Quote:
Originally Posted by cheswick
I've read a study that people who work from home generally work longer hours and have less of a work life balance. They lack a separation between what's work time and home time and that fuzzy line causes them to work longer. Where as people who go into work find it easier to shut off work when they are away from work. Personally I've seen it from many colleagues. Now emails are coming my way well outside of work hours where as before they would not be.
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As I said in my more recent post, you need to treat work as work and life as life, even if they now take place in the same location. If you treat the whole experience as 1 thing then its not a healthy balance, either for life or work.
If you're waking up 5 minutes before you start, rolling out of bed in your PJ's and sitting at your home computer to work then it wont feel much like work and really begins to impact your mental health. You
need to treat work as work and home as home or the balance between the two will never be found. For example, I wake up every day at nearly the same time I used to for work (no longer need to commute so I can sleep for an extra 30), grab some breakfast, have a shower, and wear my regular clothes (not sweat pants and a stained tshirt).
I'm not naive enough to pretend that this transition will be easy for everyone, this is a MAJOR shift in how we do our jobs and how we view what a job is and how it functions. Your example is probably a fairly common one, and one that companies will likely try to take advantage of. However, as I tell my team "If you're not being paid don't work". Work from home doesn't mean that the boundaries of 9-5 are no longer valid just because you have a workstation on hand at all times. If you're being paid for OT work then that's up to you and your company on how much you should be working beyond your regular expectations.
A couple of really interesting responses have come out of this and it really shows the full scope of how this is a balance between both work and life.
- If you treat work like home time and don't clean yourself up or prepare yourself, your work performance and engagement will suffer.
- If you don't abide by 9-5 and set boundaries on when you start and end, then your personal time will fade into 24/7 work time.
Both of these will negatively impact your mental/physical health and really highlights how this isn't just a matter of moving where you're working from. Its up to both you and your employer to make sure that the balance is found and maintained. You can't treat work like a Saturday on your computer, and your employer cant treat you like a 24/7 on-call employee (unless that's part of your job previously and you're being compensated properly)
P.S. would you happen to have a link to that study? I'd love to read it
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