The last few weeks have been quite busy for me, juggling tight deadlines at work with the stresses and struggles of buying my first apartment...
Well, the work deadlines and the apartment are sorted now, but I couldn’t have done it without the flexibility my employer offered me during this period.
This flexibility I am referring to is working from home... and I truly believe that you will not fully appreciate the benefits until you need to work from home yourself. I was able to save the travel time to work, sort out what I needed to do with regard to the apartment and complete the projects required at work by the deadlines.
Working from home not only benefits the Employee, it also benefits the Employer.
Some of the commonly reported benefits of having a Home-Based Agent programme include:
- Access to a wider resource pool that you would not usually access (e.g. work from home parents, regional/rural communities)
- Improved staff morale and retention
- Improved productivity of staff
- Improved service response to customer needs
- Reduced travelling times for employees
- Improved work-life balance
With so many benefits and proven cases of the concept working across the world, it puzzles me as to why only one in ten contact centres in Asia allow agents to work from home.
Western countries such as the US and Australia have higher adoption rates of Home-Based Agent programmes and this looks set to continue to grow and attract increasing support from senior executives in 2012.
With the relevant OH&S and Security measures, working from home makes logical sense and should be the direction that the contact centre industry in Asia head towards.
Comments
challenges, blurring of boundaries between work and home. I find that the people who are advocating working from home are commonly people who've never done it. There are some people and circumstances for whom this can work well, and the flexibility to do it
on an occasional basis is great, but I've worked from a home base for 18 years of my career, and in an office for the last 4 years. For work life balance, better work relationships, access to resources, clearer boundaries between work and life ... give me
the office any day.
organisation will need to assess the suitability of working from home depending on the skill sets required and where they can access the human resources for these skill sets. With the industry continuously growing there is a continuing need to find other avenues
of attracting staff - the flexibility of working from home is one method, where it allows the organisations to access human resources that they may not have been able to access if working from home was not available - i.e. parents with children at home, rural
and regional workers, the disabled, etc. Ofcourse organisations also need to consider many many other factors apart from human resources - IT, Security, OHS etc. In the 10+ years that I have been visiting and assessing contact centres across the Asia-Pacific
region I have seen instances of where working from home will work and where it won't work. The key thing that stands out for me where it'll work from a employee engagement perspective, in order to overcome the common fears of isolation of workers, loss of
corporate culture and relationships, is to regularly 'touch' the @home employees. This can be done through virtual meetings, telephone/video calls, face-to-face meetings in the office, and also social events during or out of work hours, to name a few. All
these initiatives will assist in alleviating the issues of employee engagement from working from home. By no means will working from home be successful if you do not engage with your employees regularly. Ultimately it also depends on the employee and whether
they are suited to working from home. From our research we have found that generally the older, mature workers are more suited to working from home. And like yourself, sometimes you will never know if working from home is for you until you try it - I, personally
myself, cannot do it on a full-time basis, like you said the flexibility to work from home on an occasional basis is great. Kind Regards William