Thursday, September 11. 2008Are There Any Reasons For Building Any More 'Office Blocks'?John Linton I don't know what the general trend of working locations is around Australia but, being such a large country, it has always meant that a significant number of employees have worked 'remotely' in terms of their geographic location vis a vis the location of their organisation's 'head office'. It's therefore, perhaps, easier for Australian organsations to make the next logical move of dispensing with 'regional' offices than it is for,say, EU countries. Exetel has had 'remote' employees since the first day of it being in business in that Steve has always worked from home in Perth for at least 50% of the time and Annette seldom ever came in to the Exetel office (when we eventually had one some 4 months after starting the business from our 'study' at home in January 2004. Indeed more than 50% of my working hours are away from the North Sydney Exetel office. We currently have Steve, Annette and two support engineers (one in the ACT and one on the NSW Central Coast) who work from home in Australia and are about to have our tenth employee working from our new Colombo office. Over 70% of all sales and support telephone calls are now handled 'remotely' and, once the Colombo office is fully operational 98% of all such customer, and prospective customer, contacts will be handled 'remotely'. This is only possible because of the great advances in both the communications technology, and the cost of that technology, over the past ten years. It's a common concept in today's commercial enterprises to deploy VoIP and VPN solutions that make it irrelevant where any employee is situated to carry out their daily tasks. Our Colombo employees are linked to the same telephone and computer systems and data bases as Steve and Annette are or our engineers in Canberra and Gosford are (or any Exetel employee is when they travel interstate or overseas). Today, or certainly 'tomorrow', it will be hard to come up with a reason for making an employee travel to some location other than where he/she resides to carry out their daily work. The financial reasons (for both the employee and the employer) are overwhelmingly against having to incur travel time and costs for the employee and rental and operating costs for the employer compared to using VoIP/VPN connectivity. The environmental reasons for people not travelling to and from work would make even the most aggressive 'greenhouse gas reduction' targets easy to achieve if all the cars and buses/trains (where there are any) were not clogging the roads for 4 hours each working day. Of course, there would remain training and other issues that reqire some amounts of travel but that would not be much in terms of total 'working hours'. From my point of view, and I realise that I am more used to 'innovation' than many people who don't work in the communications industry, there are only two issues to be addressed - one for the employee and one for the employer. The employee issue is not something that I can readily address as it is going to be different for each individual and is entirely personal - how any individual regards the desirability or otherwise of working from the same place they live. Personally I find it highly desirable and preferable but I realise there are many people and circumstances where that may well not be the case. However, as any change to 'working from home' will be gradual over two decades that should not be a problem for any individual whose employer decides to make such a change over time. The key issue for the employer is to be able to ensure that an employee who works from home gets the same levels of guidance and assistance and career development that they would if they worked in a 'traditional' office environment. (I understand a cynic might suggest that this would not be a problem because some individuals get nothing useful from their current management - but I don't accept that is generally the situation). At Exetel we decided to address this key issue (or set of issues) by developing a computer based job goal setting and management process that we have been working on for almost a year now. It will take another year to fully develop, trial and activate but, based on what I've seen so far, I believe it will address most of the guidance/management issues that a widespread implementation of 'working from home' will demand: http://whitepapers.exetel.com.au/mediawiki/index.php?title=GURUS-_Ultimate_Personnel_Management I would think that any company that was contemplating a significant move to 'working from home' would do something similar. Obviously teleconferencing/video conferencing and similar tools have already removed some of the disadvantages of working in geographic locations that are 'remote' from a 'head office'. Specific database tools should, in my current opinion, be able to replace 'proximity' management equally effectively and, in a number of ways, be more effective. Once we complete the move of all customer provisioning/support/sales/admin/accounting functions either to Colombo or to other parts of Australia (individual's homes) we will have less than 40% of the people we have now working in our one Australian office in North Sydney. I don't think we will be unique in making that happen - I do wonder why more office space continues to be built.
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Timely post for us.
At our place we are just starting to have employees working from home one or two days a week. However, none of us have experience with having our employees work from home. So any chance of blogging about the details? I mean such things as what tools do you use (email, IM, calendaring, VoIP, job logging, etc.) and how do you monitor your employees (as in are they working effectively, are they having trouble). Comment (1)
We are happy to share whatever information we have.
I gave a url of the gurus system in my blog today. We use our database as the main source of work related measurements and then also write 'interrogators for various other devices and information. Our 'at home' employees have Mitel phones linked via ADSL to our Mitel VoIP switch as well as full VPN access to the database systmes. We use email (of course) plus email lists and teleconferencing. Comments (4)
I have been working from home for quite a few years and have found my only reason to go into the office is to have lunch/coffee with my colleagues. This personal contact is the one thing which I personally don't want to loose by working from home and I don't believe phone/video conferencing can replace this personal contact.
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Very true - there is a loss of a key ingredient in working life and it isn't going to be easy to replace.
Similarly, for more people than you might realise, staying at ome to wrk is not something they relish - for many different reasons. However - I think it's a quickening trend. Comments (4)
The problem with working at home is that once you can do your work at home then you are no longer competing with other workers in your town for your job.
You are competing with people in third world countries who are prepared to work for a fraction of an Australian salary. How can you compete with that? You can't. Why would you hire a person in Sydney when you can hire a small team in Columbo for the same money? Comment (1)
There are many jobs and many careers - my youngest daughter works at IBM in her third year there and often works at home.
It isn't a unction of whether a person in another country would do the same job for a lower remuneration it's more a question of how an individual bilds teir own career to give themselves financial security and fulfilment. I don't, and I doubt that you, buy electronic goods that are made in Australia - we prefer the quality, technology and price available from items made in Korea, the PRC or some other S E Asian country. We have a privileged life in this country and we, each person who is going to work for decades, have to make sure we can keep ourselves and the people for whom we are responsible financially provided for. Comments (4)
I work for a virtual call centre organisation, where all the operators work from home. The office only houses admin, management and customer facing staff, and folks like myself who run the various teams of agents.
All the telephony is managed via an inhouse developed system that calls the agents home number (via a VoIP connection), and then passes the calls down the open line (both inbound and outbound, as required). Training is done entirely via a web-based system, and a high percentage of calls are monitored, either live or after the fact, for coaching and compliance purposes. I worked as an operator initially, and never actually met any of the office staff in person until I had been working for around 8 months. Constant communication with the operators is key, as well as making sure they fully understand the requirements and individual jobs measures. This environment is very popular with "sea-changers" who are looking for part-time work, and don't fancy living in metropolitan areas. Comment (1)
I'm sure your experience is becoming more common and, for those types of people it suits, is preferable and much more flexible than imposing a geographic requirement for the purpose of obtaining a job.
For me, it's becoming irrelevant where I'm located to do my jo and I think that's becoming more and more common. Comments (4)
Agree, I've been working from home for the last few years and working remotely also, broadband access and VoIP make it possible to work from just about anywhere these days, I'm currently in China and to anyone that calls me it's mostly transparent, many are surprised to know when you are talking to them that you are not at your usual place of business
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i am looking do similar sort of work from home , does anyone has any contacts of co that need such ppl ?? plz advice ????
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