from home, as far as my employer is concerned. however, the reality of it (three kids at home, homeschool, etc) makes it difficult. i have a door i can close, and some private space, however there’s something about ‘working from home’ that makes it difficult to focus.
so… i did answer ‘yes’… however it’s a pretty nuanced answer.
It’s not that black and white anymore. So many shades of grey. What I love is the flexibility. I crave my team and co-workers and the structure of leaving the house, putting on clothes to face the world. But some days, feeling under the weather, the weather itself or the need to have peace and quiet to focus makes working at home the perfect antidote. I work from home 1-2 days a week and love the option.
I’ve worked from home before, and while there are benefits, I couldn’t handle it long term. I’m a wander at work, which is good because I find out a lot of important things just by talking to a wide variety of people. Yes, I also IM with co-workers, but there is a large population of people that still don’t communicate over IM and there are things that people will only say in person.
I frequently work from home because my co-workers are in another time zone. The only thing that is in the office are noisy people who have to be noisy to hear each other over the cheap fans in the demo box they’re working on. So while I would often prefer to work in the office to get my mind more focused on what I’m doing and such, the truth is that my office environment reduces my ability to deliver value rather than enhances it.
I very much believe in the value of face-time with co-workers, but in my particular office I spend most of my time with noise-isolating earbuds pumping quasi-appropriate music into my head. So I often just work from home instead.
I would happily work from home. A lot of the following comments work in the technical software/sysadmin context, and will not apply to all fields equally.
I like a quiet environment, and I like to work at night. Neither of these are conducive to working in groups, or in shared spaces.
Face to face discussions have value, but most people don’t need to make decisions in groups all the time. Most F2F discussions can be done once a month or even once a quarter, with high bandwidth global discussions.
Voice is easier for a lot of people to communicate in, but it wastes the time of the recipient, and leaves no documentary trail.
Text forces people to be accurate and precise about their communication, and it strips out the emotional bits of technical communication.
I can log chats, and refer back to my logs to look at discussions made. Again, group chats (IRC, Jabber MUC) help in keeping all participants in the loop, regardless of physical or temporal location.
Email, used correctly can make life easier in the same way. This does imply using mailing lists, rather than CC. If anyone needs a FYI email, mailing list archives work wonders.
I can read a lot faster than you can speak, and I can read your writing even faster if I don’t have to spend mental resources in dealing with accents.
Where face to face discussion is useful is when we are discussing high impact architectural changes. These are usually not discussed every day, usually once every six months or less.
What is important is communication between all members of the team(s) involved, and we can scale that better by using text than by using voice.
Excellent commentary. Thanks for the thoughtful comment.
Definitely! I don’t know why companies are considering this as an evil practice and yes I get the idea of “working from home – you do not work and respect the team and the company”, but this is just not the case…
The trend is changing. One of the reasons I’m writing the book is to report on how one important company has taken a radical approach on this and it’s working for them.
So, the radical approach taken by this company is for good, isn’t it? :)
Having spent a lot of time in internal tech support, in my experience it’s not all good.
Remote access technologies have improved quite a bit, but a lot of people are still prone to stuck with technical problems when using their home IT resources. So there’s some lost productivity, but also some extra costs for support and infrastructure.
Over all I’d say it is good to let people work from home, but it takes some expectation management to pull of properly.
Will agree with you as I work in the same industry. However, with the proper management procedures(what they expect, how are the tasks assigned…), with ensuring you have the infrastructure and technology needed and of course with being trusted by the same those guys from the management team, I clearly believe there should be no obstacles as to why not to work remotely.
It depends very much on the job, I guess. Many occupations are location independent these days. For example, as a web developer, like I am, you can easily work remotely from home. Maybe checking in once or twice per week is neccessary to attend some meeting and plan the next steps of a project, but basically it’s possible.
It’s also always a question of equipment, for example, if you need special, expensive software like an architect.
Well, I am working from home. And I have noted my experience of doing so here: http://deepaksurti.com/wfh.html.
However, whatever I have explained is in the context of me being a software programmer and the work-cultures of the companies I worked for.
I’ve worked at home FT for the last year and PT for the last 4.
I like the removal of stress from commuting, it’s almost 2 hours a day I get to use for something more meaningful. Family, cooking, exercise, side projects. I don’t have to stress about bus schedules or wearing the right clothes for the weather or traffic. I walk the dog, organize my thoughts, and work.
With a family at home it is hard. It requires you and your spouse having a good understanding of the situation. I think it’s difficult for spouses to conceptualize work at a computer 8+ hours a day when they don’t do something similar (my wife is a dental hygienist for example). I’ve looked into a coworking space but have failed to find one affordable where I live. So I go to Starbucks. As a developer I trade the efficiency of big screens for lack of interruptions.
Working at home it’s sometimes hard to get into the correct frame of mind and focus needed, because it’s your home as in you typically try to leave your work at work, or you know there is an immanent interruption, versus hiding somewhere at work or locking your office door with a sign.
That said, you are either motivated and driven or not. I’ve encountered plenty of people who go to work, do as little as they need to, and play on the web all day long. If you a driven you are going to get your work done no matter where you are.
I’d be curious to know what percentage of the 45% responding ‘Yes’ on the poll presently would give the same response if they had a complete understanding of the pros and cons of working from a home office. Don’t get me wrong – as a home-based worker, on the whole I prefer it, but one of the key downsides is the loss of face-to-face social contact in the office. Skype et al help with that, as do the occasional coffee meetups and professional dinner meetings, but nothing beats some of the friendships and mentorships that develop face-to-face on a daily basis. The development and growth of a project team in a home-office setting, particularly on a virtual team where -everyone- is in a home-office setting, is noticeably more difficult.
Mike: good point. Poll’s are pretty limited especially as I did this one, with no control over who answered and what their assumptions were. There is other research I’ve found and I’ll report on it in future posts.
I replied Yes but I’d like to qualify my response. I wouldn’t want to work from home everyday if I had an office close by and reasonably smart people to work with while there.
Interesting. So you’re saying ideal would be a close office, but you’d prefer remote to a long commute (and/or stupid coworkers? :)
My employer is very flexible and actually quite supportive of the idea of working from home. However, as a worker in a UI Design role, I feel that I can only do my work properly if I can quickly turn to my colleagues and ask them a question about a process or a piece of software or other things that would take me minutes or even hours to find out myself. Some will argue that this is what IM chats are for, but I often use a whiteboard when I speak to my colleagues, and I also find it difficult to properly read between the lines if I don’t speak face-to-face.
I also admit that I sometimes struggle with the trust component of working from home. In previous jobs, I have seen many times that ‘working from home’ meant that the output of that day was severely diminished. I know, this could incite a barrage of comments of people who don’t agree, but all I can say is that I’ve seen it happen, and found myself thinking that without mechanisms to fight abuse of this flexibility, there is an awful lot of risk involved.
Although I’d rather work from an office. I always get distracted by my family and when I am working from home it seems that work is endless because I can’t set specific working hours.
I would love to work from home as it provides flexibility for my family. I can help with the kids, collecting from school, making lunches etc. and then balance the work load throughout the day. It would be the ultimate work life balance solution for me as I could re-invest the close to two hours I spend a day in transit into more productive things. We would also own one less car and pollute less. The company could save more money due to reduced prime office space – wins all round. The only requirement would be a suitable space at home to work with really good telecons including the ability to hold virtual meetings with ease.
I voted “no” because I like keeping a strict division between my job and my home. I can leave the problems from one when I’m at the other. I get some good walks in during the spring, summer, and fall while going to work, and whenever I take the bus, I catch up on my reading, both of which I wouldn’t do as much if I worked from home. Yes, on the days when the weather is nasty, working from home sounds wonderful, but not enough to outweigh the cons of the situation.
I work from home full time now, a fairly recent change. I’ve been planning this for a long time, and been meaning to write a (long) essay about it, but the short version is that I felt a strong need to work in my neighborhood, rather than from home specifically.
Working at home is fine now, and will probably always be what I do a few days a week, but my hope is to create a workspace that combines many of the pros of working from home (flexibility, proximity to my kids schools, being in a place I really love, being near the beach) with some of the pros of a good workspace (dedicated facilities, quiet when you need it, adult people with interesting ideas to talk to).
What became unbearable for me were some of the things that don’t HAVE to come with office work, but typically do anyway: car commute, ugly cubicles, soulless workspace design, dumb IT policies, etc.
After 16 years working in the office, I recently moved and now work from home (for the same company). We moved a thousand miles away from my coworkers to take care of my wife’s parents. I sometimes miss being around the gang for all the human feelings, but I now have no commute and I don’t think my productivity has suffered.
In preparation for the move I shed my manager responsibilities (that took over a year!) then slid back into being a regular senior-level programmer.
A fear of mine is that this job market is no-where near as rich as the Boston market. However, that probably means my future jobs will also be remote, so I will then need to make myself _very_ attractive to compete with the lower priced telecommuters from around the world.
As an independent consultant, I have worked from home for a while (and did periodically while working for some previous employers as well). I finally caved and got a coworking space… that I’ve used twice in two weeks. It’s just too easy to stay home and be able to run errands when I need to or do laundry between conference calls.
I occasionally consider going back to office-based employment, but then I end up taking a nice walk during lunch or being able to start cooking dinner at a reasonable hour, and I question the wisdom of such a move.
I work at home 2 days a week. My commute is more than an hour each way and it’s mind numbing to do more than two or three days a week. My boss is on the east coast, most of my co-workers are remote too. There are few people in the actual office and two or three days a week is plenty of face to face time. We all have IM, VOIP, cell phones, web cams, etc so the combination of technology and occasionally face to face meetings work fine. Also, with constant on IM, people can see that you are online, so if the other person isn’t working, they’re at least sitting in front of their work computer.
I *could* work from home, as my employer is pretty understanding in that regard. Since I live with other people, however, I lack the peace & quiet that I’d need to be as productive as I’d be in the office. That is, unless I did all my work in the wee hours of the morning.
In the last two years, I’ve gone from “work at home a couple days a week” to “100% remote worker”. I’m employed by a large company that is trying to cut down on overall real estate costs. I’m *completely* sold on working from home, and would consider it a step down if I had to start going back into the office. Work isn’t even that far away (20 minute mass transit commute). I just love working from home.
I realize that I’m at a point where that works well in my life. My kids are 26 and 24, so there are no small kids to attend to. I have a basement office (“the pit” or “the cave” according to my wife). It’s comfortable. I have high-speed internet access, separate work machine, separate work phone, etc. In fact, if I go into the office, I’d have to use my personal laptop to remote back to my work computer at home. It’s now *less* productive for me to be at work.
I’ve effectively “worked remote” for the last 15 years when I think about it. When working for Enron, I was in Portland and most of the people I supported were in Houston. To this day, I couldn’t tell you what most of my users looked like (I’m a developer). Post-Enron, I conducted most of my work meetings over the phone, so it didn’t matter if I was half a floor away (which was sometimes the case) or on the east coast. For what I do and how I work, I consider location to be irrelevant.
On the down side, I find it far too easy to not go out and not get enough exercise. I’m trying to fix that, but it will always be a struggle for me. Realistically, I’m probably less healthy working at home due to the decreased need for moving around. That’s my fault.
Bottom line… if I ended up looking for a new job, I’d give a *much* higher ranking to a company that would let me work from home on a regular basis. I’m not sure I’d sacrifice a chunk of income for it (I like my paycheck), but I definitely prefer it.
I have worked from home, and it worked as well as in the office. Key factor there was that we had a distributed team. After the third meeting in a row that I was alone in the conference room I told my boss I could talk on the phone just as easily from home.
Well … almost. When I started I was using a cheap phone. Home offices need the same high-quality communication equipment as traditional offices.
I used to telecommute, and it ultimately didn’t work out very well. There are at least three problems:
1) Signaling. If other people are in the office while you’re at home, they’re going to think that you’re a slacker who doesn’t sacrifice as much for the work. That may be unfair, but it’s what they will assume no matter what.
2) It’s harder to get plugged into what’s going on at work and to share ideas. In an office environment, it’s very easy for the following conversations to arise in the course of casual chit-chat: “Hey Steve, have you ever dealt with Customer X?” or “There’s this great new project, can you help me out?” or “Do you have any advice on issue Y?” As a result, the office worker stays plugged into lots of different projects, and has a chance to share a good idea or benefit from someone else’s good idea.
For the telecommuter, those conversations don’t happen — out of sight out of mind, for one thing, plus many potentially useful conversations don’t seem worth arranging a conference call about. Studies show that people eat way less candy if the bowl is across the room instead of on their desk within reach . . . if people don’t take the trouble to walk across the room, they also don’t take the trouble to affirmatively seek out the telecommuting colleague to keep them roped in on everything.
3) Being at work offers a chance to make chit-chat and build relationships with people over conversations that would never arise over the phone or email. This shouldn’t need to be said, but building friendships with people is useful. It makes them more likely to help you out. If the economy is tight and people have a choice to help their good friend who they see every day vs. a distant co-worker who sends a work email once in a while, the former will win out most of the time.
I answered No, but my answer, like so many others it seems, has a caveat.
I’m allowed to work from home, but whenever I do, I find I don’t get work-work done because I’m more interested in my own projects, doing chores, sleeping, playing video games, etc. – basically, there are too many distractions. At work, I can keep a reasonable amount of focus, and generally I’m more productive.
I agree with Sam and for me it’s even more drastic: I do a ph.D (actually, the german equivalent) additionally to my normal work (with support from my employer) and it would be perfectly possible to do all the work for it from home (it mainly involves reading, thinking about problems and solutions and sitting in front of a computer). I tried to do this from home and never succeded (to much distraction) so I switched to both my normal work workplace and a workplace at the university.
Actually I think this affects alot of people. Many Artists need an special workplace (“atelier” in german, according to a translator thats “artist’s workshop” in english) to get work done. If heard this for example from a drawer of comic strips (who only needs a table and a pen for work) – it’s important for him to have a different place at least a few meters from his flat away where he only goes for work.
It also seems to affect many students here at the university who prefer to learn at the local library (although it’s pretty crowded and noisy there) to learning at home.
The nature of my job is such that I don’t keep regular hours, and it’s almost impossible to keep to a schedule. I work in network security and digital forensics. Often, I spend a good deal of time trying to break into a client’s network or remotely pulling information from servers — these are very time-consuming.
Fortunately, I’m single and live alone (except for my cat), so it’s not really an issue for me, I have no distractions save for those I create myself.
While I do occasionally work from home, and I did answer “yes” to the question, I would have selected “yes, but…” if that was a choice. My team is spread across time zones, and I’m usually in my cubicle with my large, do-not-disturb, noise canceling earphones listening to music while I work and respond to emails and instant messages. I like the change of scenery and flexibility that working from home gives me, but I do not like to be so loudly reminded of all the housework that needs my attention. Once the kids come home from school, it is also difficult to work at home. I think the ideal solution would be an inspiring co-working space with good coffee and fast, secure Internet access.
Co-working is another interesting wrinkle to the question., since it combines working away from your co-workers, but co-working with other people in the same situation.
I work from home and have done since February 2011.
I work in this pretty cool arrangement where I’m employed by an agency as heading up the remote office Monday – Thursday, and then on Friday I freelance.
It’s really really difficult.
I love my work (web guy) and find it hard to leave the laptop even after 12 hours tapping away. If you’ve ever tried freelancing one day a week you will know that it’s just about impossible, so once I’m done with an 8 hour day I switch timers and get on to my freelance work for a few hours.
Once this is done I still want to do some research and reading, meaning that I spend between 10-14 hours on the laptop a day ( a little less on the weekends).
I took some advice from one of Mark Boultons books where always wearing shoes to the home office and taking them off at the end of the work day was a good queue. That has helped enormously, but after nearly 2 years I’m ready to move back into an office.
There are other negatives (besides not making time for other things) where you are easily interrupted at home. The gas man comes, the car needs to go to the garage, your significant other comes in to say hello. All of these things seem alright for others, they expect that because you’re at home you can also deal with these things. While you would usually get /more/ interruptions in a normal office it is these interruptions that are FAR worse (in your own mind).
If I were to remain in this situation I was looking to open a shared working space in the city where I would spend 2-3 days. It would help get you out of the house and provide some professional interactions that are otherwise missing when working from home.
Be careful what you wish for ;)
I’m not a computer guy; I answered no. I took a cut in pay to go from working almost alone to go work at the main office where I would see people.
Back when I did indeed work with word processors and computers, as a volunteer student reporter, I would compose my stuff at the office rather than just drop it off.
More thoughts on working face to face:
Both my boss and a classmate who works with kids with learning disabilities noted independently that I am an oral learner. Nice to know. I both learn and think by talking with others, or even to myself.
Peter Drucker said that managers should become aware of whether they prefer written or oral reports… and so should the “report-makers.” Drucker gave clear historical examples of how this is important.
I read once that after computers came out people began generating more reports and data for the executives. The problem was relevance, both from not asking what was needed and something else: Executives wanted to run stuff by other executives more than they wanted data.
I suppose that people who are willing to put in the lonely man hours to learn computers are the sort who get jobs with less need for human interface.
Test. Nothing to see. Please ignore. Have a nice day.
I work from home now. In fact I am too far away to go into the office without a plane. I am a people person. So, I find the isolation challenging.
I do work from home already, from time to time. As a project manager the most difficult step I found was to “let go” of some of the local issues such as managing the work environment as well. Rght now I settled in a two-tier pattern where “work” happens both at home (programming., code review, or drafting of long reports) and at work (face time with people, solving urgent matters, setting up demo and product reviews).
In a nutshell, telecommuting feels to me like I am doing two different jobs – taking the best of each. And I love it.
I occasionally do work from home. There I have a better focus. What I am missing at home are the coffee break discussions with my coworkers (topics mostly related to our work).
Short answer: no.
Long answer: I see it as a matter of physical space, commuting time and quality, relationships with your work and co-workers.
There are people who can do their job in their home offices or even their sofas because they don’t feel the need for special equipment or a dedicated workspace.
I don’t.
I need my big desk, my nice office chair, my 27″ external display, the espresso coffee machine, the huge whiteboard in the conference room, a reliable Internet connection, and so on.
Even if I could have the chance to get a dedicated home office space in my apartment, I would prefer to be in an office: I see my home as a sacred temple, “no work allowed” in there.
And here comes the commuting topic: I takes me a 7-minutes long bike ride to go from my home to my office. Since a live in a small city, it’s a healthy, pleasant, daily ritual that will never bore me.
I did have longer commuting times, for both school and work, usually within the range of a 45-minutes long train ride: I still consider it a bearable and high quality commuting time. You can read, write, talk with friends, I find it difficult considering it a waste of my time.
I understand that people having to fight every morning for their seat on public transportation, or worse, being stuck for hours in their cars, would naturally prefer to stay at home and avoid such low-quality commuting time.
Thirdly, there’s a matter of what’s the job that you are doing and the kind of relationship you have with your co-workers.
I design and develop mobile applications.
I need people feedback. I need to show things to people. I need to make people think about what I’m working on.
No matter how good my wireframes are, no matter how good my writing is, no matter how polished a prototype is, no matter how many features the communication tools I’m using have, nothing beats face-to-face meetings.
Last, but not least: co-workers.
Many people that would love to work from home, well, it’s because they either don’t have a good relationship with their co-workers or they’re simply not interested in developing one – and their job is probably less “people-centered” than mine.
I always had the luck of working with great people and, as of today, I can’t remember a single day when I didn’t want to go to the office just to learn something new and have valuable feedbacks from them.
Working from home has been difficult in so many ways, but nothing can override the fact that my (office-based) wife and I do not need a childminder. I can do the school run, babysit, all sorts of things, and with careful planning it will not impact my work. Note that means A LOT of careful planning/hard slog/motivation. It is tough at home on your own, without the idle chatting and ‘slacking off’ that occurs in an office….
I am working from home right now – and doing a pretty good job too. Today I wanted to do some research into social media and other similar tasks – when I take working from home days, it’s usually because I have a more creative task that requires some thinking or a more research oriented task that requires a lot of back an forth on the web and in the room etc. I find it that working from home days are perfect for this kind of work where you are actually more effective if you’re not pinned to a desk and a chair all day. You know.. it’s a process… do some work, get up, leave it some room for thought while going to the supermarket across the streeet, come back, write some stuff down etc. It doesn’t seem productive if you capture it on camera, but it actually gives great results for me. Especially the liberty to pace around the room at will. :)
I wouldn’t work full-time at home, or at least, if my company adopted that as a practice, I think we’d still need to have regular face-to-face sessions. There is only so much you can absorb via documentation and phone calls.
Presently, in my current role, I tend to work a day at home every week or so, purely to have some uninterrupted (under my control) time to get through emails, paperwork and other tasks that benefit from solid attention.
I’d happily shift that arrangement and work one day in the office a week and I think I would be more productive for it, I think my team would be as well.
I can work from home now at my current company, and while I used to prefer working in the office, the more I get on my plate, the more I prefer working from home. The lack of constant interruptions from hallway chatter and people “stopping in” to my office is an advantage in chugging through my to-do list. I also get more quiet time to think and strategize. I don’t know that I’d want to work from home all the time exclusively, but it’s looking more appealing all the time.
Hi Scott,
I think the best answer is hybrid. Some people can’t create working environments in their homes. Stay at home children/spouses, for example. Co-working can have implications for IP protection. But it also depends on what types of activities I’m doing right now and the general culture of the organization based on the type of work they are doing.
I for one would not like to work for a purely distributed organization like GitHub or WordPress. But I would like an organization that is flexible and offers support for that flexibility with proper tools and top-down cultural support.
I also like flexible programs such as unlimited vacation days that I know some smaller design-oriented orgs have and use very effectively. As they realize that people in our business seldom are 100% turned off when “away” and the benefits of reflection time is immeasurable (but a different yet related question.)
I answered no. I love colleagues popping by my desk with questions, suggestions and ideas to discuss. I love being able to hear other people work on similar tasks, or on entirely different projects; I think you can learn a lot from seeing, hearing and ultimately feeling how others work.
That said, I love retreating to the sanctuary of the home office, where it is easier to have a sense of completing tasks, without distraction. If I’m in a solitary mood then it’s easier to be creative at home, but then I miss the input of others.
So, it’s certainly not a full out no, but I prefer the office, with the odd retreat.
Yes. At least part time. I’m an IT-consulting guy, and half my work requires my brain but not my body. So if I could avoid the ego depletion coming from selecting a suit and my commute, I’m sure it would affect my work in a good way.
An IT consultant in a suit. That’s sad.
In my last job, I was working from home at least 3 days a week. I would work from home 5 days a week if possible, going to the Office only for important meetings.
I am currently unemployed. The only bad thing about unemployment in my view is the lack of income. Not having to go to a distracting, noisy, busy, unproductive office is wonderful.
My spouse is freelance and has worked entirely from home for nearly all the time I’ve known him. I envy that.
My employer is very flexible about my work location. However as a new mom I find I can work best on site, than at home. Too many distractions at home. At work, I know how many hours I have and am extremely productive. This also helps me keep a boundary between home and work.
I worked from home for several months and ultimately quit that job to go back to an office environment. Here’s why:
1. While I was in my comfy clothes, I felt tied to my machine between the hours of 8 and 5. The benefits of taking a walk or volunteering at my kid’s school were trumped by my self-imposed need to show I was productive and contributing during work hours.
2. Working at home was incredibly lonely. The connection with colleagues is important and I found it couldn’t be reproduced at a distance.
3. I got fat. The fridge was always right there and the sweatpants I wore everyday were too forgiving.
4. Without daily face to face interaction I felt like the big budget item most easily cut.
Great and nice post thank you.