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Working from Home Information: How to Stay Healthy and Happy While Working Remotely



Traditionally, work is done in an office. A business functions in a physical workspace and work-related tasks are completed by employees at the office itself. This is changing with the progression of digital transformation. As software capabilities become more complex, and business processes come to rely on them more, companies are finding that many of their employees are no longer bound by a physical workplace in order to work efficiently. Instead, telecommuting, or working from home, can be just as efficient.




working from home information




Prior to the pandemic, there were far fewer people working from home. According to a survey by Gartner, after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, 88% of organizations around the world encouraged their employees to work from home or made it mandatory. While many jobs cannot be done remotely, like nursing and cleaning, a lot of industries are capable of fully adopting a WFH model.


WFH means an employee is working from their house, apartment, or place of residence, rather than working from the office. Many companies have a WFH policy, or remote work policy, that allows their employees to work from home either full-time or when it's most convenient for them.


Video conferencing tools and collaborative technology make it easy for coworkers to communicate and stay in touch, no matter their geographical location. There are even WFH jobs that are completely remote, so workers work from home every day. Employees who WFH often have a home office or designated workspace where they're able to focus and be productive.


WFH stands for work from home or working from home, depending on how it's used in a sentence. The acronym is used in messaging tools (e.g., Slack, instant messaging, text message) to communicate they're working remotely.


The right answer will depend from person to person, but companies, like Doximity, have found the WFH Wednesdays are the most beneficial for workers and employers. Having a WFH day in the middle of the week helps break up the week, keep employees engaged, and prevents a midweek slump. If you're struggling to decide if you should work from home or not, this flowchart will help you make a decision.


There are a few key benefits of working from home (WFH). Employees who WFH often have a better work-life balance and often are more because they don't spend time commuting into the office and can get their work done quicker in a focused environment. Plus, WFH provides environmental benefits.


As people work from home more frequently, they'll rely on WFH to communicate that they're working remotely. Looking for more? Learn about telecommuting and how it helps remote workers next.


Many people with disabilities, such as chronic back pain or mental illness, can also benefit from WFH gear and settings personalized to meet their needs. An employee with chronic joint pain, for example, may feel more comfortable in their ergonomic home desk chair. A worker with seasonal affective disorder (SAD), can position their desk near a window to get more sunlight. Someone who moves or fidgets often through the day can do so without worrying about distracting others.


The boundaries between your job and your life can become blurred when you work from home. According to research from NordVPN Teams, remote employees in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada put in an average of two extra hours of work per day in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. As you may know firsthand, when work expands and seeps into your free time like this, it can throw off your work-life balance and accelerate burnout.


When the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered workplaces nationwide, society was plunged into an unplanned experiment in work from home. Nearly two-and-a-half years on, organizations worldwide have created new working norms that acknowledge that flexible work is no longer a temporary pandemic response but an enduring feature of the modern working world.


Thirty-five percent of respondents say they can work from home full-time. Another 23 percent can work from home from one to four days a week. A mere 13 percent of employed respondents say they could work remotely at least some of the time but opt not to.


Eighty-seven percent of workers offered at least some remote work embrace the opportunity and spend an average of three days a week working from home. People offered full-time flexible work spent a bit more time working remotely, on average, at 3.3 days a week. Interestingly, 12 percent of respondents whose employers only offer part-time or occasional remote work say that even they worked from home for five days a week. This contradiction appears indicative of a tension between how much flexibility employers offer and what employees demand.


However, the opportunity is not uniform: there was a large difference in the number of employed men who say they were offered remote-working opportunities (61 percent) and women (52 percent). At every income level, younger workers were more likely than older workers to report having work-from-home opportunities.


The opportunity to work flexibly differs by industry and role within industries and has implications for companies competing for talent. For example, the vast majority of employed people in computer and mathematical occupations report having remote-work options, and 77 percent report being willing to work fully remotely. Because of rapid digital transformations across industries, even those with lower overall work-from-home patterns may find that the technologists they employ demand it.


A surprisingly broad array of professions offer remote-work arrangements. Half of respondents working in educational instruction and library occupations and 45 percent of healthcare practitioners and workers in technical occupations say they do some remote work, perhaps reflecting the rise of online education and telemedicine. Even food preparation and transportation professionals said they do some work from home.


According to a January survey of 5,889 workers, 61% of people working from home today say they're not going into their workplace because they don't want to, and 38% say their office is closed. It's a reversal from October 2020, when 64% of people were working from home because their office was closed, and 36% were doing so out of preference.


Teleworkers say they're choosing to stay home for better work-life balance, productivity or because they've relocated away from the office. Fewer people say Covid is the main reason why they're working from home (42% now vs. 57% in 2020). Roughly one-third of parents cite child care as a major reason they telework. And most say working from home hasn't impacted their ability to advance in their career.


With that said, Parker points out, today's remote workers feel more strongly than ever about making it permanent: 78% of people mostly working from home want to continue doing so after the pandemic, up from 64% in 2020.


Accounting for the pros and cons, Parker says, "when you look at the fact that a vast majority want to continue working from home in the future, you can see people are making tradeoffs in their mind and are seeing flexibility as more valuable than coworker connection."


A much smaller share, 14%, say their primary reason to return to offices is because they're worried about losing work opportunities while at home; 9% say they feel pressured to from their boss or coworkers.


Importantly, the majority of workers, 60%, don't have jobs that can be done from home. About half of those who work in-person say they're concerned about being exposed to Covid, according to Pew, a share that hasn't budged since October 2020.


While remote work has been a rising topic in technology for a good while now, nothing has put this conversation in the spotlight quite like the COVID-19 pandemic. As thousands of companies adjusted to support employees working from home, many information technology (IT) departments faced a new range of challenges to quickly address.


The survey measured the incidence of working from home as the pandemic continued, focusing on how a more permanent shift to remote work might affect not only productivity but also overall employee well-being. It also examined factors including how work from home would affect spending and revenues in major urban centers. In addition to the survey, the researchers drew on informal conversations with dozens of US business executives. They are publishing the results of the survey and related research at wfhresearch.com.


People who worked from home spent an average of 35 percent of saved commuting time on their jobs, the researchers find. They devoted the rest to other activities, including household chores, childcare, leisure activities such as watching movies and TV, outdoor exercise, and even second jobs.


This interpretation, they write, is consistent with media reports that employees worked longer hours from home during the pandemic but with the added flexibility to interrupt the working day. Yet, according to the survey, this does not have a negative overall effect on productivity, contradicting one outdated stereotype of a remote worker eating bonbons, watching TV, and getting no work done.


The researchers used personnel and analytics data from before and during the coronavirus work-from-home period. The company provided a rich data set for these 10,000 employees, who moved to 100 percent work from home in March 2020 and began returning to the office in late October.


And author and behavioral scientist Jon Levy argues in the Boston Globe that having some people in the office and others at home runs counter to smooth organizational processes. To this, Bloom offers a potential solution: instead of letting employees pick their own remote workdays, employers should ensure all workers take remote days together and come into the office on the same days. This, he says, could help alleviate the challenges of managing a hybrid team and level the playing field, whereas a looser model could potentially hurt employees who might be more likely to choose working from home (such as mothers with young children) while elevating those who might find it easier to come into the office every day (such as single men). 2ff7e9595c


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