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Originally Posted by Torture
I disagree. Obviously it depends on the workplace but I have seen lots of employees told "you can't work from home" because their manager simply doesn't trust or believe that work can be done efficiently from home.
At a lot of companies those managers have been proven wrong. That doesn't mean that those managers won't still be old fashioned, but employees probably won't buy the argument that they can't get their work done from home because they've already demonstrated they could!
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There's a huge financial incentive for companies to encourage people to work from home. Rent, facilities, furniture, etc. are big expenses. Why would profit-driven companies continue to spend so much money on those resources if they didn't have evidence that it was worthwhile?
We have 15 years of data from people working from home, including major companies that encouraged telecommuting for much of their workforce. When the results came in it turned out most teams simply aren't as productive, regardless of how they feel.
If you you have a job where you have a 100 hours of work to do by yourself without interacting with others, and you're the kind of person who can shut off all distractions at home and put your nose to the grindstone for 8 hours, then sure, you might be as productive. But that doesn't describe most jobs and most people in a modern, collaborate knowledge economy.
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In 2009, IBM reported that 40% of its 386,000 employees in 173 countries were working remotely. That policy allowed IBM to sell off its office buildings at a gain of almost $2 billion. Hailed as a savvy business strategy, the trend of telecommuting was soon in full swing.
Impressive, right? Why then, in March of this year, did IBM pull thousands of its workers back into the workplace? Was it the desperate move of a company whose profits had fallen, as some pundits suggest? Or might it be the result of something else - something that has triggered companies like Yahoo, Aetna and Best Buy to also pull back their work-from-home home policies, and corporations like Apple and Google to pass on the concept of telecommuting in the first place?
Consider, for instance, the increasing emphasis on collaboration and the corresponding realization that any collaborative effort is highly dependent upon well-developed personal relationships among participants. While remote workers might be highly efficient with individual efforts, nothing builds collaborative relationships better than being physically present.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolki.../#851064c16da2
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