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While working from home allows many brokers flexibility – and the ability to cut costs – UCi2i found those who work from home spend an average of 24 days a year more working, compared to their peers in traditional office settings.
However, NSW broker, Patrick Chidambaram, who started out in a traditional office environment before moving his business home, says his experience is quite different.
“I’m the opposite, because it’s two hours per day less travel time and two there’s no distractions, because I don’t have colleagues talking to me and asking me to go out for drinks. You don’t need to go out for lunch because the fridge is just upstairs and I’m more effective, because I know if I get this done I get to go surfing!”
UCi2i also investigated the way in which home workers are viewed by those working in traditional offices and found that, strangely, one in four professionals believe those who work from home are ‘cheating the system’, while 84% say they’re ‘uncomfortable’ with colleagues who are not physically near them.
Chidambaram, however, says this hasn’t been an issue for him and that any such animosity towards home workers likely comes down to good ol' fashioned jealousy.
“I don’t really talk to brokers in a traditional office, but I think it’s more jealousy than anything else. I can work two hours a day and get something done and go surfing, compared to someone going back and forth on the bus. That being said, people who work in [a traditional] office are a lot more...productive from a point of monetary gain. If I'm sitting in an office eight hours a day I’m probably making more money,” he admits.
“I can see why brokers working from an office would have suspicions, because it probably comes across as people who aren’t willing to commit to that expenditure and to that business model and have that traditional office setting.”
But, when asked if he would ever consider moving back to a traditional office, Chidambaram doesn’t have to think twice.
“No way! why would I do that?”
