Written by As viewers of the old BBC television programme Tomorrows World will recollect, a commotion was made in the 1970’s and 1980’s about the imminent expansion of work from home opportunities. It was eagerly anticipated that by the the next millennium (i.e. ten years ago) a significant part of the populace would find it possible to carry out their duties for employers in their own home without having to journey to employers sites. Work From Home opportunities were expected to become the answer to traffic congestion issues all over the country as the daily commute would eventually fall away as fewer and fewer people found it necessary to make that daily journey. Economic benefits would be huge as not only would the economic cost of traffic congestion fall, but workers output would increase as they dispense with the commuting dead time. Of course there would always remain a number of jobs which would continue to necessitate the attendance of workers at employers’ sites. Most production jobs would require this, but many service based jobs lend themselves to the work from home idea. And as Britain continues to move away from production and towards service provision as the chief economic activity, so it was though that the work from home revolution would by now have been in full swing.
IT would need to take part in this work from home revolution. The key focus of the predictions being made focussed around bettering telecommunications. One often touted advance which would act as a key launch pad was video conferencing. This would let teams of home workers to attend virtual meetings with colleagues and managers. This could replace the usual meeting and let workers to share data and work from home with as much effect as from an office.
The web was not predicted, but it now turns out that the internet can offer a much broader set of resources and communication options that should enable working from home to become even more practical. Communication by e mail and the attachment of any kind of document, video conferencing in the form of on line virtual meetings, training conducted on line perhaps in the form of webinars add more opportunity. Add to that the abundance of broadband provision throughout houses in the UK means that fewer and fewer individuals are excluded from this new way of working. But the arrival of Online Jobs and the internet business per se have also increased work from home options. Online Jobs let workers to carry out rather complex tasks at their own computer and the internet enables them to deliver the fruits of their labours anywhere worldwide almost straight away. The Internet Business itself, designing, building and optimising websites, also contributes.
So it does seem that at last the work from home experience is becoming available to more and more people. In the UK broadband is now supporting nearly 60% of houses and that figure continues to rise. However there will always exist a core of jobs, largely in manufacturing, that will not yield to this movement. There will also continue to be a requirement for one to one human contact on many activities. One thinks particularly of sales and business development, where there would appear likely to always be the need for face to face meetings. As a postscript, it does seem in recent years that the relentless growth in daily motor car use might have actually slowed, though not actually reversed. Maybe we are at last seeing the start of the work from home revolution.
Work from home has started to have an impact but not as quickly as you might think. There seems to be some sort of human nature or psychological factor that makes certain people capable of working from home. Also there is the function of walking over to someones cube and asking a question that does not seem to translate very well to the home office. Communication tools such as Skype seem to help but it seems to take the right kind of person and some special effort.
Are there any studies on what people need to work from home that you are aware of?