John Linton
When I first heard the statement "I'll be working from home today" I think I laughed derisively and thought how moronic the management of that company (Swiftel) must be - they were - to fall for that BS. Working from home? Right! Just meant the person could sleep off their hangover and mooch around the house until it was time to go out on their personal business/entertainent. "Working from home", to me, was just a more bare faced lie than the one it replaced - "I won't be in today I've got a dose of food poisoning". Both completely unbelievable and totally ethically demeaning to the person uttering those words.
The simple fact is that, for most people, there is nothing that can be done better 'at home' than at the working premises expressly designed to optimise the work to be done by any individual.
Until now, perhaps.
Today, for most companies that have implemented 'modern' database and VPN systems and use VoIP 'PBXs' there is little difference between the working conditions 'at home' and the working conditions at the 'office'. Exetel certainly has three people who 'work from home' on a full time basis and two others who work around 50% of their time 'at home'...and, of course they have fully spec'd computers, fast ADSL connections with Cisco router/modems and VoIP telephone handsets (identical to the office handsets) linked to the Exetel VoIP PBX.Of course they can also be expected to actually work as effectively at home as they would do if they were in the Exetel office at North Sydney because, in part, their jobs are specifically designed to be location independent.
The other issue, not specificaly related to the work done by a commercial organisation, is the realisation of the impact of 'travel' on the environment and the new, currently voluntary, cost of ameliorating the carbon emissions acssociated with employees travelling to and from a 'place of work' which to date haven't figured in many/any cost of operating equations.
I, personaly, dismiss the "better quality of life" cant of those parasites of commerce, human relsources personnel, as I do every other purveyor of that crass nonsense - it's just 'code' for giving untrustworthy employees the opportunity of working less hours as there is not the same level of supervision. However that particular issue has never concerned me as I believe that if you hire 'untrustworthy' personnel then you have far more problems than whether they also cheat you out of a few hours working time - simple solution to that problem is take more care hiring and then motivating from that point onwards.
Most of the first 30 years of my working life was in sales at various levels of seniority from the most junior to the most senior. In sales the amount of time I was 'in the office' was very very small - even in the 1960s when you were totally dependent on office facilities (quotes, proposals, general correspondence etc) for many aspects of the job. If you were actually 'in the office' for much more than 20% of your time you probably weren't going to last in a sales job. So I'm 'pre-programmed' to understand that the only real motivation for any employee to actually do work that isn't supervised is to ensure the work is self monitoring and the employee has a continuing interest and motivation to carry out the tasks (making enough sales to keep your job solves that issue for sales personnel).
There is, for many people, of whatever age group or personal circumstances, a true social need provided by an office environment and there is, for a smaller number of people who work, a very real need to get away from their 'home environment' for a large part of the day for a huge variety of reasons. These reasons range from the very obvious and very desirable opportunities of social intercourse over coffee or lunch, a drink after work or just across the desk to getting away from some infelicitous home 'circumstance'.
So, working from home can provide very sensible benefits for quite possibly a large part of any company's work force but maybe not as high a percentage as may be first considered.....and that's just looking at the 'social interaction' aspects of the issue and ignoring the teaching on the job and other major benefits of people working together in the same physical location.
I'm only referencing this scenario as I've been trying to work out the carbon impact of Exetel employees travelling to and from work so we can finalise the commitments we need to make in terms of the carbon neutral funding we need to incorporate in to our operating plans from Feb 1st 2008 onwards. I actually can't find any sensible guide on how to calculate this so I don't know whether this cost will actually be a financial factor.
What is a factor, depending on just what our final plans might turn out to be from July 1st 2008 onwards, is our need for office space and how that might be affected by a higher percentage of Exetel employees either working in Sri Lanka (or Eastern Europe) or working from their own homes anywhere in Australia. This is a very real financial consideration and must be seriously considered in what might turn out to be a very financially challenging 2 - 3 years.
So, it appears to me, that Exetel would be better off financially to pursue a 'work from home' employment policy moving forward as the physical operating facilities are 'location neutral'. What is far from clear is what the impact of removing the social interactions embodied in the 'work from the office' concept on which most people's working lives, however short to date, have been based.
I guess we'll have to add it to the list of considerations - I think that's now up to page 143.