what's in the place??

When I told my friend that I work with Plughr, a work flex organization which gives me an option to work from home and I am on a lookout  for a baby sitter, she first couldn’t  relate to it and very candidly said , “why do you need to do that when you are anyways are at home?”

Now lets not blame her  for this ,mostly you would find people joking around as WFH to be work for home than work from home and worse is that most of the times  its true. A great work flex model, if not practiced properly  fails to keep upto the real intention. Work from home can be a dream job for people like me who want to cut down on travelling to save it for more quality time with family and better output,  for you can’t beat the work engagement and concentration without collegues .Infact  when I got one , could only thank my brightest star for the that.But its not an easy ride and to make it happen the way it should ,one has to consciously put efforts to streamline the work. Office working always has its own advantage over virtual , where most of the intangible things like taking a break, amount of efforts, actual working hours put, need no explanation for its mostly visible .But the moment you are out of the visibility arena your work has to speak for you and further you have to make your self more vocal. Though technology has helped a lot in this front still there are areas which are not as transparent and that’s where the challenge lies.

Moreover work from home is just a change of place and not the schedule.Will you entertain your neighbor if you were in office then why should you when working from home? If you need groceries do it after office hours and not in your lunch break. Making a personal call should be limited to only urgent ones. Strong reporting and regular meeting is a wonderful way to let you manager know about your progress. At Plughr we have morning rhythm (con call) where we discuss our daily routine and that also keeps us on our toes for as an individual we are answerable towards our self defined milestones.Also regular webinars and weekly official visits helps building rapport with team member and collegues. Interesting all throughout working for technology companies before plugHR , I never got an opportunity to be so tech savvy as I am now. Credit goes to Go-to-meeting and  sykpe for never letting me feel that working from home can be boring .I also have found people complaining about no time limits to work, but that’s true for office jobs  as well.Why blame 'work from home' for that? Mostly the culprit is the time management, again a very crucial aspect for working remotely.Setting up a schedule and most importantly following it that way can be a great help too.

Another very important aspect is the acceptability of the model with employers and clients. I remember initially my client wasn’t comfortable enough with the work from home model and it took us some time to make him believe that it works. To sum up its very easy to falter in this model and most of the times its because we don’t practice the basic rules properly but the beauty is to follow it the right way and enjoy the benefits attached to it.