Employers save on rent and utilities, and employees on commuting. But there is a risk of turning into a hermit.
Along with the development of digital technologies, a new form of work organization is gaining momentum in Ukraine — remote work, where full-time employees (not freelancers) do not go to the office every day but work from home over the internet. According to GfK Ukraine research, 21% of companies (about 100,000 firms, a third of them in Kyiv) tried this new arrangement in 2015. And the results were pleasantly surprising: businesses saved UAH 1.7 billion on office rent, utility bills and equipment purchases, while people saved the time and money they would otherwise have spent getting to the office. As a result, the number of such firms is expected to double over the next two years.
Not going to the office
As Tetyana Pashkina, HR manager at the job portal rabota.ua, told us, IT specialists switched to working from home long ago. Now they are being joined by employees of sales, recruiting and contact center departments, translators, distance learning and the media — that is, workers in fields that do not require physical contact with customers. "Obviously, you can't work remotely in the service sector — as a salesperson, hairdresser or builder, or as a worker or engineer at a factory or construction site," Pashkina says. "And even at firms that practice remote work, managers, accountants, drivers and security staff are still present in the office." According to her, Western experience (where companies switched to remote work about five years earlier than in Ukraine) has shown that everyone still has to be in the office one or two days a week. People usually come in on Monday (to set tasks and plan) and on Friday (to sum up the week). This also helps maintain work discipline and a healthy atmosphere in the team.
Pros and cons
"We've been working like this for 15 years. It makes economic sense; otherwise we would have to maintain an office for 1,000 specialists, which is unrealistic and expensive. It's better to raise employees' salaries," Yuriy Syvytsky, head of a large IT company, told us. And according to Tetyana Vanyushkina, editor of an online media outlet, remote work makes news delivery faster: journalists manage to do 30% more work and, on top of that, hardly ever get sick.
Rank-and-file employees are in favor too. "I'm a sales manager for ventilation equipment. I used to spend three hours a day and UAH 22 on commuting, so the new arrangement suits me: I work from home, get more done and can plan my own time," Yevhen Sharmin told us. "As for the downsides of working remotely, in the office it's sometimes quicker to 'point at the monitor' to explain a problem to a colleague than to contact them by email or Skype, and household utility costs (electricity, water) are higher. Another bad thing is that you turn into a hermit — there's no one to chat with or have a cup of coffee with."
Source: segodnya.ua