Recently, research found that most Hongkongers work for 44.3 hours per week, which is higher than the standard of healthy working hours. The poor work-life balance of Hongkongers starts to spark a lot of discussion. There are a lot of suggested ways to halt the unhealthy trend, including having a home office. Is this really a way out for all those workaholics in Hong Kong?
Undoubtedly, working at home provides employees with greater flexibility in scheduling. They can decide their own timing and accommodate tasks that need to be accomplished. They also spend less time on travelling. In a cosmopolitan city like Hong Kong, thousands of people waste time on traveling to and from work. With a home office, they can save the travelling time and spend it on other aspects, such as having supper with family and friends. It also allows working parents to spend more time with their children. The less they worry about their children, the more concentration and productivity at work. It helps them to strike a better balance between work and life.
Working at home also creates a more relaxing and comfortable working environment. Research found that a relaxing working environment helps boost employees’ performance. Emotional disorders, like anxiety and depression, are more likely to be developed under stress. A comfortable working environment helps relieve workers’ stress and improve their moods. They can take a short rest or have some light refreshment whenever they like. It helps improve their mental health, leading to a better quality of life.
On top of the advantages mentioned above, mobile workers are also allowed to wear casual wear during work, unless there is a web-cam conference. People can thus save expenses on clothing since they no longer need to buy formal suits or smart casual clothes so often anymore. Wearing comfortable clothes can actually increase productivity in return. Since they no longer need to travel from home to work, transportation expenses are saved. In other words, having a home office can help people to save a considerable amount of money.
However, there are some drawbacks of having a home office as well.
Working at home requires a high level of self-discipline and self-motivation. People who lack self-discipline may not be able to finish tasks on time since there is no pressure to start work at a time. It is very easy to put work off. There are also many kinds of temptation and distraction at home, such as the evil bed. People may easily get distracted, instead of focusing on work. Tasks that would otherwise take 15 minutes can end up taking up a lot more time. The circumstance is even worse when it comes to someone who has a habit of hitting the snooze alarm.
Another disadvantage of working at home is lack of human interaction. The only thing you encounter and interact with at work is the computer. Staying in such a relaxing and colleague-free environment for too long may lead to a decline in competitive spirit. Having colleagues and peers helps keep the competitive spirit alive, and thus enhance the productivity. Building up a good and extensive social network is also crucial at the workplace. Working at home may also make it difficult for workers to build a strong bond with colleagues and a sense of belonging to the company.
In conclusion, having a home office helps workers to have a better work-life balance, a more relaxing working environment and more savings while it may result in delay in accomplishing tasks and a lack of human interaction. In fact, the long working hours in Hong Kong is quite worrying. It is an urgent issue to be solved. Therefore, introducing a pilot scheme of home offices in some companies can be a way out to test if it can really alleviate the problem of poor work-life balance in Hong Kong.