Should You and Your Team Continue to Work Remotely? Pros and Cons

With vaccines out and workspaces returning to their “normal” flow, it’s a common consideration among team leaders whether to keep working from home. However, the answer to this question is a bit complicated, as there are specific pros and cons to working from home post-covid.

This article discusses the top advantages you can leverage and the most significant disadvantages you could face while working remotely after the pandemic. Let’s dive in.

Pros

Here are some pros of staying vital towards work-from-home after the pandemic.

Time savings

You or your team members don’t have to make time-consuming commutes to the workplace. The time you save can be used to do other productive stuff. For instance, if your commute takes 45 minutes, you can start working 45 minutes earlier if you work from home. In an 8-hour workday, 45 minutes make up a big chunk of the total time.

Cost savings

The cost of office space can be high, but with remote working, that cost can be greatly lowered. Because the majority of your team members will be working from home, you'll just need a tiny office space to hold occasional in-person meetings, which will save you a great deal of money!

Productivity

Team members who work from home tend to be more productive and time-efficient than in-office workers. That’s because homeworkers feel comparatively “at peace” than in-office workers. Furthermore, remote workers maintain a better work-life balance, enhancing their ability to stay sane and avoid workplace burnouts.

Cons

Here are some cons which you could face while working remotely.

Lack of trust

No matter how good online remote work systems get, they will always lag behind in-person communication and networking. Simply put, team members’ interactions with each other are much more meaningful and trustworthy when they’re sitting right next to each other. Furthermore, the administration has better control over who’s doing what in an in-office environment.

Informal interactions

Executives say they learn more about what’s going on in their workspaces by simply “wandering around” the office rather than formal meetings. However, these wandering-around interactions aren’t viable in a remote setting. To achieve this level of informal communication and evaluation, team members need to be in the office, with the administration looking after them from time to time.

Workplace safety

When your employees work in the office, you are in charge of the security systems they’re working on. They work on corporate computers that are monitored by your IT team for any security threats. However, when team members work from home, they usually work from laptops or desktop computers, which aren’t protected by the same level of corporate security. Data and information are much more prone to be leaked from their personal computers than the in-office devices.

That said, what about a hybrid solution?

There are specific pros and cons to working remotely; it could be a great idea to use a mixture of these infrastructures to make the most out of where businesses currently stand.

Simply put, you can let some of your team members work from home while asking the others to join you in the workspace. This system is viable, productive, and safe. That’s because you can still leverage the pros of remote work mentioned above while mitigating the cons. For instance, you can ask the team members who keep essential data and information in their computers to work in-office. At the same time, you can let other team members who don’t have any sensitive data that could be leaked work from home.

How to make work-from-home easier

You can take several measures to streamline the way your team works from home. To begin with, you should rely on the latest tools and pieces of software to conduct your remote work activities. Make sure your team has access to productivity tools that let them be productive while relying on a solid communication infrastructure at the same time.

Furthermore, you should make sure your team is well-trained to make the most out of the remote work tools they have access to. Arrange training sessions where they’re taught how to use various collaboration and productivity tools to make the most out of their work time.

The bottom line

Even though the pandemic is coming to an end, remote work is still a viable option due to the various pros it brings along. However, there are some cons as well that could limit the possibilities.

This article gives you an insight into the most prominent pros and cons of remote work while also throwing in a couple of strategies to make the most out of both systems.