The first reaction I usually get when I tell somebody that I work from home is usually “Wow, I’m jealous!” Thoughts of comfy sweatpants and flexibility are usually the first things popping into peoples’ minds – and you can’t really blame them for that.
The reality though is that working from home carries with it some downsides that people don’t usually think about. Here are some of the not-so-great parts of this working arrangement that you may not see mentioned in job descriptions, or think about before jumping into a WFH position.
Table of Contents
- Cabin fever is real; you’ll probably leave your house a lot less
- You’re more likely to overwork yourself
- There can be a disconnect with fellow employees
- Distractions are everywhere
- You’re paying for your home office
- Assumptions can be frustrating
- Working from home isn’t without its downsides
Cabin fever is real; you’ll probably leave your house a lot less
As somebody that’d label themselves somewhat of an introverted extrovert, the idea of not needing to leave the house is something that sounds like much more of a pro than a con more times than not.
…Until it isn’t. The sudden realization at the grocery store that this is the first time you’ve left the house this week isn’t exactly great. When you’re set up with a work from home gig, making sure you leave the house becomes a responsibility that’s 100% your own to manage and take care of.
You don’t have coworkers you’re meeting with in-person on a daily basis – you may even have a team that’s spread across the country (or several countries), so post-work happy hours definitely won’t be happening. In fact, if your team’s spread out, you probably won’t be making friends you physically see outside of working hours at all whatsoever.
As a millennial that’s been working from home for close to 10 years now, let me be the first to tell you if you haven’t heard it already: it’s so much easier to make friends and develop a social life through work. They’re right there. You don’t need to make an excuse to talk to a stranger, you’ve already got common ground, and probably at least a sort of familiarity with each other.
In my case, most of my friends from college either went back to their hometowns further away from where I’m currently at, or accepted jobs in places too far away to easily pop by and visit. Friends I’ve made at my job live scattered across the country, and while it’s amazing to make a weekend trip out of flying to Texas to see a coworker, or driving up to New York to see another, the reality of life is that that’s simply not something that will happen often.
Traditional jobs typically result in employees living within a certain radius of the job, and your coworkers likely work shifts similar to your own, if not the exact same ones. These two factors come together to make it much easier to make friends than you may realize until you’re working from home without these perks.
Maintaining a healthy social life when you’re working from home requires a lot more intent and effort. If you don’t already have a strong friend group through a significant other, previous job, hobbies, or school, you’ll need to really put yourself out there to make one. Whether that’s by picking up social hobbies, or going out of your way to talk to your neighbors, the burden is completely on you to make that happen without the common ground of a traditional workplace.
Oh, and make sure you leave your house more than once a week. Please. It doesn’t matter how great your home office setup is, at some point, it’ll start to feel like a box you only leave to eat and sleep. Walking to the kitchen should not be your only change of scenery for the day.
You’re more likely to overwork yourself
Employer resistance to work from home setups typically centers around a common refrain that you may have heard before: our employees will be less productive!
I mean, just think about it, employees will be subjected to all sorts of distractions (more on this later) from home! They may be tempted to do tasks around their house instead of working! We can’t have a manager supervising them to make sure they’re working the whole time!
False. False, false, false.
A Standford study pointed out productivity increases of up to 13% that resulted from shifting to work from home arrangements. More studies will come out on this topic in time no doubt, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the average increase in productivity ended up being more than 13%. Here’s why.
You have no commute
Your commute to a home office is nonexistent, and that’s great. Unless you’re missing your alarm in the morning, chances are you’ll be at your desk right when your shift starts after having completed whatever morning rituals you may have. When it’s time to pack up for the day, the process is as simple as shutting down your computer and heading into another room.
While the lack of commute is no doubt one of the bigger perks of working from home, it’s also the biggest trap for overworking.
When you’ve got a decent drive from work to make it home, you’re more likely to try and get out of the office in a timely manner to compensate for that drive and make the most of your few hours at home before bedtime. That doesn’t exist in a work from home setup.
Sure, your shift may technically end at 5:00 PM, but you’re already home, what’s a few more minutes to finish up a task you’re working on? Before you know it it’s nearing 6:00 PM and you’ve stayed an extra hour having lost track of time. This time quickly adds up to result in more working hours.
That’s without even touching the constantly-connected nature of working from home.
You’re always connected to your work
Picture this: It’s a Saturday afternoon. You’re enjoying your day, when suddenly you get an email from a client with a request. Nothing pressing is going on, and your office is just a room away you figure, so you shrug and head in to handle the task for your client without even thinking about it.
This kind of thing happens so much more than you would ever expect.
When your office is just across the hallway, it seems like no problem to “hop on for a sec” and handle whatever pops up. This, in turn, communicates to the people you’re working with that you’re willing to respond to requests at all hours, which itself encourages them to do it more.
Let me tell you from experience: once you’ve got people convinced you’ll respond to any and everything they send in a super timely manner with no regard for your personal time, it’s very very hard to reverse it.
Even if the task doesn’t involve heading to your home office, the temptation to be responding to emails, slack messages, and tasks on your phone – which you’ve likely got on you at all times – is constantly present.
Compare this to a traditional work setup where your tools for your job are all locked in one place that you don’t have access to after working hours. It’s much easier in this kind of scenario to clock out and leave your work at the door when you leave.
You don’t have a watercooler
While not having coworkers you’re physically interfacing with is one of the downsides of working from home, it’s also something that helps with productivity. With no coworkers occupying the same space, it’s much harder to get to chatting about the latest events, office gossip, or much anything else – this leads to more working time.
Working from home, conversations with coworkers are instead chat bubbles that you can dismiss until you’re ready to look at them, or notifications you can ignore until a certain task is completed.
You’re not going to spend an hour of your day in a lounge or part of the office singing happy birthday to Brenda and eating cake a coworker brought in for her. You’re not going to be leaning over and talking to the person sitting next to you about what you did that weekend.
All of this leads to more time spent with your head in the game and working, which itself deprives you of (sometimes necessary) breaks, and increases the amount of work you get done in a way a traditional office can’t quite accomplish.
There can be a disconnect with fellow employees
As mentioned above, working face-to-face with your fellow employees is definitely a perk of the traditional office setup insofar as maintaining a social circle goes. Making things worse, the lack of face time with your coworkers can also lead to disconnects on a personal level.
You’re missing out on a lot of context
If you’ve ever had a conversation over text with somebody that went bad fast because of a misinterpretation, you may be familiar with the sort of disconnect that can happen with remote employees.
In a traditional office setup with built-in face-to-face time with your fellow employees you’ve got expressions, tone, and gestures; all of the little things we look at to put together the picture of not only what the person in front of you is saying, but also the why and how.
Due to its nature, digital conversations (not counting video chat, more on that in a sec) replace expressions, tone, and gestures with things like punctuation, message length, and emojis. Considering the ambiguity there, it’s super obvious how things may be misinterpreted.
Video chat has its own issues
Some employers turn to video chat to introduce some of that needed face time with employees in a digital workspace, but that’s not always the solution it may be thought to be.
Don’t get me wrong, it can be great to put a face to a name, and a voice to text, but video chat always carries with it a somewhat manufactured setting that’s not without its own downsides:
Connection speed: If you’ve ever done a video chat in your life, you’re probably familiar with (and dread) the phrases “am I frozen?” and “you’re frozen.” Connection speed impacts video and audio quality and can interrupt serious conversations. Your coworker you’re trying to converse with suddenly isn’t Molly from HR, but instead a pixelated nightmare that blurs and turns into glitchy squares with every little movement.
The delay: You know the speech delay. Somebody talking at the moment appears to open up a part of the conversation for you to take part, only for the inevitable, awkward overlapping of people talking at once. “No, go ahead,” “you go first,” and “sorry, go ahead” are quickly mumbled by all participating parties, and suddenly you’re in a verbal traffic jam that calls everything else to a halt.
The manufactured nature of it all: Anyone who’s ever taken a selfie in their life understands the impact that lighting and angles can have on the final result; video chats are no different. Seeing your face in a little box in the corner of your discussion is a distraction that can absolutely impact a conversation. Imagine having a conversation in person with somebody, but the entire time you were talking, he or she was holding up a mirror pointed at you. That’s a little awkward, isn’t it? Add on the weird green screen type backgrounds, filters, and effects, and you’ve suddenly got a pretty manufactured-feeling conversation on your hands.
Distractions are everywhere
The traditional office is full of distractions in the form of coworkers and meetings that could have been emails, but a home office can bring distractions to a whole different level.
Many people that work from home do so with dogs; it’s undoubtedly one of the biggest perks of working from home. I absolutely love my dogs, but I would be lying if I said they weren’t a distraction sometimes. Nice day out? There’s temptation to get a good walk in. Need to teach a puppy a new trick? Sure, handle that between emails. Been a minute since the pup was outside? Better take 5 to give them a potty break.
Beyond dogs though, you’ve also got your standard house chores that seem reasonable to accomplish between tasks. It feels like nothing to throw some laundry in the washer partway through your shift. You’ve got a full kitchen available to you at home, so the appeal of cooking up something a bit better than a brown-bag lunch is there.
The list goes on and on, but the point is a pretty simple one: while yes, it’s reasonable to do some of these things during the course of the day, the cumulative time spent on each thing can definitely add up fast.
Making sure that you’re getting all of your work done without a manager peeking over your shoulder is a skill that’s developed over time, and needs to be consistently reinforced. If you find yourself overwhelmed by the freedom and not tending to the duties you’re being paid for, you’ll need to put a conscious effort into making sure you fix that. If you can’t, working from home may not work out for you.
You’re paying for your home office
A huge perk of traditional office setups that tends to be overlooked is the fact that your employer typically covers the cost of everything you need to do business. While some employers will maybe set you up with a company computer, many don’t, and the list of expenses that would have been covered before is now yours to shoulder.
Here are a few expenses you’ll be responsible for while working from home:
- The internet you use to get your work done
- Your computer itself, if not covered by an employer
- Your desk
- Your desk chair
- A webcam and/or mic for virtual meetings
- Any extra utilities (heat/cooling/electricity) to compensate for an extra person being home all day
These are just the more immediate common-sense type expenses, but there are others.
Your office space
If you’re somebody that’s likely to stick with their work from home job for a long time, or plan on only looking for careers compatible with this working arrangement, chances are you’ll want a dedicated office space at some point if you don’t have one. Even when housing prices aren’t as insane as they currently are, the requirement of an extra room or space for working will without a doubt add to the overall cost of buying or renting a house that wouldn’t be there if you worked in a traditional office.
The extra room paid for and taken into consideration, you also have to take into account the cost of heating and cooling an extra room for 40ish hours a week. Many people save on utility bills by setting their thermostats higher in the summer and lower in the winter during the workday since nobody is home to be impacted by the temperature; if you’re working from home, you’re going to want a comfortable office, so that money-saving option isn’t available to you.
Internet
Internet is another expense that seems fine on the surface, but gets more involved when you consider it through the lens of working from home. With more and more internet providers adding monthly data caps to their service, you’ll need to account for all of the extra data you use during the course of your workday being connected for 8+ hours extra each day.
If your ISP doesn’t have data caps to keep aware of – great! That’s one less thing to worry about, but how does your speed look?
If your work from home gig includes lots of video chats, or file uploads/downloads, you’re likely going to want an internet package that offers higher speeds than you’d typically need for home entertainment purposes. Higher speeds, of course, come at a higher cost. All in all, you’ll likely be paying more for internet than you would have been if you didn’t work from home.
Miscellaneous expenses
The big expenses aside, there’s no shortage of miscellaneous expenses you’ll find yourself responsible for if you work from home.
Assuming your employer doesn’t cover the cost of your computer, it’s completely on you to handle its maintenance and the maintenance of its components. Mice and keyboards break and need replacing, but instead of putting in an order with the right department to have it fixed, you’ll be the one that needs to make sure that’s handled.
Is your office chair worn out? You’ll need to eat that cost, and office chairs generally aren’t very cheap.
Looking to upgrade to a standing desk so that you’re not sitting all day? Another expense to jot down in the “your responsibility” column.
All of these expenses can add up pretty quickly. Sure, you’re saving money on gas by not commuting, but all in all, you’re likely going to end up spending more (usually quite a bit more) than you save.
Assumptions can be frustrating
If I had a dollar for every time (before the pandemic, anyway) I’ve had to defend the fact that working from home is still indeed working, I’d be a much wealthier person. While the pandemic did in fact open some eyes to the realities of working from home, the truth of the matter is that there are still quite a few misconceptions floating around.
To some people, working from home is somehow viewed as lesser; you’re getting less work done than normal, the importance of that work is less, and the stakes of missing work are less. Obviously, none of these things are true, but it doesn’t change the fact that some people that haven’t been exposed to the concept themselves maintain these assumptions.
I’ve encountered this personally more times than I can count. From requests to do things during the day with a dismissive, “You work from home, just go do it” to equally-frustrating accusations like, “You have all the time in the world to do whatever you want, you work from home.”
From babysitting to running errands for people, there’s this sort of built-in assumption from people that don’t quite get it that you working from home equates to unlimited time and freedom in a way that just isn’t there in a traditional work setup.
Likewise, there’s the assumption this whole article started out with: working from home is great and cushy with no downsides!
I’d like to think I’ve illustrated, at least in part, why that isn’t the case, but the assumption will undoubtedly live on until more people are exposed to it. There are genuine, difficult downsides to working from home that most people don’t see.
Working from home isn’t without its downsides
To say that working from home doesn’t have any downsides would, simply, be a lie. The scenario people usually think of when they think about working from home is one that emphasizes this unrivaled freedom and the best of everything. It’s the ideal.
The reality, especially when it comes to the pieces of it people don’t typically consider, is a lot different from the fantasy people tend to spin up for themselves.
This isn’t to say that working from home isn’t ideal – quite the opposite, I personally believe that working from home is the best working setup when it’s possible, and wouldn’t be interested in ever going back to a traditional office if I had the option.
That doesn’t negate the fact that we need to remain aware of the downsides and trickier parts of this unique working arrangement, and also help to let others know about them too.
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