The development of ICT has direct effect on improving quality of employment and community ways of living. One of these effect pose by development in ICT is the increase in new ways of establishing work and one of them is remote working.
Remote working can be seen as work flexibility arrangement under which an employee achieve the responsibilities of such employee's and other activities from the employer in an approved worksite other than the traditional location from which the employee would otherwise work.
Remote working can also be seen as a kind of work process that keep workers to do their job activities from distance or out of work surrounding.
The advent of covid-19 has pushed some business owners and other employer of labour to adopt the remote working system in which there are now trying to accept as a new normal.
While some aspect of job can be done remotely, there some that requires the presence of the worker in the working environment. Some studies find out that productivity will not not be deterred by shift to remote work, other studies are of different opinion that a shift to remote work will have effects on the productivity of the employees.
According to ADP research, a US based labour market analyst, which is of different opinion that a shift to remote work will have a negative effect on productivity says: Getting back in to the office might be the best thing for many people, their employers and for productivity.
Its report, onsite, remote, or hybrid says: "On the whole, employees working onsite enjoy crucial advantage over their counter parts".
Remote work as a concept will have both positive and negative effects on the employees productivity and these are as follows :
The positive are:
➡ Higher productivity because of less distraction. With remote work, employees can avoid many distractions such as unimportant meetings, office gossip, casual phone call and interruption from coworkers. If there are no distractions at home like personal calls household chores, work productivity can be dramatically increased with remote work.
How ever, some employees might have challenges with personal time management when there are out of the office. For employers, it is recommended to organize time management courses or coaching for such employees to make sure they reach their full productivity potential.
Negative are:
➡ Longer working day. According to ADP report, remote employee have on average, a longer working day. For many, home-schooling and child care responsibilities may also have led to disruption during regular business hours, and need to catch up on work in the evening. "Parents returning to onsite work can look forward to a more focused and shorter working ", ADP says in its report.
➡ Distraction at home and losing work-life balance. When working remotely there are no office distraction, but on the other hand a remote worker can face a whole bunch of new distractions, especially working from home - like kids, pets, hobbies, TV and so on.
When working remotely, it might also be harder to find the right balance between business and personal life. This is especially dangerous for workaholics. If you are working constantly without proper breaks any kind of work-life balance, productivity declines faster in the long run.
More so, adopting remote work by the employer will reduce the rate at which the employees will be competing with each other for promotion and this will decrease the productivity potential of the employees.
More to this, is doing work half the time and spending the other half being with families or having fun. When working remotely, it makes sense to be 100% at work with full focus during working hours and being completely free during non-working hours.
In conclusion, it can be view that the negative effects of remote work outweighs the positive effect. And going by this, it is best to say that accepting remote work as a new normal will affect the employees productivity.
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