Last year the ONS found a record 4.2 million people in the UK are working from home. With numbers on the up, remote working is evidently becoming an ever-more important part of modern working life. While the traditional office generally remains a vital hub for most businesses, Peter Ames from OfficeGenie.co.uk looks at why these millions of workers might be happier at home

Flexibility and the work-life balance boost

Ardent home-workers will often cite one key factor as to why they love working from home: it offers them the flexibility working in an office cannot. Home workers are rarely obliged to start at 9am and down tools at 5pm. For many, working from home puts the power in their hands; allowing them to work at times that are most convenient and often at when they are more productive.

Of course, this can be great for work-life balance; employees who work from home can have much greater ability to work around their out-of-work life. In fact, research from both Microsoft and the London School of Economics, has found the healthy work-life balance of remote workers to be the key to home-working happiness.

Some things are just done better at home

Then there’s the simple fact certain tasks may well be better carried out in a (quiet) home office. The most obvious of these is perhaps editorial work, for which the modern workplace, where the trend is for collaborative and open-plan spaces, is not necessarily the ideal environment.

I asked Chris Marling, our own in-house editor, why he was happy working from home: “Terrific though my colleagues can be, the excitement of the office doesn’t always lend itself to tasks such as writing and proof reading. Generally, I find you face less interruptions at home, which can help if you’ve got a particularly heavy workload.”

Cut costs of expensive office space

In 2015, office space is more expensive than it has ever been. Take London for example; two years ago the West End overtook Hong Kong as the world’s most expensive place in which to rent office space, and rates are expected to increase further as demand continues to well outstrip supply.
The maths here is simple, the more employees are encouraged to work from home, the less space is required and costs can be reduced. While some may be happy working at home, we’d suggest increasing numbers of businesses will be happy to let their employees do so too.

For some companies, instigating home-working policies is just not practical. But there are a number of steps they could take to improve the working environment:

Offer flexible hours

Remote working can undoubtedly offer flexibility, but much of this can be replicated with flexible working hours. Say employees want to leave early for the school run, or they simply work better in the early morning? Allow them to work flexibly and you could have happier and even more productive staff.
This is perhaps a key area for improvement in the nation’s businesses. Indeed, recent Office Genie research found twice as many workers would be more productive with flexible working hours than if they could work remotely.

Create a quieter environment

A further key learning from this research was the fact employees much prefer a quiet working environment to a loud or ‘buzzing’ office. While around 15% of people we surveyed said they were more productive in a quiet environment, only around 2% said they worked better in a more boisterous space.
As mentioned, modern offices have moved away from the cubicle format of the 20th century, with more and more enterprises buying into the open-plan space as a means of boosting communication and collaboration. While many can’t reassess an entire workplace, an easy way to get around this would be to provide quiet working areas in any available space; something that has gone down a treat in our very own offices.

Office Genie is a UK office search engine uniquely designed for small businesses and freelancers.