Weighing up the pros and cons of home working

 How have you approaching working from home in your start-up or in other work environments?

We’ve been discussing the pros and cons of working from home versus working from the office and wanted to get people’s thoughts on this.

Pros:

• It can be more productive to occasionally work in an environment free from distractions.
• It’s a nice perk to sometimes be able to work from home in your PJs.
• If you have a long commute, working from home can save you the commute time.
• If you feel yourself getting sick you might still be mentally able to work but physically not be up to traveling to the office and working in an office environment where you might make other people sick.

Working from home might allow you to still get your work done in this instance – particularly important for a start-up that may not have other people to cover your role while you’re out. (Note: if you’re sick, you should still take a sick day to recover!)

Cons:

• Communication. In a fast-paced start-up environment, with a team of 17 communication is critical. While online text and video chat is great, it’s harder to communicate with people working from home compared with being in an office environment.

  We see this in the communication challenges we have across our China and Sydney offices with things changing so rapidly. Lots of people working from home compounds this.

• Office culture. We aim to create a fun, exciting office environment. Our office is open plan, we have regular drinks and we provide lunch to our team and eat together every day which has helped to build a strong sense of team. This is all harder to achieve if we work from home.
• Some roles require software on our office desktop machines, being able to access our collection of shoes to take photos for customers or involve other tasks that require items only available physically in our office.

Overall we figure it’s better to be in the office but some work from home flexibility is a good thing.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this. How have you approaching working from home in your start-up or in other work environments?