Monday, May 11. 2009"Working From Home"......John Linton ...is more possible now than ever in the past for some types of 'white collar' work but is it actually beneficial to either the 'work from homer' or for the entity that employs them? From the time Exetel was brought in to existence it has had employees 'working from home' - Exetel commenced operations from a room in our house and Steve worked from his house in Perth and didn't come to Sydney for a month or so from our start up time. The programmer who wrote all of our initial systems didn't some to work at Exetel's office until we first had a semi-formal office in March 2004. The first four Sri Lankan employees we had started by working from their homes for over two years before we established a presence in Colombo and two of our Level 3 support personnel have never worked at the Exetel office except for their initial familiarization and training always working from their own homes in the ACT and the NSW Central Coast respectively. I work from home more than 50% of the time and Annette seldom goes in to the office at all. So Exetel is fairly experienced in understanding the basic merits and de-merits of employing people who work away from other employees for considerable amounts or 100% of the time over a period of over five years - we have no problem with either the concept or the actuality and have a more than a reasonable knowledge of the up and down sides and other issues. Exetel re-look at this scenario every six months or so and I raised the issue again last week after I had filled in a survey/questionnaire some weeks before for some government department whose name I can't remember and thinking the questions being asked were incredibly naive and/or incredibly doctrinaire though it was hard to tell whether they may well have been both. I think they were doctrinaire rather than naive as, at least as far as I could see, they seemed to assume that it was preferable for people to work from home under all and any circumstances given that there was a very short section, essentially one question, along the lines of "do you think there are any circumstances where working at an office location provides more benefits to the employee than working from home - there wasn't even a reverse question asking whether there were any disadvantages to the employer if the employee worked from home....doctrinaire?....I think so. However after I answered the survey as it didn't take much time and it was getting round to the time to reconsider this question again anyway I subsequently received a telephone call late last week thanking me for submitting the survey (perhaps very few people did?) and asking me some follow up questions including expressing surprise that we already had such a 'policy' in place and had done so for such a long time 'for so many staff'. The follow up questions were not very sensible or even sensibly structured but I answered them as patiently and politely as I could for some 30 minutes and eventually had to say I had no more time after the questions became more and more intrusive. I think the 'surveyor' became very frustrated with me because I wouldn't agree with any of her survey's "suggestions" on the benefits of someone working from home from the employer's view point. Even though Exetel has highly automated systems and, in comparison to any other entity I know, extremely advanced communications systems there are virtually NO advantages to an employer for employees working from home under any circumstances other than one, perhaps one and a half, - and, personally, I think there are many, many disadvantages to both the employee and the employer. The 'one' advantage to the employer for 'allowing' an employee to work from home is that it allows an employer to employ people in diverse geographic locations if they can't find the 'talent' they need within a reasonable traveling distance of the place they need them to work. This is obviously the case with Steve (who lives in Perth and comes to Sydney for a few days each month) and mostly for Annette as she started doing work that was 'part time' and needed zero interaction with anyone else. It was also obvious for the initial employment of personnel in Sri Lanka. Our two Level 3 support engineers were hired in a 'conscious' experiment to determine whether it would work for support to be remote from Sydney prior to our final decision on moving all support to a different country. And that's where the matter rests today for Exetel. The ONLY reason that I think is beneficial for an employer and an employee for the employee to work from home is when a changed travel distance, time and cost become a factor in the employee's life and the employer doesn't want to lose their talents, skills and knowledge. This can happen in any number of ways (some completely rational, or almost, some quite irrational but that's humanity for you) but the end result is the same - an employee whom the employer values is under the burden of excessive travel time (and sometimes cost) which is not a good situation - for either party. I don't take this in to consideration when hiring new employees because I , personally, have always recognised the fact that you should never hire anyone who has to travel more than 45 minutes to work - though I do understand that as cities such as Sydney have grown so big geographically that has to be increased - it actually doesn't change the fact that is highly undesirable for both parties. The nice government survey lady couldn't understand how I couldn't see all her other benefits but actually saw separation from co-workers as a massive social minus as opposed to the four walls and 'limited' human association of the employee's home as THE major disadvantage - particularly for the young age demographic that applies within Exetel. So I suppose the net of my view is that people should select jobs that are as close to where they live as possible and that an employer may mutually agree with an employee who is valuable to the company that they should work from home if they end up living (for whatever reason) so far away that travel is a negative factor in their lives and therefore in their job performance. Maybe I won't fill in the next survey - my answers appear to be as 'helpful' to the 'government' as my answers to their paid maternity leave survey. Trackbacks
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Having worked at home for a few years now I would largely agree. Over coming the tyranny of distance is the major benefit. Most other factors are negative, though exactly how negative depends a lot on the individual and the sort of work. It works adequately for me but I am comfortable with low levels of social contact, and am very self-directed.
One addition that I would make is that working at home part time (e.g. 2 day a week at home, 3 at the office) has a lot to recommend it. It over comes a lot of the negatives and allows some other positives like minimising distractions to come to the fore. Comment (1)
It takes me an hour each way to travel to work (bus/train) from Parramatta to the city and I don't think that's too unreasonable (30min of that is spent asleep anyway), so yes your 45 min. needs scaling upward a tad
I could do my job entirely from home with ADSL/VPN/VOIP but my employer prefers I come in to work for much the same reasons as yours above - "separation from co-workers as a massive social minus". I have no problems with that, when they employed me it was with the understanding that they didn't "do" work from home. T. Comment (1)
One advantage that you may have overlooked is the cost to Exetel - how much would your offices need to grow if all employees were there every day? And how small would they be if all employees worked from home?
Not only the office, but the extras - water, sewer, electricity etc. All of these can be supplied "free" by the employee - their pay stays the same, they save on travel and pay the bills which they then claim via their taxes rather than hitting your bottom line. I know these bills are smaller by comparison, but they're still there. Then add to that the ancilliary costs of "support" - with 50 less PCs in the office you have one less IT support employee to pay for. Again, small costs but lots of smaller costs add up to a larger one. Plus, especially with an under-40s workforce, how many sick days are avoided "cos the kids are sick" etc? Comment (1)
I have both VPN and Citrix access and whenever I'm working on strategy docs I prefer to work from home. So much easier when you don't get drop-ins and excessive phone calls. However if I'm just working on day to day management and operations, I prefer to be in the office due to the social interaction and the number of random ideas that come from impropmtu hallway standups.
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I would tend to agree with Neil and Felix. There are in fact some very important benefits (for employer and employee) to working from home, especially in certain types of jobs, but these benefits are not necessarily required every day of the working week.
The majority of offices nowadays offer sloppy, on-the-cheap manifestations of "open plan" offices (i.e. they do the cubicles part but forget to provide enough/any small private workspaces or meeting rooms). These can be great for collaboration and staying abreast of team mates' work through informal eavesdropping and casual conversation. But when it comes to doing anything that requires supreme concentration, listening, focus on accuracy or creativity (writing, say) they suck big time. My employer's office is such an office. If I wasn't able to do some of my work from home some days and adopt occasional flexible hours in order to work at times when the office is largely unoccupied I would be much less productive. But at the same time, I wouldn't be able to do my job properly if I worked from home all the time. I would lose the interaction, the awareness of operational activities and the benefits of having a general presence in the office. So employers who allow flexibility and occasional or part-time work from home are, I think, taking the smart approach. I would add that on the occasions in the past when I've had an enclosed office to work in, I've been absolutely productive working standard office hours five days a week. Environment, facilities and resources make a lot of difference. If an employer can't offer an adequate environment for the type of work to be done, then working from home at least some of the time is a very sensible compromise with many benefits. Comment (1)
how is working from home any different to working in another country? Instead of having an office in Sri Lanka, you have desks all over the place. I'm not saying all work can be done remotely, and there are great benefits to working in an office, but telecommuting is something that should be seriously considered on a case by case basis, and not dismissed out of hand.
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