John Linton not necessarily as beneficial as it is sometimes suggested.
From 'day one' of Exetel's existence when its three founders all worked from home before it ever had its own office Exetel has always recognised that employees working from home could be beneficial and sometimes was the only way that some people could work. This is hardly novel as it has been a 'reported on' practice since at least the very early 1990s. Today Steve works from his home in Perth 75% of the time and Annette has continued to work from home 95% of the time, Due to my excessive working hours I work form the office for around 30 hours a week but work from home for another 30 to 40 hours each week now - in the past it has been much more.Several other people who do work for Exetel work entirely from home (except for Christmas parties and other celebrations.
As I have alluded to recently we have recently almost run out of the current space in both North Sydney and Colombo 1 and seriously considered the options of allowing current personnel in both those locations to work from home......for all the wrong reasons as well as some of the right reasons. The wrong reasons were mainly the possible savings that Exetel would achieve by not having to pay big slabs of extra rent plus the relatively large costs of fitting out the new floor space. The right reasons for us were the interpersonal communications that, in our opinion, are essential in a company that employs mainly university graduates in their first full time working role and has constant changes in almost every thing it does.
I read this article earlier this morning:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704004004576271222140110188.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_Above_Video
which apart from providing some updated statistics (strangely unreferenced for this particular on line newspaper) was written about the 'needs' for work from home workers to actually get away from the solitariness and other down sides of working from home. I understand the concepts of work from home people regularly working at the office to address this issue and the concept has been in existence since I first worked for IBM in the late 1960s where sales people were provided with a giant table and a row of phone booths as their communal work space on the basis that they should rarely be in the office (they should be 'on the road' making face to face prospect and customer calls). That failed to produce the expected results - unless the expected results were groups of IBM reps improving their pool playing abilities and having long, alcohol based, lunches.
That particular concept, imposed from some far away place, lasted about nine months before being abandoned. Doubtless, knowing IBM as I did then, it had been seriously considered for a very long time by all sorts of very earnest and highly qualified people and then gone through several layers of scrutiny and approval before being put in place. The fact that it was a miserable failure just goes to show that theory is very difficult to apply to disparate groups of people in different times. My daughter, Catherine, who has worked for IBM for the past five years since she completed her degree tells me that IBM have returned to that type of operation (some 40 years since the idea came and went back in the day). It is even more draconian now with a ratio of seven employees to each desk being made available.
Clearly 'working from home' practices will continue to depend on the individuals involved and the amount of face to face interaction and 'encouragement' aspects of their individual responsibilities. From this article you could tend to lean towards the view that the obvious advantages of an individual working from home are somewhat dissipated by the obvious negatives. Before some jumped up personnel consultant argues the reverse I will remain reminded how much more qualified 'consultants' persuaded the IBM of the day to ensure its sales forces around the world did far less work each day than their Utopian planning had expected and had planned for.
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