You should spend about 40 minutes on this task.
Many people nowadays work from home and this has been possible mainly because of the advancement of computer and internet technology. What are the effects on employees of working from home?
Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.
You should write at least 250 words.
Sample Answer 1:
It is a fact that many employees insist their employees to work from home these days and this is due to the fact that advancement in technology has made is possible for many employees, especially related to IT and communication sectors, to work from anyplace. The work culture has been drastically changed from last decades. People can work from any avenue and at any time. Let’s discuss the effects on this trend in detail.
Firstly, the advancement of technology has made it possible for most of the people to work from different parts of the globe. An unavoidable fact is that the percentage of people working from home has been drastically increased in recent days. These factors affect positively for collaborating the resources all the time. Moreover, the efforts of work will not be diversified due to lack of resource availability. The most important feature of advancement in technology is collaboration, this is seen as one way of collaboration the resources.
In addition to the above fact, the people can easily attend meetings and respond to the calls or assist team members, if any major issue’s encountered in the system. Most likely, people tend to work more productively without the intervention of human or environmental barriers. In fact, the workload can be planned properly and can report to the respective teams for the deliverable. Nowadays people cannot relax as the fact they work from home, it can trace easily by many advanced tools which track the status of people’s availability. The most observed fact is that many women can utilise their talent and skill in workplaces as the work from home allows them to work in a company.
Perhaps the negative aspects of the above work culture should also be considered. There is a famous saying “for every action there will be an equal and opposite reaction”. All the above facts are only applicable if the employee works and utilises the timely effort in a reasonable way. People working from home could easily divert their concentration on other things. Most often individual can involve in implementing own or personal stuff than official work. The deliverable can affect if an individual is non-responsive. Some technical issues can encounter like networking, connectivity to the workstation and the slow responsiveness.
In conclusion, the work culture has been scaled to the flexibility of each individual, if the facility is utilised in a correct way, the outcome will be more effective to individual and to the organisation. Perhaps if there is any deviation then the productivity will be lowered. It depends on the fact of each individual’s ethics and the responsibility. This culture is useful in various ways, the percentage of working people has increased and many women genders are able to contribute to the society.
[ Written by – Abdul ]
Sample Answer 2:
As the development of technology, working from home is not uncommon phenomenon nowadays. It is a trend of future working mode with both positive and negative effects.
From the positive perspective, it does benefit to the work-life balance. For example, employees do not have to spend their time on shuttling between their office and home. The saved time can be spent on their work or taking care of their families. Therefore, the pressure of their work and personal life can be alleviated to a certain extent. Another advantage is the flexible working hour which is conducive to staff’s efficiency. It is more reasonable to arrange different kinds of work on different time section. Furthermore, conducting meetings with the customer from different time zone has become more realistic by this practice.
Form the negative perspective, the staff management is a big challenge to many companies. As staff remote to work from home, their managers cannot monitor what they are doing during the working hours. It would cause the lack of effective control and management to their staff. It would greatly impact on the normal run of a company and it is a great waste of human resource which is the last result employers would like to see. However, this concern can be address by utilising some technology or measures. For instance, the company can install the monitoring software in their staff’s laptop to oversee working situations, such as, what software they use and which websites they are browsing during working hours. Furthermore, the strict management measure is a key too. Managers should conduct an effective communication with their staff and estimate the appropriate volume of work for the staff so as to ensure they are reasonably occupied by their work.
To sum up, working from home is good for work-life balance and the work efficiency. Nevertheless, it is necessary for employers to take effective measures to ensure employees to be under a good management, such as, installing monitoring software and assigning the reasonable volume of work to their staff.
[ Written by – Quanji Anan ]
Sample Answer 3:
An increasing number of people work from home these days and stay in touch with their office using computer technology.
What are the effects on employees of working from home?
In today’s modern world, the computer technology is being developed at a fast pace which opens up an avenue for people to work at their own homes and communicate with employers and other employees via video conferences. Thus, it is important for us to establish the possible impacts on the employees who work at home.
There are several advantages of working at home instead of working in an office. To begin, the employees will have more flexible times to decide when to start working. For example, they can choose their working time which starts from 9.30am to 6pm, or they can also choose to extend their working time with some breaks in between. In fact, it should be made more common by providing people around the globe for working at home as the employees do not need to commute to work every day which normally takes a long time to reach their workplace from their home. The time they spend on commuting is more valuable if the employees can use it on working. Undoubtedly, it will not cause any harm to the company, but help to increase the work efficiency.
The next benefit of it is that housewives can get an opportunity to work even though they have to stay at home all day long. Most women tend to sacrifice to quit their current job after they get married as they believe that they need to stay at home to manage all the households well in order to be a responsible housewife. Thus, it is apparent that if most of the company provide jobs to work at home, the housewives will be able to continue to contribute to the society and earn more money to support their family financially. According to the statistic of a recent research conducted in Malaysia, it has shown that more than half of the married women wish to work at home owing to the fact that they can take care of their children and work simultaneously. Therefore, it has clearly shown that working at home provide the housewives with an opportunity to contribute to the society.
Nevertheless, there is always another side of a coin. It is believed that working at home rather than in the workplace will eventually weaken the ability of an employee to socialise. If the employees were to work at home, they will probably have not much time to interact with others as they focus solely on their works. Even though some people might say that they utilise the convenience of the internet to socialise with others through the social media like Facebook and Twitter, it is proven, however, proven that the way people socialise online is totally different from interacting face-to-face. As a result, it may cause the people these days who work at home without interacting with others face-to-face to develop relationship crisis as they are not equipped with the crucial interpersonal skills.
In conclusion, there are both positive and negative impacts of working at home on the employees it is, however, believed that every employee can contribute endlessly to our nation regardless of where they work and our nation will continue to prosper and flourish in the years to come.
[ Written by – Lee Wing Qeen ]