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.
Categories of Mobile Workers
Total Employee (1) Tethered/Remote Worker - An employee who generally remains at a (2) Roaming User - An employee who works in an environment (e.g, (3) Nomad - This category covers employees requiring solutions in hotel (4) Road Warrior - This is the ultimate mobile user-spends little time at |
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.
Those who are working from Home: What they feel about it?... “I work from home as a freelance writer, and In addition to freelance writing, I teach continuing The above excerpt has been taken from the article, Some other useful articles and their links where you 1> Refer “Avoid the commute: Work at home” at 2> “Home working: does it make sense?” at http://bit.ly/4Fxj2u 3> “Working from home: does it really work?” at 4> “Trying to increase productivity? Send your |
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.