The advent of employees working from home has been a challenge for companies and employees alike. Over the last 15 years, many fortune 500 companies have strongly encouraged their sales representatives to work from their homes. Of course, working from home is not suited to everyone.

Some companies will agree to their employees working from home if there are checks and balances in place. For example, an agreement between the company and the employee may require that the employee log in and out at the start and end of their shift and record projects they are working on.

Here are some advantages and disadvantages to this arrangement:

Advantages:

Time with the kids – A parent with small children will get time to spend with them and help in their development. There many successful businesses who have adopted the idea of employees working from home with great results. Some examples include: mom bloggers, many of whom balance blogging and recommending company products and also taking care of little kids, sales reps of major pharmaceutical conglomerates and technology companies to name a few.

Travel time –When working from home, you don’t have to contend with traffic or gridlock. Also the damage to the environment with all these cars on the road is insurmountable. Millions of people commute to work each day, spending numerous hours on the road, all of which has an adverse effect on their health.

Flexibility – You can choose which tasks need to be accomplished based on its deadline. Someone who is disciplined can get more done while working at home with no distractions from colleagues.

Disadvantages:

Personal chores – It takes someone with a great amount of discipline to work from home and ignore tasks such as; doing laundry, going out for a two hour coffee break with a friend, grocery shopping or watching their favourite soap operas for a few hours.

Human interaction – The lack of human interaction will be hard for some employees to get use to. The daily ritual of meeting at each other’s office cubicle to discuss who got booted off the latest reality TV series can be a stress relief for some people. Trying to replicate these activities through a teleconference with co-workers is next to impossible when working from home.

Temptation Island – There are a range of other distractions for anyone who is working from home. If expectations are not set between the employer and the employee it’s easy for the employee to slack off. Productivity can suffer since there is no pressure to start work at a certain time or dress a certain way.

To read more about our business automation telecommuting tools, go to our website. You can follow us on Twitter or sign up to participate to in our monthly webinars. The next one is schedule for January 2012.