For those who missed it, a couple of weeks ago the UK ‘celebrated’ National Work From Home day. Much heralded in the past as the way technology would take us, how much have we really changed our approached to flexible working? This week Quentin addresses issues surrounding working from home and the true benefits for employers and employees.
I have to admit that I successfully missed any publicity regarding Work From Home day, so much so that I didn’t even know it had happened. Somewhat sad given that I do spend some of my time working from home!
The idea of working from home is certainly not new. One of the proclaimed benefits of IT was the ability it would give people to work remotely and therefore give them more control over their lives. Great plans were developed, for example BT trumpeted the concept of Directory Enquiries being run from home and a pilot in the Highland was developed. But it never took off – why not?
I think there are a number of reasons why home working hasn’t taken off. Certainly the potential is there, broadband technology provides swift and secure communications to the majority of the UK, but how much of the capacity is used for work purposes? While some work from home, and typically they are self-employed, the numbers whose employers let them do so are few and hard to find.
There is a perception that working from home can be a skivers charter. Of course that could be the case, but equally how many people in the office contribute a full day’s work?
I’ve had a number of discussions recently with businesses looking to put in place effective smoking policies post 1st July. Some of the discussion revolves around the question of smoking breaks and ways of minimising downtime. How much time at work is spent chatting round the coffee machine or in the kitchen? My personal view is that the key issue is employee motivation rather than location. Wherever an employee is based they need to be committed to what they are doing, and that can be equally successful at home or in the office.
We need to keep in perspective the number of people who may be able to work from home. There are many manufacturing and production roles that depend on capital equipment, many of those in the service sector and offering personal services, such as within shops. In addition there are already many field-based workers within the UK. I suspect that the number who do the type of work that could be performed remotely is less than 5 percent of the working population.
Most importantly though, we need to recognise that work is essentially a social activity. Of course the vast majority of people work out of economic necessity, but for many of these the social aspects of work are also vitally important. That opportunity to have social interaction should never be understated. We often miss its importance, but we need to remind ourselves that one of the key aspects of retaining staff within an organisation is having friendly colleagues. It may be all well and good having great colleagues, but if you never see them their value swiftly diminishes.
There are of course times when working from home has its advantages. When a report needs to be written to tight timescales or when a lack of interruptions is important then seclusion, often at home, may be the key. But let’s not kid ourselves; despite the pressures for work/life balance and the environmental issues of travel, the amount of home working will not change dramatically. There’s simply not the motivation or interest.
So has you your employer tried to embrace working from home? What did the organisation think of it? What about the employees? Let’s hear your experiences.
Quentin Colborn is an independent HR consultant based in Essex who advises management teams on operational and strategic HR issues. Quentin can be contacted on 01376 571360 or via Quentin@qcpeople.co.uk
3 Responses
Home-working
Quentin can always be relied upon to ask good questions in his postings!
Personally, I think the home-working issue has been wrongly presented, as an ‘either-or’ option. My own experience is that it is a great option, especially if not an exclusive one devoid of any face-to-face contact.
I find that given the option, employees at almost all levels enjoy both home and office working. Give them a link to your server and in a healthily-motivated and responsible organisation they’ll be working for you as they may need to whatever time of day or night.
This requires trust and goodwill by all to work well – but no more than any other shared activity? I commend it as both an employer and an employee!
Jeremy
Working from Home and Work/Life Balance
As General Manager of a regulatory affairs consultancy to the Pharmaceutical Industry, I highly recommend and promote working from home and agree with both Quentin’s comments and those made by M Roy.
It’s interesting that so many people regard homeworking as ‘skiving’. From my own experience, I have found that when employees are set up to work remotely, they all work extra hours in the evenings and weekends. I actually have the reverse problem to ‘skiving’ in that I have to actively protect the work/life balance of my colleagues to avoid ‘burn out’.
What employers should also consider is that they are more likely to attract and retain staff by offering an element of homeworking along with some flexibility of their working hours. My company has been able to recruit some excellent staff who needed a certain amount of flexibility within their working lives e.g. school runs. Without being able to offer homeworking and flexible hours, we would not have attracted (and retained) such good staff. I believe many employers do not realise that they are unnecessarily ‘writing off’ a large proportion of the population and subsequently, some very skilled and knowledgeable people.
Does the IT industry give more flexibility to home-workers?
In response to your article dated today about employees working from home, I would advise that the practice might be somewhat more common than you are aware; especially in the IT industry.
I work for an accounting software development company as an Office Manager and many of our developers work from home once a week. They can log in remotely to the server and write code all day and it works quite well for them and us. There are guys who’ve worked here for 5 years or more who regularly work from home as well as newer staff members. Some of the team have regular days during the week when they work from home and we do not find that people use the time for slacking off. It’s largely a matter of trust between the boss and the staff and as no one takes advantage of being allowed to work from home; we continue to have this flexibility. It also works well when people need to be at home for a specific delivery or if a repairman is due, as people can let the relevant person in and then get back to work. We all know when BT says they’ll be there between 8am and 1pm, it’s more likely to be nearer to 1pm than 8am, so why make staff drag themselves into work after 1pm with a 90 minute journey after the gasman has been when they can just as easily be far more productive working from home? Giving staff the ability to work from home rather than making them use a day’s holiday makes them much more loyal to the company in the long run and less likely to leave; thereby improving staff retention rates.
At present we have only one member of staff who works from home more than one day a week and he’s a team leader who is based in Germany – he comes into the London office just 2 days a week. He’s been with the company for 7 years now; working from home hasn’t stopped him from being promoted or from being an effective part of the team.
I understand that there are people working in the IT industry who work from home on a more regular basis. For these types of jobs people can get a lot more work done working from home without the interruptions of an office environment – the chit chat at the coffee machine, day to day gossip and cigarette breaks outside the building. I’m by no means saying that it’s ideal to work from home full-time; as you so rightly say there needs to be a degree of social interaction between colleagues. If working from home every day it will inherently become difficult to build a real relationship with colleagues.