Surveys conducted over the past 18 months have shown that working from home (WFH) can make you sick. Obviously there is a toll on your mental capacities from the constant tugs of war at home but there’s also that missing element of communication with people outside of your family unit that is critical to maintaining a sense of humour and your sanity.

The other downside about which many workers have expressed dismay is that because they’re working remotely from their colleagues and bosses, they tend to be passed over when it comes to promotions. I suppose the saying ‘out of sight out of mind’ might actually ring true. Is it that all these downsides can only be overcome by working on site, albeit for only a few hours a week?

In addition, surveys have shown that a lot of people working from home are also suffering from musculoskeletal disorders. If you have a desk job and work on site there’s usually a desk and chair and, because almost all offices are now health and safety conscious, these chairs and desks tend now to be ergonomically designed to minimise physical stress, and therefore injury, to the body. But since many people have opted to now work from home most of the time, some permanently, they are finding that, unless they have a dedicated workspace with a proper chair and desk that suits their body type, they are experiencing more aches and pains because their workstation is usually their dining table or their sofa or a chair propped up against their beds, the latter acting like a temporary desk (like mine).

Moreover, since many people live in small flats sharing workspaces with their families, they can’t set up a dedicated workstation because of the lack of space. For those who can afford to, the trend has changed in that over the past year, many have decided to move out of flats and into larger spaces, like a house, that will most likely have a spare room or two or, at the very least, a bedroom that is big enough to set up a workstation in a corner.

One of the downsides of working from home is that although the line between work and home gets very blurred it tends to be sharper on the side of work where people end up working longer hours and without a break. When you’re at work, you tend to get up for a coffee or to talk to a colleague in the breakroom or kitchen and have a proper hour for lunch away from your desk. This all means you’re not stuck in your chair for 9 or 10 hours of the day. Unfortunately, when you’re working from home, the opposite tends to happen. You seem to be working all the time. Whereas before you would leave the office at 5 or 6, when you’re working from home you don’t seem to leave your desk, without much of a break all day, until 7 or 8. In addition, you appear to be on call all the time.

The physical and mental stresses from working from home can be overwhelming. The thought that springs to mind is, when you’re working from inside an office and you feel unwell, you can go home and call in sick the next day. But when you’re working from home, how do you do that? Do you suddenly announce in an email that you’ll now be incommunicado because you have taken ill and won’t be working that day? I wonder how that might come across. The reason I say this is because those who work from an office probably think that those who are working from home are taking it easy and only doing something when someone from the office contacts them or when there is an online meeting. How do you call in sick or go home early when you are already at home?

As technology progresses and takes over our lives all this will become very complicated in the future, especially for those who are prone to taking sick days to deal with family matters. Apparently what’s known as ‘pulling a sickie’ will be a thing of the past when technology will allow employers to monitor employees’ vital signs to check if they’re not faking. I do find all this rather intrusive. In addition, I dare say employers will need experts on hand to interpret the readings! Sounds ridiculous to me! And costly!