Advantages and disadvantages of teleworking

Teleworking, as the name suggests, involves working in a location other than the office; either from home or from a hotel on the other side of the world.

This model is beginning to spread in Spain, albeit timidly as yet. According to the Adecco Employment Opportunities and Satisfaction Monitor report, 6.6% of workers (approximately 1,200,000) practice teleworking.

The figures are still very small compared to other EU countries, especially if we take into account how the internet and the cloud have made this modality accessible to many more people today. However, companies suffer from a strong attachment to the culture of face-to-face work. Only 22% of national companies have telework programmes in place, a figure of National Statistics Institute (INE).

If you are thinking of implementing this model, you will do well to read this analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of teleworking from a business point of view.

Advantages of teleworking

Increasing the number of workers working outside the office has a number of benefits:

• Retaining talent of workers who, for personal reasons, need to better reconcile their personal and working life. For example, parents who need to take care of their children when they are small.
• Access to a larger number of partners who are, for example, freelancers and are working from home in another part of the world.
• Increasing productivity, The employee is more concentrated at home and has fewer distractions (phone calls, meetings...).
• Increasing motivation The team's flexibility of being able to work from home when they need to.
• Saving costs office utilities such as electricity, water...
• Improving the balance between personal and working life of employees.

Disadvantages of teleworking

No model is perfect and this one also has its negative points. For example:

• Difficulty in monitoring how the team is working and what it is doing.
• Deterioration of the quality of work because there is less supervision.
• Problems in the development of employees' skills, as they do not have access to training programmes.
• Less security when handling sensitive information.
• Increase in the cost of communication, e.g. in telephone bills.
• Decline in team spirit, which can be difficult to maintain when members are separated.

Having analysed the advantages and disadvantages, you can make the decision to implement this model in a 50%. You don't need to send all your employees home, you can offer teleworking to those who are interested in it or when they need it on an ad hoc basis.

Flexibility and autonomy are an important motivation for employees. Having the freedom to work from home whenever they need to, work permitting, can make a difference.