Working From Home: Myths and Truths

Are we rapidly getting transformed into a 24 x 7 working society?

Globalization of businesses has set in. Employees, business partners in the

enterprises are pushed and pressurized to respond and make decisions faster than

ever. The sun never sets in the 'follow the sun' business model; someone's night

is some one else's day in another country at the opposite side of the globe.

Work takes place anywhere, anytime, anyplace. Fuel crisis apart, people still

seem to travel heavily; just observe how crowded the airports are these days and

how many new airliners have come up. When people travel, they still need to

work. Thus, work seems to be moving out of the traditional offices into homes,

hotels, airport lounges, and taxis. The employee is no longer tied to an office

location and is, in effect, boundary-less.

Workforce Mobility or Mobile Workforce



It is important to understand what types of jobs may align well with working

from home option. First and foremost, whether the work from home is for you,

depends on the nature of the work you do and your team situation. For example,

it has been seen that it works wonderfully for certain jobs such as freelance

journalism, freelance writing assignments, for those who work as independent

researchers, to some extent for musicians where the seclusions and the peaceful

noiseless environment is conducive for composing music. To a large extent, it is

suitable for some roles in the IT/Software industry where work is mostly

discussions and task allocations through telephonic meetings, accessing the

Internet and web-based applications, using the company intranets and filing

reports through emails, etc. To some extent 'work from home' may work for

certain types of consulting work but not all types. It is certainly not at all

suitable for jobs involving heavy client interfacing or interactive work (sales

force, teachers doctors and other medical professionals, etc) and for those in

manufacturing jobs in factory environments. From a team supervision perspective,

it depends whether you, your team and your manager is co-located with you. If

this is not the case, and it so happens that either your team or your

manager/supervisor is located in another city/country, then it really does not

matter whether you work from office or from home; as far as the team logistics

is concerned. There are communication technologies such as web cameras, Net

meeting utilities, video conferencing facilities, chat rooms and document

hosting web-sites that let you manage that.

Green aspects



If organizations consider providing the working from home option (of course,

based on organizational policy and defined rules to help make judgment about who

should be allowed to utilize the option), many benefits could follow; being able

to retain a critical talent, which otherwise could have left the organization

due to personal or family related time constraints, the 'green' factor - not

having to commute would mean reducing a large amount of carbon foot print. In

the context of supporting the 'go-green' cause, for example, IBM estimates that

something in the neighborhood of 58,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions were

not released into the air during a single year of its work-at-home program,

thanks to the elimination of daily commutes for 25,000 employees. Another

interesting question to explore in the 'green' regard is this — greater the

number of people working from home, greater would be the reduction in the number

of people working at offices and as most offices have air-conditioning units,

this could eventually bring down the HVAC (heating, ventilation and

air-conditioning) requirements down. Of course, the peak load calculations will

need to cater for the scenario wherein all the headcount could be working from

offices; but suppose an organization has a permanent mobility program for some

of its employees depending on the type of work they handle, then this could

possibly be a building design consideration right from the beginning. For

instance, you can come across a very high-skilled professional and it so happens

that he is physically challenged and so commuting is very difficult or say

impossible for him. The work from home option could come in handy to attract

this employee.

Challenges in working from home



Technology is not the only factor that goes in the working from home option.

There are other aspects too and many other challenges and concerns to be managed

that come with the 'working from home' option. The first and foremost that comes

to mind is the concern about 'work productivity'. How do we 'measure' the work

productivity of while collar workers when they are away from office and away

from their managers/superiors who assign them the task? For blue collar workers,

measuring work productivity is not an issue because most tasks for this worker

class are well defined, discrete and they produce 'physical' output. There are

home infrastructure and logistics issues if an individual finally ends up

working from home. In Indian metros, with the space scarcity, how many of us

would have the luxury of setting up an office like space in our apartments so

that we can work without any disturbance even when operating from home? One

would worry if the family is going to get disturbed. For example, you could be

in a situation when you are constantly on calls working with you virtual team

members in other geographies. If your house is a small apartment, it is but

obvious that you could be disturbing the entire house-hold with your long calls!

A typical question asked by management is this — 'who should we allow to take

the 'work from home option'. Clearly this is not an easy question to tackle.

Precedence can be set and expectations can get built if the option is exercised

indiscreetly. First of all, there has to be a clear and well thought out policy

on mobility and flexibility that an organization wants to provide to their

employee. The percentage of employees to take the mobility option should be

known in advance with justifiable business cases with the Human Resources

department involved in the evaluation of case to case basis of the circumstances

under which an employee would want to opt for work from home option.

Security and privacy



Given the fact that most information assets now seem to be digital in nature

and residing on corporate servers, this becomes a big concern. Copying,

transferring and replicating documents is easier than never before when most

information exists in soft copy forms and powerful tools for document handling

and emailing are easily available. Will the employee, working from home guard

the confidentiality of the information he/she is handling? How will be the

sensitive information be handled? Organizations will need to implement adequate

security and privacy measures to prevent breach of security and privacy in the

working from home scenario. Providing remote log in access will be a matter that

security administrators will need to handle appropriately. Management would feel

uncomfortable about not being able to watch an employee working away from

office. However, this concern is valid not only for those who work from home but

also for other types of 'mobile workers' that we mentioned earlier. To push the

security patches and virus scanning software as well anti-virus software

programs that are run on laptops connected to an organization's server for those

who work from office, the same will be needed to be run on the remotely

connected laptops of those working from home for an organization.

Conclusion



Mobility is not a new phenomenon; workforce has always been mobile; people

have been commuting to and from work, people in sales need to complete sales

transactions at a customer's site, people need to meet suppliers and prospects.

The only change is that mobility is on the rise and working remotely/working

from home has become a viable option. However, it has both ups and downs.

Working from home has some appealing benefits, however, there are constraints,

issues and challenges; it is a situation of clear trade-off. Providing

mobility/remote working option to your workforce is not just about procuring and

providing the latest technology and devices. There are IT infrastructure

challenges to deal with when working from home. The Green benefit is worth

considering in current times. Other challenges for workforce mobility include

the legal, statutory and social challenges; technology is not the only challenge

as is the popular belief. Organizations with clear and long term thinking

supported by well thought out mobility policies have a fair chance of cracking

the mobility challenge and reaping benefits.

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