Thursday, September 5, 2013

Working From Home Poses Challenge To Employee Productivity

By George Drummond


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The ability to work from home today is very appealing to literally millions of people worldwide. Working from home means that you get the flexibility to live life on your own terms and not to have your daily actions dictated to your by the boss.In this article we will look at a number of methods for how you can start working from home today, as well as reveal one of the best ways to fully take your financial freedom into your own hands.

Virtual Assistant - One particular type of work from home job is to be the virtual assistant of another marketer or small business owner.This typically involves doing tasks that are outsourced for you and can range from writing articles, to submitting content to websites, customer support, and manual SEO tasks.The freedom gained is not that much greater than a typical 9 to 5 job as you are still likely to be working full-time. But at least it means you can work from home.Writing Articles - You can earn good money as a freelance article writer from home. There are lots of SEO article writing jobs listed on freelance websites such as Elance, Freelancer and ODesk and these sort of jobs seem to be very in demand.

First, apart from SEO industry, working from home is also practiced by other companies that operate under different industries as a way of reward system to worthy employees in their organization. Some companies regard it as a good opportunity to display it to employees merely as a reward system so the same remain trustworthy while they work from home, but the main intension is to reduce expenses on space, utility, and office supplies. Nevertheless, may it be a reward scheme or a way to reduce company operating expenses; both are no longer an effective ways to promote employees' productivity in the organization. To illustrate, a recent study shows that telecommuters are less likely to work forty hours a week. This suggests that allowing employees to telecommute poses a big challenge to their productivity and performance in the company. Once they are off the radar or company's monitoring system, they begin to work in their own phase far more different from the usual and effective way. Hence, when this practice becomes their new routine, they are likely to experience difficulties on some important elements that have more to do with companywide HR goals.

Second, as mentioned, one of the HR goals is to ensure productivity from each working employee in the organization. This objective is realized and gauged in terms of standard working hours. Because they no longer work onsite, regardless of the company's encouragement to play under the same rules even when they are already working from home, inevitably the telecommuters are likely to feel unbound to keep rules and regulations set and only apply in the actual workplace. Also, they see it as an opportunity that gives them liberty to develop their own rules that are not in harmony to the HR goals and play under the same condition. Thus, these rules offer leverage to complete tasks based only on the number of hours required to finish a specific job. In other words, if tasks in one day are completed in four hours or less, that concludes the business working day. Distinctively, this issue will result to violation against standard working hours and contributes negative impact to companywide HR goals. Undeniably, some would suppose that the remaining hours be spent to redouble the tasks more than a telecommuter is assigned to complete. This is not so. Majority of what happens in the real world is the actual opposite of the assumption.

Having to get up every day and get ready for work takes time. You have to shower, put on make-up, fix your hair, get dressed and drop the kids off at the sitter's. All this takes time. Driving to work takes even more time. And that means you have to fill your car with gas every few days. Gas stations are not fun places.Many women have small children at home. Paying a babysitter to keep the kids so you can work to have money to pay the babysitter is hardly worth the effort.There are many other expenses involved with keeping a job, too. For starters, you have to go in debt to buy a sporty, new car to leave sitting in the parking garage all day. After all, your co-workers all know which car is yours. The cost of the car, insurance and maintenance will take more than a year's salary to pay for, but it's one of those things you have to have.

Ultimately, one major misunderstanding in allowing selected employees to telecommute is to assume that it will help the company lessen operating expenses and motivate employees to increase productivity. This should not be the case. Telecommute should be viewed by companies as a competitive advantage against competitors in the same industry to increase productivity but not awarded to employees who can work onsite or living within the city where the company is physically located at or else it will hurt the company big time. Companies should only employ telecommute to employees who are living away from the city of the actual business location and employees living and working overseas, not for increasing employees' productivity who are working onsite.




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