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.