Out of the Office: The Working from Home Debate

At the recent South by Southwest festival, wellness experts convened to discuss work environments in a talk entitled “Your Desk Job Makes You Fat, Sick and Dead”. This was part of a larger discussion series, aiming to highlight how corporate wellness begins with employee physical, emotional and environmental wellbeing, and this is the incentive that flexible work arrangements, such as working from home, offers.

Moderator Cali Williams Yost, CEO of Work+Life Fit Inc. which is a business that provides consultation and resources for navigating work-life balance, noted that companies such as Yahoo and Best Buy Co are ending location and schedule flexibility for most employees. She said, ‘We could not have planned to have this panel at a better time. Physically and mentally, a lot of us are not doing very well the way we are working currently, and what that does then is it carries into the workplace.’ She continued, ‘We can’t be as creative and innovative and engaged if we aren’t our best physically and emotionally, and that all interacts together to make us and our organisations fat, sick and dead.’

According to Yost, the media tends to cover the extremes of entirely in-office or out-of-office schedules, but a hybrid model, what she refers to as “workshifting,” is a solution that suits many businesses. ‘There needs to be a much more expansive way to think about how, when and where we work, and one way to think about it more expansively is workshifting and really finding the optimal time and place for business and people,’ she said.

Global Workplace Analytics recently showed that 36% of employees would choose increased flexibility over a raise, while a separate study of technology professionals revealed that 37% would even have a 10% pay-cut, if that meant they could work from home. Kate Lister, the president of Global Workplace Analytics, argued, ‘By avoiding the commute just half of the time, a typical employee can gain back 13 days, equivalent work days, that they would have otherwise spent playing in traffic, and they can save between $2,000 and $7,000 per year. Again, this is just half of the time not going to the typical office.’

Leah Brinkmeyer, a Chicago-based marketing executive, attested to the employee-employer benefits of workshifting, ‘The biggest thing is if the company allows for flexibility, then they also have strong values and have high regard for family-work balance. My family is No. 1 in my life, and since they respect that, I find myself bending over backwards for them and being very loyal to them — even if our raises are minimal to none.’