Working from home: A double edged sword

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how working from home can be optimally managed to achieve greater work/ home harmony. Critics assert that employees who are not office-based are "actually not working". The following are challenges of working from home -The difficulty in separating home from work -Self- imposed pressure of working endlessly and -The feeling of being alienated from companies’ major decisions and sometimes promotions. Otani (2015) argues for flexibility and cites Sheryl Sandberg, Facebooks Chief Operating Officer as making the point that it is more important to measure the results rather than watching people "try". Even though teleworkers can generally develop strategies that align boundaries to their preferences for segmentation or integration, employees with greater job autonomy and control are better able to do so. When work and home activities take place in the same physical space, physical, temporal and psychological boundaries between work and home can become blurred. The benefits of teleworking in terms of quality and quantity of outcomes can result from allowing employee’s time away from the office to work on tasks requiring higher levels of concentration without interruption. Organizations benefit by saving costs on office space and becoming more flexible. HR plays a significant role here and very often retention of staff is linked to the availability of flexible work options. Working from home can be beneficial for both employers and employees but might be a double edged sword if employers use it to evade responsibility for employee welfare