The current pandemic COVID-19 has forced companies to stop employees from coming into the office. Many of us are now forced to work from home. A study made by Qualtrics suggests that one in three Singaporeans feels more productive working from home while 20% said otherwise.

Most of us now have to adjust to the “new norm” lifestyle and this “new norm” lifestyle have had an impact on each of our life.

Many of us have to transform a new working place at our home. Our working environment has changed from an office to our living room. We have to change and adapt to our new home-office workstation.

Our new environment may not be most suitable place for us to work as our home may not have the material that we need and there’s limited spaces at home. Certainly there will be competition for space as each room will be occupied by each of our family member.

During this time, technology play an important role. Technology have ease communication such as virtual meetings on platforms such as zoom. Of course they are advantages and disadvantages of virtual meetings.

For instance, virtual meeting makes meeting with anyone possible compared to physical meeting in the office. Timing is more flexible when it is done online as we can multitask doing our work while on a meeting. Besides that, people can be more productive when they can gain access to resources, information and guidance without any delay.

However, video conferencing puts users at the mercy of technology, which may decide to stop working halfway through a meeting. Dropped connections, camera malfunctions and choppy video streams can quickly make a video conference frustrating or useless.

For instance, on 15 April 2020, Starhub had internet disruption that affected most us that are doing work at home. Our virtual meetings can be affected by this kind of problems.

In addition, documents are easier to be shared in physical meeting compared to online meeting. This makes physical meeting to be preferred compared to online meeting if given the choice.

Working at home allows us to save the time spent traveling. We don’t have to spend time travelling anywhere. Despite that, we tend to spend more time working at home.

The long hours that we spent on our computer can improve our productivity rate and more work can be done. We can be more flexible in our work schedule and spend more time doing work instead of spending the time on traveling.

In conclusion, working at home can affect our productivity rate either positively or negatively. But the most important factor is the employee themselves.

They are the one that have to decide whether they want to be productive at home or to be inactive in doing our work. It doesn’t matter whether we are working at home or in the office, it is the same and we have to put in the same amount of effort to be productive and efficient.

by Danish Aiman
Article Contributor, contact@thevideocompany.sg

Source:-
1) Studies on productivity: HRM Asia - Qualtrics.

2) Internet Disruption: Starhub 

3) Benefits of Video Conferencing: Express Virtual Meetings 

4) Benefits and Drawback of Virtual Meetings: GB News