Travel from and to work is becoming more difficult. One solution is that employers should allow employees to work from home. Do you agree that the advantages are more than disadvantages?

Nowadays, more and more workers are already exhausted when they arrive at their companies as they spend lots of time on being stuck in heavy traffic. For this reason, some workers request their employers to allow ‘Home-Working.’ However, I firmly believe that allowing to work at home has more downsides than benefits.

Most employers expect high job performance or productivity from their employees. If they accept their workers to work at home, work productivity would be worse with the following reasons. First, in general, it is hard to focus on jobs at home due to many distracts like TV, children, or visitors. Second, this is more important factor, most today’s projects are based on a teamwork with other colleagues. Therefore, if team members work separately, they can not have a hand from co-workers when they need. Not only that, but it is difficult to call a meeting to confirm where projects are going. Likewise, in the aspect of job efficiency, working at home has fatal drawbacks.

To some extent, I agree that there are some jobs which have better work efficiency when people work at home. Animators, writers and computer programmers would be good examples. They can select their working time to maximize their creativity and efficiency. Generally, they say working at night is much better than working at day time. Besides, it is easy for them to have their own workrooms at home and decorate them along with their tastes to focus on the work. However, compared with the number of general jobs, that of special jobs is very a few. That’s why we can not be sure that working at home is more advantageous than working at a company.

Even if we can see some advantages for ‘Home-Working’, most general jobs are more productive when they work together at a company as today’s jobs are so complicated. For this reason, I believe we had better find other ways like flexible working time to avoid heavy traffic rather than working at home.