The desire to work at home has inflicted multiple workers over the past few years. The numerous benefits inherent in home work make leaving office cubicles seem a worthwhile endeavor. When one decides to work at home, he has the opportunity to choose when he wakes up, when he begins working, whether he wants his own brand of coffee or prefers traveling to Starbucks and setting up his workspace there, with human company and freshly-brewed lattes surrounding him. The scenery is much more appealing than simple gray office walls.
Self-discipline becomes a major factor, however, in the efficiency of those employees. All those perks require discipline to ignore, because often, they detract from the efficiency of the worker. Apart from dealing with perks, one must also maintain focus while unpredictable distractions emerge, and keep emerging. A crying child needs attention, for instance, because she is sick and cannot currently fend for herself. Once that situation is resolved, the employee returns to his desk, only to find the cat has strode across the keyboard and accidentally closed every application, rendering all his work void.
Freelancers learn the significance of balancing work with home life immediately, as well as the importance of guaranteed pay checks. That is, most of their pay checks are not guaranteed, at least not guaranteed to come in on a specific day each week. Their clients change from project to project, so they must constantly search for new opportunities to earn a living.
At a traditionally structured corporation, in which employees always arrive at nine and leave at five, income is secure, because their jobs usually provide guaranteed annual salaries (unless they get fired for sub-par production). But if the employee remains a productive worker and repeatedly produces a at a steady rate, the option exists for promotions, incentives, etc. Just staying around in a company for a sustained period of time increases the chances the employee may be considered for a higher position.
Freelancers do not have that kind of security. When searching for those possible clients, the internet has become the most common medium for submitting applications. But this medium has multiple setbacks, specifically that employers briefly skim applications and resumes, and summarily dismiss them upon encountering one error or one minor unmet requirement. Many perfectly acceptable freelancers go unnoticed simply because of the abundance, bordering on excessive, amounts of applications employers receive from one posting on Craigslist, causing them to arbitrarily ignore applicants.
Even with the downsides of freelance work, the benefits (mainly working at home) appeal to many traditional office workers. Those employees are becoming more cognizant of the viability of transferring from their business office to their home office, mainly because of so many communicative platforms that exist now. Those platforms allow employees to submit work that, in the past, could only be done at an office. With email, phones, faxes, Skype, etc., employees can now do the same work at home and simply send it to the supervisor. This convenience allows different categories of workers, such as new mothers or physically disabled, to produce the same level of work as their counterparts, but from a home environment.
A writer for Black Enterprise Magazine, Maria A. Reed-Woodward, noticed this trend of office workers transferring home and composed an article exploring the topic. The International Telework Association conducted a survey that found the number of teleworking employees grew from 41.3 million in 2003 to 44.4 million in 2005 and projects that number to climb to 51 million by 2008. Woodward quotes Jan Anderson, director of Midwest Institute of Telecommuting, who summarizes the general direction to which those statistics point: "There is a trend toward making jobs more mobile and permitting employees to have remote access to work from home."
With all the employees staying at home instead of commuting, more and more of them will discover the various distractions always present within a house. At a typical office, the boss serves a very important purpose, apart from assigning specific tasks: he keeps employees focused on their work instead of playing Tetris all day. The possibility of enduring an angry boss?s reprimand for surfing the internet, instead of generating a sufficient amount of work, acts as a heavy deterrent for employees inflicted with an easily-distracted personality.
Yet if one believes that they will operate with equal efficiency if they work at home, a good idea is to gather some research from freelancers relating to daily operations, how they manage aforementioned ever-present distractions, and the general states of their careers as they work at home.
James Scottworth enjoys writing articles regarding home business. In the past he's penned about how to earn money taking surveys, and why taking surveys for moneycan be a great part time job for almost anyone.
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