SOHO (small office home office) and telecommuting are getting more common in Hong Kong. With the advanced development of telecommunications, staying at home to work becomes possible. However, there are various pros and cons regarding having a home office.
One advantage of having a home office is the commuting time can be saved. Although Hong Kong is a small city with convenient transportation means, the commuting time is still long for most employees. The reason for that is the busy traffic in Hong Kong. Traffic congestion in the Cross Harbour Tunnel becomes an everyday matter. Most citizens take nearly one hour getting from home to the CBD and vice versa. Thus, having a home office can significantly save lots of time on commuting.
The land rent in Hong Kong is another concern. The land rent in IFCII per square feet is the highest in the globe. The rent cost often takes up the largest portion of a company’s expenditure. Besides, Hong Kong always lacks land. To save the cost of renting a large area to be the office and alleviate the shortage of land, employees can work from home. The saved expenditure can be used to further expand the company and can increase the salary of employees.
Another benefit of having a home office is that employees can enjoy higher flexibility. A traditional office adopts a relatively rigid work pattern with, for example, a fixed lunch time. Employees have to strictly follow the rules no matter whether they have or have not finished the tasks. Therefore, the maximum efficiency of the employees cannot be achieved. Working from home could give the freedom to the employees to work or to rest. Some employees may want to do the task at night because they are owls while others may wish to follow their own schedule. Therefore, a home office can give greater flexibility to the employees. The working mode will be switched from working-hour-oriented to task-oriented.
However, a home office is not a panacea. The manager of a company may face more difficulties in monitoring the home workers’ progress. Employers cannot check the progress directly as they cannot see their employees face to face. Some employees may become unproductive as there can be many distractions from their home computers like surfing YouTube or browsing Facebook. All these would crucially decrease the productivity of the employees.
Another vulnerability of having a home office is the security threat. Most companies need to handle lots of private information like credit card numbers and passwords of clients. Handling such information in a home office means the data has to be transferred through the Internet. Hackers may have some opportunities to sniff the data flow and obtain the private or confidential data. Leakage of data would cause an invasion on privacy.
Finally, the home workers may need to work for a longer time. As mentioned previously, telecommuting would switch the working mode to being task-oriented. Because of the convenience of telecommunications, the home workers are indeed 24 hours on call. It means they need to work for the whole day or even days if the task is urgent. The over-time compensation is harder to calculate as no one would know how long they have worked. Besides, in order to maximize the efficiency of each employee, which is the philosophy of capitalism, more and more tasks may be given to the employees. It might result in a drastic increase in working hours.
A home office is a coin which has two sides. Thus a firm needs to consider both its disadvantages and advantages carefully.