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Friday, May 18, 2012

Hartal and traffic free - work from home

Does your company allow you to work from home? Given the fact the spoilticians (spoilt politicians) are determined to make ‘hartal’ part and parcel of life in the country, may be human resource department in your company will need to review existing policies to encourage and allow employees to work from home if required. Other than hartals, think about the snarling traffic or even any emergency family issues which will require you to stay back at home. Rather than taking a day off or calling sick falsely, it would be nice if your company introduces flexible policies to accommodate familial and social realities. In the end of the day, what is more important is getting agreed outputs from employees as part of their job contract – physical presence in the office premises is required but the job should be done and can be done from any location, if technology, infrastructure and rules are in place. 

Working from home too much has its own risks – either you end up working too much as the boundaries between work and family life is blurred or you can totally become a scumbag and start misusing your flexible arrangements. Although one of the reasons I preferred to go to work in one of my jobs in Bangladesh as early in the morning as possible was due to the fact that there was a massive generator at work and it was all air-conditioned. So work or no work – I could stay away from the terrible Dhaka summer, nice and cosy in the office cabins – no power cuts, no heat and humidity. You can always argue that what is the point of staying at home and work via laptop/internet if there are so many powercuts, unreliable net connection and all the usual complains? Well, no easy response to this though, but there is for sure a trade off between travelling for 2 hours to reach work, wasting valuable economic times due to hartal – and staying at home to get the same jobs done via easy technologies – as and when required. HR managers welcome to shed some light on the topic.

2 comments:

Tareq said...

I am a homeworker and has been doing freelancing for last five years. Strikes does not effect me at all. The thing that bothers me nevertheless is the fact that i have to work on Fridays as well. My weekend is on Saturday and Sunday.

Anonymous said...

The concept of working from home is gradually growing in Bangladesh. Both working from office and home has its own advantages and disadvantages.

The greatest problem of working from home is that it is hard to make people understand what you actually do. Another major problem is the constant availability of electricity. One of the greatest advantage of working from home is that you get to save travelling time and thus your productivity increases.

However, one should be careful so that home based office does not turn into a homely office! that would ultimately cost huge!

Russel