Working at home is a skivers charter, isn’t it? Well, no not
really, it depends on both the organisations that allow it and the attitude of
those who work from home. There is a prevalent state of mind among those who
don’t work from home that those who do are not putting in a full shift, but in
my experience that is not the case. For
instance my wife works from home regularly and I know from observing her
that not only does she use the time she would otherwise be commuting to work,
she regularly puts in a ten hour stint
in front of the PC when working at home.
Working from home has become more prevalent in recent years,
and the concept tends to polarise opinions. Naturally there are some jobs that
do not lend themselves to home working, so when we talk of people working from
home we are normally talking of those who would otherwise be working in
offices, and among office workers there are some divisions about the
effectiveness of home working.
Some people are opposed to home working on principle and in
my experience these people’s prejudices are based on their conception of how
effective other people are when they
work at home, so the merits of home working have a certain dependency on who is
doing the talking, the home worker or the worker who remains tied to the office.
For those who work at home and do so enthusiastically, the benefits include the
lack of commute, the freedom from interruptions and the ability to concentrate
solely on the task at hand; the flexibility to start work early, finish late
and adapt work around their domestic commitments. To those who remain chained
to their office desk, these virtues may be seen as opportunities for the home
worker to be less productive, less proactive and more reactive, doing only the
bare minimum of what is required of them.
There is no black or white answer; sometimes home working is
at least as effective as working in the office; sometimes even more so but on
other occasions there is no substitute for being in the office. Having worked
from home on occasions, I know that how effective I was really depended on what
tasks I had to perform on a given day. Some days I could be really effective
working at home, for instance if it was appraisal time and I had to write
reviews of my directs, or if I had to produce some sort of document then it
really didn’t matter whether I was in the office or at home. On days when there
was less structure, I might become purely reactive, just responding to emails
and therefore somewhat less productive. In the job I did, one particular piece
of software was not available to me at home as I didn’t have a laptop supplied
by my employers and instead relied on connecting through Citrix [1]on
my home PC. The software in question was a thick client and not having the
software installed on my home computer I was unable to use the GUI[2]
and instead had to connect via CICS[3],
or the “green screens” as many of you will know them. This had the effect of
making life slightly more difficult in working at home than in the office.
Being in the office facilitates collaboration; face to face
meetings can be more effective than conference calls and informal chats at the
coffee machine have a habit of throwing up solutions to problems but are not
possible if workers are not co-located. On that subject, virtual teams, whereby
members of the same team may be located in different offices or different
countries and time zones are another matter and one which I cannot honestly say
that I favour, but that subject I may well return to at a later date.
Whatever work you do at home, there are a few key
imperatives to ensure that the home worker is as effective as it can be.
Firstly, environment. Sitting in the lounge, on the sofa,
with a laptop balanced on your knees is not ideal in any way, well not for
working. A laptop on the kitchen or dining room table is a step up, but ideally
home workers ought to strive for an area of their home that is as business like
as possible. I’m in the fortunate position of having a small study with a
phone, PC, printer and an office chair and this always made me feel more
businesslike and focussed when I worked at home.
Secondly, family. Because you are at home, there can be a
tendency for family members to forget that your primary purpose is to work for
your employer, not for them! The home worker needs to be able to refuse
requests to run errands for their family to the detriment of their paid
employment.
Thirdly, distractions. I have to admit that when I worked at
home my major distraction was tea, and I would drink cup after cup to the point
where I was spending almost as much time in the kitchen making tea as anywhere
else. In my defence, I would say that I usually worked longer hours and took a
shorter lunch break when I worked at home than I did in the office, so I don’t
think that the time I spent with the kettle rather and the PC was that
detrimental. The home worker needs to guard against the five minutes spent
browsing non-work websites or reading a book, that turns into an hour (or two).
From the organisation’s point of view, having their staff
work at home saves on various overheads, allows “hot-desking” and enables their
personnel to work flexibly. On the face of it, it is a win-win situation for
the organisation and their staff, but as with all things, trends and fashions
change and the tide may even now being changing to an anti-home working point
of view. In February 2013, Yahoo! announced that it was banning staff from
remote working, giving as reasons such things as improved communication from
working side by side, that speed and quality are often sacrificed with home
working and that some interactions and experiences are only possible in the
office. Far from a voice in the wilderness, their fellow search engine giants,
Google, when asked how many of their people work from home, replied “as few as
possible.”
With so many organisations now setting themselves up to
encourage home working by reducing office floor space, introducing hot desking
and positively encouraging their people to work from home, are Yahoo! and
Google out of step or, having pioneered home working, have they been the first
to discover that it is not the panacea that many thought? Probably they have
found that with many things, home working should not be seen as a mutually
exclusive option to regular office work, but complements it when required.
Certainly organisations need contingency, for example if bad weather makes
commuting difficult then the ability of staff to work from home provides a
perfect alternative but as a rule, home working may not after all be the magic
potion that it might have thought to have been originally.
Mind you, with many organisations changing course with all
the speed of a fully laden oil tanker, it may be many years before some reverse
the trend. So if you are reading this while working from home, why not check
out my previous blogs while you have the chance; before too long you may be
back in the office!
[1]
Citrix is an American multinational software company founded in 1989 that
provides server and desktop virtualization, networking, software-as-a-service
(SaaS), and cloud computing technologies.
[2]
Graphical User Interface.
[3] Customer
Information Control System – IBM transaction processing software.
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