Employee asked me if she can "work from home" one day a week. Opinions?

[Deleted]

This "working from home" trend seems to be gaining in popularity the last years, at least here in the Netherlands.
I never had anyone ask about this arrangement before though. Maybe because you mostly see it in the non-commercial sectors, not sure.

Anyway, the first thing that comes to (everyone's?) mind is that working for home is just a way to slack off. Especially if it's on friday.
I am also not to keen on having people work away from their collegae's, which seems counter productive.

What is your view on working from home?

[Spiffums]

Depends on what the job is and what it requires.

[Machismo]

It saves on commuter time a and traffic. And, depending on the employee, they can work efficiently at home.

[Deleted]

As long they perform... no problem with it.

Most companies will have policies in place for "work from home"; look into those.

[zenkai]

This "working from home" trend seems to be gaining in popularity the last years, at least here in the Netherlands.
I never had anyone ask about this arrangement before though. Maybe because you mostly see it in the non-commercial sectors, not sure.

Anyway, the first thing that comes to (everyone's?) mind is that working for home is just a way to slack off. Especially if it's on friday.
I am also not to keen on having people work away from their collegae's, which seems counter productive.

What is your view on working from home?

IF you can measure the production of her job, how can she slack off? I think it depends on the job. You have a ton of time not having to go into work. You don't have to spend time getting pretty, you don't have to spend time driving/getting there it makes you less likely to burn out doing your job. If you can measure her productivity challenge her, give her the opportunity.

[Mizix]

I don't see the harm in working away from the colleagues if it's just one day a week. Make it clear to her that she will be expected to maintain her schedule and if she starts lacking behind because of the new arrangement, she'll be back to the office. You can agree on a trial period, long enough for the both of you to feel comfortable with the new arrangement. Some people do work better from home btw, colleagues, phone calls, etc. can kill your focus some times...

[Rotted]

It depends on multiple factors,

To begin with, what is your company? If its something involving sales across phones or conferences, then it can be acceptable,

It also comes down to the individual, how long have you known this woman? Is she new and like you say looking to slack off? Or has she been around for years and has a good work ethic?

There might be other considerations, maybe mental health issues? For example, my other half is looking for work right now / Teacher training. She has a condition which will affect her work life, requiring her to have extended breaks or allowances, so she either needs a work place where she can get the option to work from home or the teaching, which gives her x amount of time off (When I say off, I mean not being in the building, but still working) as a kind of break before going back in to it.

You also have the option of giving her a trial run and tell her you want progress reports at the end of the day, each day shes at home, if you don't feel it's working, you can tell her she can't do it again, its always best to come off as being fair.

However, I wouldn't brand it as a way to slack off from work. Going back to my other half, her father works in the Comp Sci industry (don't ask me more, I seriously don't know, all we know is he does computers ) He's worked his way up the ranks over the last 3 or 4 decades and now he works from home about 10-20% of his time. This involves everything from reports, monitoring, conference calls, the other 70% ish of the time? His company is flying him all over the world to do something with someone.

[epLe]

Been able to work from home for atleast 10 years, and have all in all great experience with it.
It depends on the person if he/she has the conscience and selfcontrol to perform their job at home.

Personally I find it way "more important" to cover my own bases by having all my tasks done when at home, and it feels way easier to slack about in the office.
Compared to the other extreme - open office landscape, where disturbances are ever present -a home office is much more efficient and productive.

[Deleted]

I work from home every friday: it's my most productive day of the week, by far. My desktop runs infinitely faster than my company laptop and there are no disturbances. And I can avoid my 3-4h commute.

I finish some reporting tasks, do calls and plan ahead for the week/next few weeks. I do project work and generally organize myself. It helps me to stay on top of things.

Allowing employees to work from home depends on the tasks they have to perform and on the person itself. It takes self control to be productive at home.

I slack off more in the office than at home.

[Thelin]

This "working from home" trend seems to be gaining in popularity the last years, at least here in the Netherlands.
I never had anyone ask about this arrangement before though. Maybe because you mostly see it in the non-commercial sectors, not sure.

Anyway, the first thing that comes to (everyone's?) mind is that working for home is just a way to slack off. Especially if it's on friday.
I am also not to keen on having people work away from their collegae's, which seems counter productive.

What is your view on working from home?

It's your job as a manager to determine if someone is slacking or not. It'd be pretty easy to find out if someone didn't do their job for a day in many industries. I'm in I.T. and I can literally do my job 99.99% of the time from anywhere unless physical access to the data center is needed. Working from home is something that a lot of places offer because they understand the value it can provide.

Why not allow this person to work from home and see how it goes? If you notice productivity drops off or this person is not nearly as responsive while working from home, then you pull the plug.

[Wyrt]

If they can do the job from home then I see no reason not to let them. Having people come in to work to do jobs they can do at home just seems archaic.

It's easy enough to tell if they're slacking so that shouldn't be a problem at all.

[Deleted]

Depends on what the job is and what it requires.

In this case, it's an online marketing position.
Her tasks could indeed be done from home, but the biggest concern would still be if someone still puts in the same effort.

Maybe I'll give her a month to try it and see how it works out.

[Xandrigity]

My husband works from home 3/5 days a week. His "team" works all over the country so he rarely has in office meetings does his work by phone or skype. It takes a certain kind of person who is dedicated to committing their work time to work stuff. Works for us, his office is a 1 hour drive one way.

[Moddycss]

Been able to work from home for atleast 10 years, and have all in all great experience with it.
It depends on the person if he/she has the conscience and selfcontrol to perform their job at home.

Personally I find it way "more important" to cover my own bases by having all my tasks done when at home, and it feels way easier to slack about in the office.
Compared to the other extreme - open office landscape, where disturbances are ever present -a home office is much more efficient and productive.

I feel the same way, right now i work with internal IT-Support so it is kind of hard, but get easily distracted by outside sources when i just try and focus on my work, making it really hard to tunnel vision on the job.

[PassingBy]

If the job can be done from home, and after a few test weeks you see that she is doing the amount of work that is expected of her - sure let her work from home.

I've had a situation recently where due to a difficult economic situation in our industry we were not able to raise salaries in the end of the year even for the employees that did a very good job. I have talked to our top management and for my department we've came to an agreement that people understand that we don't have the opportunity to increase the salaries as we were planning to, but we will find other ways to stimulate the work force. The latest compromise was that we agreed that 3 days a week are office days, and 2 days a week are work at home days.
You have to have access to company email and ftp servers, be available on your cell phone at all times, and if something happens be able to get to the plant in 30-40 minutes (the town is small so you can make it from any part of town no problem).
It worked wonders. I have people willingly staying late hours doing work at home, or staying to help in the office. Some of the guys actually turned down offers with slightly higher salaries but with a strict 5 day a week 8 hour working schedule and stayed with us.

So depending on the industry, it can be a very nice stimulation for the employee to be able to work from home.

[Polar1]

What is your company's policy towards work? Is there a work from home or remote work policy? What does legislation say? At some places work from home is not protected by overtime or will even release the worker from work hours. What I do is set specific tasks that must be

If you foresee a positive result, set KPIs for the employee and measure them often enough. Do the trial run that someone suggested.

Be aware that other employees may see this and consider it "favoritism." You may have to adjust company policy so that it's available to all eligible to work from home.

[Ryme]

I tend to think one the next major working revolutions will be a reduction in office style jobs. I work from home every so often, absolutely nothing changes except I get to wake up a little later.

So long as productivity doesn't fall, which a quick google tells me it doesn't - it actually increases, I see no reason to stop it happening.

[Allybeboba]

I have people in my office that work from home quite often. They call in for meetings, do business via email, etc. It all depends on the business and the employee.

[Independent voter]

The thing about working from home is I tend to put in more hours at home than I do if I go to work. Also I get work related calls, texts well into my off time. If I go into work and leave at the end of the day I'm usually not bothered until I return to work the next day, no so at home.

[cuafpr]

give her a trail period but don't let her know its a trail period, if her performance slacks have a meeting to determine why, also ensure her connection and office set up is good for work.

I work from home sometimes and LOVE it. I'd forgo a small raise for it, as working from home full time would save me 120 +/- a month in gas, plus i could sleep about one hour more per day or so. I know when i do WFH i often get more done as I dont have people randomly stopping to chit chat about things. My setup would need improving for full time WFH, as in the office I use 3 monitors but just my laptop's screen when WFH, that i would change.

It also makes sense for a company to encourage this as people working from equals less need for office space, thus lower rent/utilities on said office space. I applied once for a WFH job where the team meet at most once a week and only maintained a small office with a receptionist and meeting room to save money. Outside of customer facing jobs there is no reason to have an office to me, esp in IT.

Oh the other caveat i'd have on it is that she can get to the office in 1hr's time if needed.