Allowing the employees to work from home can provide multiple benefits for an organization. Firstly, it can ensure a better work-life balance for employees, which can, in turn, impact their motivation and efficiency positively. Also, it can help employees get more out of a typical workday by saving the time usually spent commuting.

Most importantly, it can help organizations cut down on their real estate and overhead costs significantly. Therefore, tt can be a win-win situation for the organizations and their employees.

Read more about the Benefits of Work from Home for organizations as well as the employees.

The concept of Work from Home poses new challenges for organizations. The most important of these challenges are as follows:


1. Concerns over productivity

In fact, the biggest challenge faced by businesses in enabling work from home for their employees in maintaining their productivity and efficiency. The question being asked by organizations is whether employees can work at the same level of efficiency and dedication from home as compared to working from the office.


2. Availability of right digital tools

Organizations also need to make the right digital tools and infrastructure available to the employees to make it possible for them to work from home. Employees also need to be comfortable using these technologies and tools.


3. Internet connectivity

Internet connectivity is the most critical aspect for ensuring smooth work from home experience. In fact, arranging for a fast and stable internet connection can be a major challenge.


4. Teamwork and Collaboration

In fact, most organizations find it extremely difficult to understand how to maintain teamwork and collaboration between members of the workforce who are working remotely.


5. Employee Engagement

The other challenge posed to organizations when employees work alone from home is how to keep the employees engaged and sustain the organizational culture.

The above challenges make it difficult for organizations to adopt work from home as a permanent part of their operations strategy. However, thankfully most of these challenges can be overcome with proper planning and well thought through policies and processes.

Given below are some tips that can help organizations in this context and get the most from their work from home employees.





1. Enable a digital workplace

Organizations need to invest in the right digital tools and technologies required for the employees to work from home efficiently. In fact, organizations should digitize all possible business processes. They need to provide employees with digital tools such as virtual private networks (VPNs) web conferencing platforms, online document storage and sharing platforms and all other applications that they would normally have access to when they are operating from office. Remote technical support for these tools should also be made available.


2. Support for infrastructure and connectivity

Organizations need to formulate policies to address issues related to internet connectivity and infrastructure such as power backup so that the employees go for the best solutions available to them locally and then the expenses reimbursed. Also, a stable internet connection from a reliable service provider is the bare minimum.


3. Training and coaching

Additionally, organizations need to provide online training programs for employees for skill development and enhancement. This should be supplemented by coaching from their supervisors and other identified subject matter experts.


4. Regular communication

Also, organizations should make constant efforts to assuage anydiscomfort that their remote working employees may have through extensive communication.

Therefore, managers should conduct virtual team meetings, enable online informal interaction, recognize their efforts and achievements and provide support and guidance


5. Flexible working hours

Organizations need to adopt a more flexible approach towards the work schedules for their work from home employees. Hence, this would help employees with better work-life balance and maximize their productivity by adjusting their work timings.