Sarah Jessica Parker works flexibly in Sex
and the City.
Photograph: c.HBO/Everett / Rex Features
How does your day start? Assuming you still have a job, is your commute 30,
60 or even 90 minutes of hell? Is it an unreliable bus that you take to work, or
an overcrowded train? If you drive, do you wish you had cycled? If you cycle, do
you wish you had walked? If you walk, do you wish your shoes were dogshit-proof?
Do you arrive stressed, exhausted, ripped off, degraded, suicidal, homicidal or
all of the above?
And what about the next eight hours? Do you get a headache because of the
lighting, or an earache because of the telephones? Is it the decor that makes
you feel queasy, or the chit-chat when you're trying to concentrate? Do you go
home regretting how little you have achieved or cursing how soon you will have
to return? Work stinks, doesn't it? Or, at least, going to the office. The good
news is, it doesn't have to. Millions of us are doing jobs that could be carried
out just as well at home.
"I can't help feeling that our descendants will look back at us and think,
'What on earth were they thinking of?' " says Shirley Borrett, who works and
lives in a motor home.
Borrett is development director for the Telework Association, which promotes
working from home, especially if that involves a computer and a telephone, and
splits her time between Britain and Spain. Whether you call this teleworking,
telecommuting or home working, it's a growing market. Banks, call centres,
councils, management consultancies, software companies, law firms, PR agencies:
all are increasingly allowing their staff to do it at least part-time. BT, the
pioneer in Britain in the 1980s, now has 65,000 flexible workers, of whom 10,000
do not come in to the office.
We're still a long way from the dreams of 20 or 25 years ago, which imagined
offices emptying of everyone who didn't operate a franking machine or wield a
mop. According to the official Labour Force Survey, in the spring of 2009 there
were 691,000 British home workers (working mainly in their own homes, using both
a phone and a computer) versus 582,000 three years before. But Borrett and
others reckon those figures are underestimated. Even in 2008, a survey for the
CBI found 46% of businesses allowing their staff to work from home, up from just
11% in 2004.
Melanie Pinola, who writes about home working for About.com, says the jobs
that can be done remotely range from accountancy to telemarketing, via financial
analysis, translation, data entry, graphic design, illustration, insurance,
media buying, speech-writing, research, sales, travel agency, stockbroking,
website design, writing, editing.
"Virtually anything that used to be an office job and uses computers and
telecoms can be done remotely for at least part of the week," says Borrett's
colleague, Peter Thomson. "Take nurses in a hospital," he says. "They have to be
physically present when they're caring for patients, but they also do a lot of
paperwork. That could be done anywhere."
So how do you join the home-working masses? If you have a child under 16, or
18 if they are disabled, you have a head start. Employers are legally obliged at
least to consider your request to work flexibly, which could include working
from home for at least part of the week and/or changing your hours. They must
also consider an application if you are caring for a friend or a family member.
But even if no one loves you and you have no one to look after, you have a very
strong business case – if you can persuade your company to listen.
Not only do home workers reduce the need for expensive premises, they are
often vastly more productive. BT claims it gets an average of 20% more work out
of its 10,000. "It works amazingly for us," says Caroline Waters, the company's
director of people and policy, who herself works from home at least one day a
week. "You get great productivity, reduced sick absence, high levels of
performance. And we know it works for a lot of other organisations, because we
help a lot of them put it in place."
When the AA based some of its call-centre staff at home, says Borrett, their
productivity rose by more than a third. Some American studies show a 30-40%
increase. Noel Hodson, who was one of the key figures in home working until the
early 2000s, suggests that this is at least partly down to the removal of the
daily commute: "What we found was that most of the time saved went back into
work. These workers valued their new way of working, and to protect it they did
more work."
Hodson should know what he's talking about. He has been working at home for
30 years, ever since he decided he could no longer stand the trip from Oxford to
London and back five times a week. "I had two young children whom I barely saw,
and I thought, 'This is ridiculous.' So I closed the office." He has had one
brief spell of commuting since then, when he was advising Transport for London,
and the company forced him to come into its central London offices every day for
three months. It was winter; he got the flu. "It was suicidal stuff for me."
When you are mentioning productivity to your sceptical superiors, there are a
few more points that you might throw in. Companies that offer flexible working
find it easier to attract staff, and easier to hang on to them. At BT, Waters
says that at least 97% of women who take maternity leave come back to work
afterwards, against a national average of about half that. "In any one year,
we're retaining an additional 500-600 women. The downtime, the recruitment, the
instruction very conservatively of each person would be around £10,000. Not only
are we creating a more inclusive BT, we're saving £5m-£6m on skill losses." Mind
you, that's small beer compared with the computer company Cisco's savings from
teleworking. A survey in 2009 put these at $277m a year.
And there are bonuses for society. Home working encourages a more diverse
labour force, bringing in not just carers but those who have difficulty
travelling because they are disabled or live in remote locations. Then there's
the reduction in pollution and greenhouse gases. According to Cambridgeshire
county council, home working in that county alone could reduce commuter travel
by up to 8 million miles a year. Last month transport minister Norman Baker
reminded employers that letting staff avoid the workplace just one day in 10
would have a "huge impact" on congestion.
So if home working is so great, why aren't we all doing it already? As usual,
it's the boss's fault. Hodson remembers trying to sell home working to a firm of
engineers 20-odd years ago. "As I went through the economics, I touched on the
thought that the company car wouldn't be necessary any more – and the managing
director reached across the desk and took me by the tie in a stranglehold. He
didn't even know he was doing it. It was his big shiny Jaguar that was sitting
in the car park for seven and three-quarter hours a day."
When it's not their cars they are worried about, it's their empires. If
there's no one to laugh at their jokes, how will they know they are funny? If
bosses can't see what their staff are doing, how will they know that they are
working? "The issues are human, not technological," says Thomson. "For the past
200 years we have been in an environment where people get together in the same
place to work and a manager stands there and watches what they do. To then say,
'Right, you can't see what your workers are doing any more but trust them to get
on with the job' can be a bit of a culture shock."
"The last barriers are attitudinal," agrees Waters. "But it's a real myth
that you have control over what your people do just because they sit in the same
location. Most managers who are worried about this kind of thing actually sit in
their offices and rarely interact with their people. Presenteeism is a really
poor performance indicator. It in no way gives the kind of productivity measure
that you need to run a successful business."
Firms that embrace home working have to find some better gauge. Mark Thomas
is chief executive of Word Association, a Midlands-based PR consultancy that
employs 13 people, all working from home. There used to be an office, but Thomas
closed it to go travelling in 1998, and the staff he left behind were so happy
working from their spare bedrooms that when he got back to Britain he decided
not to reopen it. "We've managed to come up with measures of performance that
are more to do with output than with the amount of time that people spend at
their desk," he says. You might think of PR as a nebulous business, but it's not
impossible to monitor media coverage, or customer satisfaction. "I am able to
tell whether people are performing," Thomas insists. "And the reality is that
everybody who works for me puts in really good hours and does a really good
job."
Wyn Matthews backs him up, and not just because he could sack her. She
recently joined Word Association as a copywriter. "Some people say, 'Ooh, you
can just mess around the house, can't you?'" she says. "But it works the
opposite way. You're not coming away from the office thinking, 'That's it – I
won't be doing any more tonight.' If you're needed, you're prepared to be on
hand." In an office, she says, "some people have the ability to look really busy
when they're not. That nonsense is stripped away by working at home. Your bosses
see what you do."
The logical accompaniment to home working is a more relaxed attitude to
working hours. "I've had managers say to me, 'But they might go to Tescos on
Wednesday afternoon,'" says Shirley Borrett. "To which I reply, 'If you're truly
being flexible and recognising that people are doing a job, then what does it
matter, so long as you're getting whatever output it is you want?
"It all comes down to trust," she says. "Trust that people are doing what
they're supposed to be doing, though not necessarily at the same time as they'd
be doing it in the office."
The last thing any manager needs to worry about is idleness, says Pinola, who
works at home in the US. "You tend to overwork as a remote worker because you
don't want to appear to be slacking off."
Will some employers abuse this? What do you think? The same technology that
makes it possible to escape the office – mobile phones, laptops, broadband –
makes it that much harder to get away from your boss. First they give you a
BlackBerry, then they start emailing you at 1am. But that's true even if you
work in an office, nine to five. There is a certain kind of manager who insists
on interrupting his underlings' evenings and weekends with "urgent" enquiries
that could easily wait. Whether or not we've agreed to it, many of us are
already on call 24/7.
This may actually be less disruptive for home workers than it is for the
office-based. When researchers from America's Brigham Young University looked at
24,000 IBM employees, they found that those with flexible working arrangements
were able to put in 57 hours a week before their personal life started to
suffer, against 38 hours for those in traditional posts.
Otherwise, the advice for home workers is the same as it should be for
everyone. Work when you're paid to; don't when you're not. You might remind your
boss of the Department of Employment's guidelines: "Employers should seek to
ensure that timetables are established which determine when employees are
expected to be working, and when they should not be contacted."
And don't undermine your position by checking emails when you're supposed to
be off duty, or answering work calls. "The great thing about technology is that
it has an off button," says Waters. It's a cliche, but that doesn't mean it's
not true. The best employers will not just expect you to use that button, but
worry if you don't. Christiane Perera is head of people and development at OAC,
a 24-strong firm of actuaries with home offices as far apart as Devon, Surrey,
Manchester and Wales. "If you know that someone's at their desk during the day
and then you keep getting emails from them at midnight, you tend to raise the
subject with them," she says. "Do they need to work that late? Is there an
issue? Do they need help? You need to be able to read the indicators."
While you're whipping your bosses into shape, don't forget your nearest and
dearest. Let them know that when you're working, you're working. "[Home workers]
must avoid a tendency to talk with friends or family or do things around the
house," is the stern warning from America's Westchester County. "If an employee
has a family member at home who cares for children or elders, that person may
expect the employee to be more available for caregiving because they are home.
Arrangements should be made that will address this potential problem."
"It's a constant re-educating process," says Pinola. "My immediate family
knows that when the door to my home office is closed I am really busy. I try to
have them imagine that I'm not even there, but my four-year-old doesn't really
like that game. One thing that helps is having a separate phone number just for
personal calls so that I can filter the non-work calls. Other than that, I just
have to remind people when my working hours are. I guess you could hang a 'Do
not disturb' sign on your door when you're very busy."
Is there anyone who shouldn't attempt to work from home? Well, yes: anyone
who doesn't want to. For some the office is important. It provides clear lines
between work from home, a break from the family, colleagues to talk to and a
creative environment.
"[Home working] doesn't suit everybody," Borrett points out. "It's not for
people who've got a very young family and nowhere separate to work. It usually
doesn't suit people who are in their early 20s and still living with their
parents. Young people also want to get a social life out of their work life."
When Hodson was running teleworking trials, he found another group to worry
about: the over-55s whose children had left home or whose partners had died.
Many of them decided they'd be happier back in the office.
Not, of course, that home workers have to feel isolated. There's no law that
says you can't call them into the office if you have one, or find some other
meeting place. "At first we didn't put as much effort into communication as we
should have done," admits Thomas. "Now we have regular monthly production
meetings where we get together to work through every single client, every single
job. All the staff attend. We also have monthly reviews of staff, various teams
getting together around projects or services, management team meetings." In
between, there are phone calls, emails, instant messaging. If you're all logged
on to MSN, you can swap little messages with your co-workers all day long. If
you've got a smartphone, you can even do it when you're at Tesco.
Where could this all end? Just imagine turning up at the office one day and
being sent home with a flea in your ear: "What the hell are you doing here? We
don't want you sitting around chatting and drinking coffee. You should be at
home, working.
"http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2010/aug/03/rise-working-from-home
