Working at home without being self-employed: how to convince your boss?

A lot of people like the idea of being able to work from home and there are now a lot of companies that will allow it. However there are also quite a few companies where this is not yet possible. If you work for one of these companies you are going to have to be able to convince your boss that allowing you to work from home is a good idea. Here are a few things that you can try.

The best argument that you can make to get your boss to allow you to work from home is to tell him that you will be more productive this way. There are all kinds of studies that show that employees who work from home are more productive since they have fewer distractions to deal with. Since your boss naturally wants you to be more productive this is an argument that he will likely be quite receptive to. The only downside to this approach is that you actually will have to be more productive if you are allowed to work from home or you could find yourself back at the office or having something worse happen.

Another argument that you can make is that allowing you to work from home will reduce the company's expenses. Admittedly the savings of allowing one person to work from home are pretty minimal, the cost of electricity for one office, a few less cups of coffee. However if you can demonstrate that working from home is a viable option then it becomes possible to let a other employees work from home and this can really allow for savings. The best way to frame this is to make yourself out as the test case to prove that it will work.

In some cases you may simply be a valuable enough employee that your boss will allow you to work from home rather than risk losing you. It costs a lot of money not to mention time to replace an employee so they may decide that allowing you to work from home is worthwhile. Pointing this out to your boss can be tricky since you don't want to frame it as an ultimatum. It will take a fair amount of tact to let your boss know that it would be in the company's best interests to allow you to work from home.

One last option that you can try is to tell your boss that you willing to take less money to work from home. This is something that you would obviously want to leave as a last resort but it is an option. Keep in mind that you will have fewer expenses if you work at home so this may off set getting less money. The best way to do this is to let your boss know that instead of giving you a raise this year that you would rather work from home.