The corporate office where you work is made suitably for the type of job you do. It is designed exactly for the purpose of the company. Whatever industry your enterprise is under, the workplace plays a huge role in its productive processes and successful results!
Notice that nowadays, there are many jobs which allow employees to work from home. Most of them are basically those which can be done remotely as long as there are properly working gadgets, a stable Internet connection and necessary items and files to get tasks done. Aside from those jobs with work from home as their fixed setting, there are also times when corporate offices set out a work-from-home declaration. As you know, these instances are rare for companies with physical offices, but when they happen, reasons are serious. What are those reasons? Check out these 4 which are the most common ones! If you are an employee, you can absolutely relate!
[1] INCLEMENT WEATHER
When the skies are dark and crying hard non-stop, everybody can expect that floods will eventually occur. They make roads difficult to access. It’s a risk to leave the house and, even more, to travel. When the weather is severe, it causes dangers. Roads become slippery and even more congested. When flood waters reach the knee or higher, vehicles become limited, so chances of getting stranded are high!
Surely, you can imagine yourself, wearing a corporate attire or your office uniform while battling against harsh winds outdoors, just to reach the office. It’s not just very inconvenient but also perilous due to possibilities of objects flying around because of strong winds and rains. Especially if you are carrying important documents, this is going to be worrisome. Not to mention, several road accidents happen when the atmosphere is such. Moreover, even if you observe time management and allot extra time for traveling to the office, inclement weather could hamper all plans. You will get stuck in heavy, stressful traffic for hours! Not only you but your co-workers, especially those coming from further locations, will arrive late. That results in poor work outcomes for that day, probably because of exhaustion from travelling in the middle of the bad weather.
This and other natural phenomena which pose unfavorable conditions for employees to go to the workplace urge offices to give work-from-home declarations. For everybody to be convenient and safe, doing the work which can be done from home is the answer.
[2] OFFICE RENOVATIONS
The quality of the office affects the productivity of the employees. When there are broken and dysfunctional facilities, areas or parts of the building, they usually cause distractions and discomfort to people. Sometimes, the quality of the work done is also altered negatively. When the office suffers from the like, renovations must be immediately prioritized. Huge office renovations that require everyone out of the building for some weeks should not obstruct employee operations which can actually be carried out from home. The Internet and technology’s collaboration enables that. If there’s no other room or building available for employees to transfer to, then working from home is the key!
Since this is a necessity of the company itself, employees must be helped to bring their devices to their homes. Also, the company should take part in the electrical bills spent by the employees while they work in their own places. Most especially, if you are an employee living in a rented place, you should let your boss know about this!
[3] BUSINESS RELOCATIONS
In a unique case that the company you are in decides for a business relocation, various situations might happen that will make working from home the biggest option.
One. If the company experiences a conflict, personal or financial, with the owner of the rented building, your employer might decide to leave that location immediately and urgently while not stopping the service of the company itself. In case this happens, the boss might decide to let all employees work from home in the meantime while looking for a new site. Two. If the company is really off to a business relocation, but the moving-in schedule changed for some reason while the moving-out time is still the same, employees might be told to work in the intervening period. Since your company needs to directly leave the former building as scheduled, but the new place is not yet fully ready, employees may work remotely. There’s nowhere to go, so that’s the right choice.
[4] HEALTH RISKS
It is vital to begin and maintain a healthy workplace — that is healthy in every aspect!
Inevitably though, there are times when the workplace might be faced with some health risks due to several possible reasons. Dirty surroundings, not necessarily within the office only, might spread disease-causing elements through air. If ever the hazardous health risks are caused by the stay of terribly sick employees in the workplace, everybody has to be careful. These might be grave occasions prompting the office to let everyone work from home while the workplace is being sanitized. In worst-case scenarios, health risks presented by national or global problems such as a pandemic (as the COVID-19 pandemic) urge offices to give work-from-home declarations.
>>Office To Home
As long as the employee has the required things to be able to do work from his/her house, it’s alright! Employees must be trustworthy and responsible enough, and employers must trust their employees. At the same time, employers should also consider assisting their employees by providing specific needs that will help them work better at home. In that way, the employees can still produce the same good results even with limitations they do not have authority over.
The office is definitely the best place to work for any employee, especially because the facilities needed to accomplish the job are complete there, and the place is further from distractions than anywhere else. However, there really are crucial considerations and uncontrollable situations when allowing employees to work from their own houses is a MUST!
AUTHOR BIO:
Nicole Ann Pore is a versatile writer, an events host and a voice over artist from the Philippines. She finished her undergraduate studies at De La Salle University Manila as Cum Laude