The Dangers of Working From Home

If these are the only dangers from working from home, I would take that over the dangers from working in an office. I haven't even given those dangers much thought, but I'll start with a few.

1) Commute - wasted time and energy sitting in traffic, plus added stress depending on amount of traffic. (not to mention all that gasoline!)

2) The walk-by - trying to get work done when anyone can just saunter over and ask you a question, or just shoot the sh*t.

3) Noise and smells - people playing music randomly, loud conversations, YouTube videos, someone eating a smelly burrito, chinese food

4) The cold starter - someone has a cold but feels fine or wants to show they got guts, spreads the cold to 50% of the office.

5) Constant trivialities - walkby hellos, lunch anyone?, who's driving?, peeing next to someone in the bathroom stall

Anything else to add?

This does a better job of illustrating the problems of credibility on a corporate blog. I mean, really, this company is selling you office space and is blogging about the downsides of working at home? I bet I could find lots of blog posts about the downsides of cooking at home on lots of restaurant blogs.

A sensationalist article title, for sure. My answers to the three "dangers" listed in the article:

No separation between home and work: in the late afternoon I shut down my computer and have a glass of wine and snacks with my wife. Work day is officially over.

The prevalence of distractions: earphones.

Lack of human interaction: I broke up my work day today by spending 90 minutes at our local shooting range with my wife and three friends. On Mondays and Thursdays I go on 2 to 3 hour hikes with several people. (Anyway, human contact is probably over rated :-)

The bottom line is that people should do whatever works for them. One caveat about working at home: you either really have to love your work or to have a strong work ethic.

The no separation between home and work in my case is more of a mental thing than a physical one. If I'm caught up in a problem, I tend to obsess on it no matter where I am and my ability to get away from a problem seems to be more about having satisfied my brain that I have some kind of solution or approach to it worked out than my physical location.

I just don't buy the "you won't be distracted in the office" argument. I work from home ~12 hours a week, and I find being in the office more distracting because people are constantly badgering me with questions. And I see plenty of other people wasting time talking around the proverbial water cooler.

Working from home requires discipline, especially when it comes to unplugging from work. When working from home, I try to provide a schedule of availability to my co-workers, so there's no expectation that I'm going to answer an email at 6:30 PM while I'm eating with my family. There are also days, however, that because of family schedules, that I work from, say, 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM, and folks know they can contact me 'til that point.

Wait, a company selling/leasing office space writes an article about how people shouldn't work from home?

Yawn.

What: Journal of Applied Psychology article about teleworking and professional isolation ...

Bottom line: The authors surveyed 261 professional-level teleworkers at a large corporation (80,000 workers) to study the effects of professional isolation, which is defined as a state of mind that one is out of touch with others in the workplace, on job performance and turnover intentions. Professional isolation led to lower job performance and lower turnover intentions. The effect on turnover intentions was contrary to expectations. The authors argue that this unexpected effect may be due to professionally isolated teleworkers losing faith in their skills and knowledge and their ability to find alternative employment. Another possible explanation may be that teleworkers face family or dual-career constraints due to which they telecommute as a way to maintain their job. Or it may be that those who telecommute enjoy its benefits more fully, so that despite professional isolation, they don’t seek employment elsewhere. The authors report other findings too. For instance, professional isolation led to even lower job performance for those who spent greater time teleworking and lesser time interacting face-to-face. In other words, the negative effect of professional isolation on job performance reduced for those who teleworked less as well as for those who engaged in extensive face-to-face. To reduce professional isolation, the authors make several suggestions. One of the suggestions is to include structuring activities between coworkers to ensure sufficient levels of task and social exchanges, so as to build and strengthen interpersonal connections while achieving work objectives.

Source: http://www.leadingvirtually.com/?p=157 , which is a great blog on all aspects of remote work.

There are plenty of distractions in an office as well -- chitchat, meetings, poor environment not under your control (e.g. too hot or too cold) and noise. You do need to be disciplined because there's none of the peer pressure that arises from being around other people who are busy working. Additionally, I'd only work from home if living in a big city, in order to combat isolation. In a city you have access to people, whether by interspersing meetings into your day or simply stepping outside, and this combats isolation. I would not enjoy working at home in the suburbs.

Just short of a self-serving advertisement. As someone who has worked at home for a substantial portion of my <redacted> years long career, and have managed teams that work exclusively at home, what works is 1) have an office with a door that closes and make sure even the most slow-to-learn family member knows to treat the closed door as you being out at the office 2) I have found more distractions in corporate workspaces than at home. See #1 for reducing distractions 3) Find or build a community that is refreshing--it is likely to be better for you in any case.

There are certainly some office situations that are impossible to duplicate from home, even with lots of electronic communication, however. They are quite rare in my <redacted> experience.

This is very, very true. I worked on a start up for a friend of mine years ago, and I lived in his guest room. I woke up, rolled out of bed, walked 2 feet to my desk, and coded for my 4 hours work day, then some at night, and it was exhausting. I know, that sounds crazy, 4 hour work days and being exhausted, but when you work where you sleep you get pretty confused. The 4 hour work day was mostly due to distractions: video games, walking in the woods, arguing with cofounder about randomness. On top of that, where we were was so isolated (about 16 miles from civilization) so I never really saw anyone but my cofounder. Things got tense sometimes, and there was no one to vent to.

hey guys-

i do freelance social media for sunshine as one of many, many freelance projects that i have, and one of the fringe benefits of putting in a few hours a week for sunshine is that i get to work out of either of the Manhattan locations. it's a bit of trek, since if i'm at home i'm in astoria and if i'm with my girlfriend i'm in greenpoint, but i've found that the act of getting up and actually going in to a desk space, rather than saying 'yup, gonna start working" at arbitrarily assigned time, even figuring in the hour of transit.

it's true that a lot of the same distractions, or rather variations on such, can exist in a co-working space. annoyingly loud phone calls, bothers from home, cat videos on the internet (sooo many cat videos. SO. MANY.).

but in a co-working space, every distraction is an opportunity, really-someone COULD be bothering you to see if you do graphic design, because they're looking for someone to do their business cards. and i've found those opportunities outweigh the negatives? because when it comes to stuff like not slacking around on the internet, that's still a temptation anywhere-may as well place yourself smack dab in the middle of networking opportunities.

that's just my two cents-i'd probably STILL be working from home if my work at sunshine hadn't introduced me to Coworking with a capital "C", but, honestly, I've tried to work from home and it just doesn't happen.

We live in the best networking city in the world as far as I am concerned and the last thing I want to do is stay at home when opportunity is out there. I am currently working out of Sunshine Suites @ Tribeca West and I got to tell you I really benefit from meeting a ton of entrepreneurs, in fact I just heard a lecture in one of the conference rooms about social media law really helpful.

You could easily argue these points the other direction. To me the office environment is really distracting. I focus better at home. If I had my own sound proof office at work with a big, lockable, door I'd probably get an equal level of focus but that's becoming a rarity in the cubicle environment for most people. Ideally a mix of both works best. I like having the option.

They forgot to mention one of the dangers of working from an office : paying exorbitant rent that you could save by working from home.

Hard-line 9-to-5 sucks much worse than working from home, but the best is to have an office available with flexible hours. I think the optimum is somewhere around 20-30 office hours plus 20-30 work-from-home hours.

One of the lingering benefits of old-style work environments is the idea that a corporation is invested in your career development; you're their employee. In practice, a lot of corporations ignore this responsibility, but that's another topic... If you work from home, it becomes more visibly evident (or at least seems to be) that you're just providing services in exchange for money; there isn't even the pretense of that sense of responsibility.