居家工作的优势是否更大Are the Benefits of Working from Home Greater?

Working from home has changed in a few years from an unusual arrangement into an ordinary one. In my view its advantages are greater, although this depends a great deal on the type of work and on how experienced the worker is. The clearest advantage is the time that is saved. A journey of an hour each way uses about ten hours a week. That time is not simply lost; it is also unpleasant, which is why people who stop travelling to work often report feeling much better than the saved hours alone would explain. A second advantage is control. Offices force everyone into the same daily rhythm, and this suits some people badly. At home, someone who thinks clearly early in the morning can use that time for difficult work instead of spending it on a train. The main disadvantage is the loss of unplanned contact. A great deal of useful information moves around an office informally: a remark overheard, a quick question, a small misunderstanding corrected before it grows. None of this happens in a calendar. The cost falls most heavily on people who are new to a job, because they learn by watching others and by asking questions that are too small to arrange a meeting for. That disadvantage is real, but it seems to me easier to solve than the alternative. Companies can bring people together on purpose, with a fixed day each week or longer periods together for new staff, and recover much of what is lost. Nothing similar can be done about a daily journey. For most experienced workers in most office jobs, therefore, the advantages clearly outweigh the disadvantages, provided that employers take the isolation of newer colleagues seriously.