How does your day start? Assuming you still have a job, is your commute 30, 60 or even 90 minutes of hell? Is it an unreliable bus that you take to work, or an overcrowded train? If you drive, do you wish you had cycled? If you cycle, do you wish you had walked? If you walk, do you wish your shoes were dogshit-proof? Do you arrive stressed, exhausted, ripped off, degraded, suicidal, homicidal or all of the above?
What about the next eight hours? Do you get a headache because of the lighting or an earache because of the telephones? Is it the decor that makes you feel queasy or the chit-chat when you’re trying to concentrate? Do you go home regretting how little you have achieved or cursing how soon you will have to return? Work stinks, doesn’t it? Or, at least, going to the office. The good news is, it doesn’t have to. Millions of us are doing jobs that could be carried out just as well at home.
“I can’t help feeling that our descendants will look back at us and think, ‘What on earth were they thinking of?’” says Shirley Borrett, who works and lives in a motor home.
Borrett is development director for the Telework Association, which promotes working from home, especially if that involves a computer and a telephone, and splits her time between Britain and Spain. Whether you call this teleworking, telecommuting or home working, it’s a growing market. Banks, call centers, councils, management consultancies, software companies, law firms, PR agencies: all are increasingly allowing their staff to do it at least part-time. BT, the pioneer in Britain in the 1980s, now has 65,000 flexible workers, of whom 10,000 do not come in to the office.
We’re still a long way from the dreams of 20 or 25 years ago, which imagined offices emptying of everyone who didn’t operate a franking machine or wield a mop. According to the official Labor Force Survey, in the spring of last year there were 691,000 British home workers (working mainly in their own homes, using both a phone and a computer) versus 582,000 three years before. However, Borrett and others reckon those figures are underestimated. In 2008, a survey for the CBI found 46 percent of businesses allowing their staff to work from home, up from just 11 percent in 2004.
Melanie Pinola, who writes about home working for About.com, says the jobs that can be done remotely range from accountancy to telemarketing, via financial analysis, translation, data entry, graphic design, illustration, insurance, media buying, speech-writing, research, sales, travel agency, stockbroking, Web site design, writing and editing.
“Virtually anything that used to be an office job and uses computers and telecoms can be done remotely for at least part of the week,” says Borrett’s colleague Peter Thomson.
“Take nurses in a hospital,” he says. “They have to be physically present when they’re caring for patients, but they also do a lot of paperwork. That could be done anywhere.”
UNDERESTIMATED
So how do you join the home-working masses? In Britain, if you have a child under 16, or 18 if they are disabled, you have a head start. Employers are legally obliged to at least consider your request to work flexibly, which could include working from home for at least part of the week and/or changing your hours. They must also consider an application if you are caring for a friend or a family member. However, even if no one loves you and you have no one to look after, you have a very strong business case — if you can persuade your company to listen.
Not only do home workers reduce the need for expensive premises, they are often vastly more productive. BT claims it gets an average of 20 percent more work out of its 10,000 home-based staff.
“It works amazingly for us,” says Caroline Waters, the company’s director of people and policy, who herself works from home at least one day a week. “You get great productivity, reduced sick absence, high levels of performance, and we know it works for a lot of other organizations, because we help a lot of them put it in place.”
When the AA based some of its call-center staff at home, Borrett says, their productivity rose by more than a third. Some US studies show a 30 percent to 40 percent increase. Noel Hodson, who was one of the key figures in home working until the early 2000s, suggests that this is at least partly down to the removal of the daily commute.
“What we found was that most of the time saved went back into work. These workers valued their new way of working, and to protect it they did more work,” he said.
Hodson should know what he’s talking about. He has been working at home for 30 years, ever since he decided he could no longer stand the trip from Oxford to London and back five times a week.
“I had two young children whom I barely saw, and I thought: ‘This is ridiculous.’ So I closed the office,” he said.
He has had one brief spell of commuting since then, when he was advising Transport for London, and the company forced him to come into its central London offices every day for three months. It was winter; he got the flu.
“It was suicidal stuff for me,” he said.
When you are mentioning productivity to your skeptical superiors, there are a few more points that you might throw in. Companies that offer flexible working find it easier to attract staff, and easier to hang on to them. At BT, Waters says that at least 97 percent of women who take maternity leave come back to work afterward, against a British national average of about half that.
“In any one year, we’re retaining an additional 500 to 600 women. The downtime, the recruitment, the instruction very conservatively of each person would be around £10,000 (US$15,900). Not only are we creating a more inclusive BT, we’re saving £5million to £6 million on skill losses,” Waters says.
Mind you, that’s small beer compared with the computer company Cisco’s savings from teleworking. A survey last year put these at US$277 million a year.
And there are bonuses for society. Home working encourages a more diverse labor force, bringing in not just carers but those who have difficulty traveling because they are disabled or live in remote locations. Then there’s the reduction in pollution and greenhouse gases. According to Cambridgeshire County council, home working in that county alone could reduce commuter travel by up to 12.9 million kilometers a year. Last month British transport minister Norman Baker reminded employers that letting staff avoid the workplace just one day in 10 would have a “huge impact” on congestion.
If home working is so great, why aren’t we all doing it already? As usual, it’s the boss’s fault. Hodson remembers trying to sell home working to a firm of engineers 20-odd years ago.
“As I went through the economics, I touched on the thought that the company car wouldn’t be necessary any more — and the managing director reached across the desk and took me by the tie in a stranglehold. He didn’t even know he was doing it. It was his big shiny Jaguar that was sitting in the car park for seven and three-quarter hours a day,” Hodson says.
CULTURE SHOCK
When it’s not their cars they are worried about, it’s their empires. If there’s no one to laugh at their jokes, how will they know they are funny? If bosses can’t see what their staff are doing, how will they know that they are working?
“The issues are human, not technological,” Thomson says. “For the past 200 years we have been in an environment where people get together in the same place to work and a manager stands there and watches what they do. To then say: ‘Right, you can’t see what your workers are doing any more but trust them to get on with the job’ can be a bit of a culture shock.”
“The last barriers are attitudinal,” Waters says. “But it’s a real myth that you have control over what your people do just because they sit in the same location. Most managers who are worried about this kind of thing actually sit in their offices and rarely interact with their people. Presenteeism is a really poor performance indicator. It in no way gives the kind of productivity measure that you need to run a successful business.”
Firms that embrace home working have to find some better gauge. Mark Thomas is chief executive of Word Association, a Midlands-based public relations firm that employs 13 people, all working from home. There used to be an office, but Thomas closed it to go traveling in 1998 and the staff he left behind were so happy working from their spare bedrooms that when he got back to Britain he decided not to reopen it.
“We’ve managed to come up with measures of performance that are more to do with output than with the amount of time that people spend at their desk,” he says.
You might think of PR as a nebulous business, but it’s not impossible to monitor media coverage, or customer satisfaction.
“I am able to tell whether people are performing,” Thomas says. “And the reality is that everybody who works for me puts in really good hours and does a really good job.”
Wyn Matthews backs him up, and not just because he could fire her. She recently joined Word Association as a copywriter.
“Some people say: ‘Ooh, you can just mess around the house, can’t you?’” she says. “But it works the opposite way. You’re not coming away from the office thinking, ‘That’s it — I won’t be doing any more tonight.’ If you’re needed, you’re prepared to be on hand.”
In an office, she says, “some people have the ability to look really busy when they’re not. That nonsense is stripped away by working at home. Your bosses see what you do.”
The logical accompaniment to home working is a more relaxed attitude to working hours.
“I’ve had managers say to me: ‘But they might go to Tescos [the supermarket] on Wednesday afternoon,’” Shirley Borrett says. “To which I reply: ‘If you’re truly being flexible and recognizing that people are doing a job, then what does it matter, so long as you’re getting whatever output it is you want?”
“It all comes down to trust,” she says. “Trust that people are doing what they’re supposed to be doing, though not necessarily at the same time as they’d be doing it in the office.”
The last thing any manager needs to worry about is idleness, says Pinola, who works at home in the US.
“You tend to overwork as a remote worker because you don’t want to appear to be slacking off,” Pinola says.
Will some employers abuse this? What do you think? The same technology that makes it possible to escape the office — mobile phones, laptops, broadband — makes it that much harder to get away from your boss. First they give you a BlackBerry, then they start e-mailing you at 1am, but that’s true even if you work in an office, nine to five. There is a certain kind of manager who insists on interrupting his underlings’ evenings and weekends with “urgent” inquiries that could easily wait. Whether or not we’ve agreed to it, many of us are already on call 24/7.
This may actually be less disruptive for home workers than it is for the office-based. When researchers from Utah’s Brigham Young University looked at 24,000 IBM employees, they found that those with flexible working arrangements were able to put in 57 hours a week before their personal life started to suffer, against 38 hours for those in traditional posts.
Otherwise, the advice for home workers is the same as it should be for everyone. Work when you’re paid to; don’t when you’re not. You might remind your boss of the UK Department for Employment’s guidelines: “Employers should seek to ensure that timetables are established which determine when employees are expected to be working, and when they should not be contacted.”
BOUNDARIES
Don’t undermine your position by checking e-mails when you’re supposed to be off duty or answering work calls.
“The great thing about technology is that it has an off button,” Waters says.
It’s a cliche, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. The best employers will not just expect you to use that button, but worry if you don’t. Christiane Perera is head of people and development at OAC, a 24-strong firm of actuaries with home offices as far apart as Devon, Surrey, Manchester and Wales.
“If you know that someone’s at their desk during the day and then you keep getting e-mails from them at midnight, you tend to raise the subject with them,” she says. “Do they need to work that late? Is there an issue? Do they need help? You need to be able to read the indicators.”
While you’re whipping your bosses into shape, don’t forget your nearest and dearest. Let them know that when you’re working, you’re working. “[Home workers] must avoid a tendency to talk with friends or family or do things around the house,” is the stern warning from Westchester County in New York state.
“If an employee has a family member at home who cares for children or elders, that person may expect the employee to be more available for care-giving because they are home. Arrangements should be made that will address this potential problem,” the county says.
“It’s a constant re-educating process,” Pinola says. “My immediate family knows that when the door to my home office is closed I am really busy. I try to have them imagine that I’m not even there, but my four-year-old doesn’t really like that game. One thing that helps is having a separate phone number just for personal calls so that I can filter the non-work calls. Other than that, I just have to remind people when my working hours are. I guess you could hang a ‘Do not disturb’ sign on your door when you’re very busy.”
Is there anyone who shouldn’t attempt to work from home? Well, yes: anyone who doesn’t want to. For some, the office is important. It provides clear lines between work and home, a break from the family, colleagues to talk to and a creative environment.
“[Home working] doesn’t suit everybody,” Borrett says. “It’s not for people who’ve got a very young family and nowhere separate to work. It usually doesn’t suit people who are in their early 20s and still living with their parents. Young people also want to get a social life out of their work life.”
When Hodson was running teleworking trials, he found another group to worry about: the over-55s whose children had left home or whose partners had died. Many of them decided they’d be happier back in the office.
Not, of course, that home workers have to feel isolated. There’s no law that says you can’t call them into the office if you have one, or find some other meeting place.
“At first we didn’t put as much effort into communication as we should have done,” Thomas says. “Now we have regular monthly production meetings where we get together to work through every single client, every single job. All the staff attend. We also have monthly reviews of staff, various teams getting together around projects or services, management team meetings.”
In between, there are telephone calls, e-mails, instant messaging. If you’re all logged on to MSN, you can swap little messages with your coworkers all day long. If you’ve got a smartphone, you can even do it when you’re at the supermarket.
Where could this all end? Just imagine turning up at the office one day and being told: “What the hell are you doing here? We don’t want you sitting around chatting and drinking coffee. You should be at home, working.”
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