Working from home can hurt your business
The Australian, July 2020
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Premise
Many people from Sydney / Melbourne are considering buying houses in regional Australia: cheaper, better quality of life, easy to work remotely.
This also poses a threat to the values of residential and commercial property in major capital cities.
The issue
If people are away from the office more than 2 days a week, this damages the long-term dynamic of the enterprise.
I.e. those who moved to rural Australia will have to commute to the office 3 days a week.
The most important things during the analysis: the patterns of employees’ communications and how people spend their time.
The strongest driver of how people collaborate is the office environment.
People working remotely copy the patterns they developed while in the office.
Replicating face-to-face communications completely is not possible.
People spend 45% of their communication time with their top 5 collaborators, can be done from any location.
Contacts outside the top 5 fall dramatically in a working-from-home environment.
Damage to the dynamic of the enterprise and affects the training experience of young team members.
Can be managed short term, but long-term people need to be back in the office, even if for 3 days a week.
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Oh, there's a comment section here.
First and foremost, thank you very much Max for the briefs. They've become my source of inspiration and new ideas.
Regarding the WFH issue, I think it hugely depends on the person and his/her state of mind. I first became working from home when suffering from severe depression. The thought of leaving home was causing a panic attack, but I was able to work in some way. After two years of training, I am pretty much prepared for effective WFH, while working in office distracts me.
I believe these considerations have limits of the applicability based on company size. For instance, mentioned communication only with the top 5 collaborators or training of young team members will have a less negative effect on smaller companies.