Employees are able to save time by working from home, but they would have used this time if they were working in an office. For example, employees do not need to commute, get dressed in work attire and are free from distractions by colleagues. Therefore, it is better to work from home.
The argument
The case for working from home begins with the simplest of its advantages: it gives people back time that a traditional office takes from them. The clearest instance is the commute. Travelling to a workplace and travelling home again is time that belongs to neither work nor leisure — it is spent for the sake of the job without being part of the job, and it recurs every working day. Working remotely removes it outright. Alongside it goes the preparation the office requires: getting dressed for an audience of colleagues and getting ready to be seen by them. Proponents point out that this too is time spent on the conditions of employment rather than on the work itself, and that it disappears when the workplace is the home. The second saving happens inside the working day rather than at its edges. In a traditional office, employees are continually available to the people around them, and coworkers distract each other, sometimes about the job and often not. Each distraction takes time away from the task at hand, and because interruptions arrive at someone else's convenience rather than one's own, the worker has little control over how much of the day they consume. Telecommuting eliminates these distractions by removing the physical proximity that produces them, so the hours nominally spent working are more nearly hours actually spent working. Taken together, proponents argue, the two effects mean that the same job done from home costs the worker less time than the same job done from an office: no journey, no ritual of preparation, and none of the coworker distractions that make office hours less productive than they appear. People save the time they would otherwise spend on an office job, and that recovered time is the basic reason working from home is the better arrangement.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Working from home eliminates typical office distractions such as co-workers, but there are still numerous ways someone could lose focus. It may be difficult for someone to find the motivation to work while at home because they are working independently and there is no separation from work and home life. Travelling to and from an office every day mentally prepares a person to be focused and driven to work. An office is designed for work and therefore keeps employees focused instead of being distracted by items at home.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Time not spent commuting is time saved for the worker. Whether it is saved for the work is a separate claim, and the premise never says the recovered hours go to the job. [Rejecting P2] Removing colleagues removes one source of interruption and introduces others. As the counter-argument notes, home carries its own distractions and no separation between work and the rest of life. [Rejecting P3] Even granting the time saved, the conclusion is broader than the premises support. "Better" is a comparison across everything the two arrangements affect — collaboration, training, supervision, wellbeing — and time is only one of them.
Framing
[Rejecting P2] There are numerous distractions while working from home.