COMMENT
The average UK commuter spends almost 29 working days each year travelling to work. If you are one of those unlucky London commuters who travel more than three hours per day, that figure shoots up to 96 working days each year. No wonder more people are now working from home than ever before.
The figures I've just quoted come from WorkWise UK, the group behind the National Working from Home day, which took place last week.
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That's why last Thursday most of the silicon.com team worked from home - to see whether we could function as normal with no one in the office.
The answer was - just about.
As we had conducted a similar experiment last year, which went fairly smoothly, I expected our latest working-from-home exercise to go pretty much without a hitch.
So I was surprised when several of the team ran into connectivity problems - especially since each of us already occasionally works from home without difficulty.
And not all of our online meetings went according to plan, either. By the end of the day many of the team were happy to be returning to the comparative calm of the office the next morning.
So does this mean the experiment was a failure? I'd say exactly the opposite.
It highlighted for us the important ways in which working from home is different to being in the office. It's exactly the sort of dry run that every business should do because until those plans are tested for real you'll never know if they really work.
You can read more about what went right - and wrong - here.
There will always be technology problems at some point. The key is to have a workaround. That might mean having alternative methods of access - a 3G data card rather than broadband - or getting somebody else to complete the task, or even having work to do offline.
In many ways I'm glad we had a few hiccups - it's made me think much more carefully about how, when and why teams work from home, and what they need to do to get the most out of it.
But apart from the technology the biggest issue I realise is keeping a team together and focused. Easy to do when you are all in the office together - much harder to do when you are distributed as far apart as Norfolk and Florida as we were last week.
If anyone has hints or tips on this they want to share with the wider silicon.com community, we'd love to hear them - you can post them as a reader comment below.
Editor's choice - three things you should check out on silicon.com this week:
I'm always interested in what futurist Ray Kurzweil has to say - read what he was talking about at the BlackBerry event in Orlando last week. Also, silicon.com got a behind-the-scenes tour of the National Gallery in London to check out the high tech projects underway, you can see photos here. Still want more? Cathy Holley has some top tips on how to ace that all important interview.
Comments
There are 3 comments. Join the discussion
1. Karen Challinor
There's no problem with working from home providing it's planned properly and those who work from home have sufficient infrastructure in place.
The biggest hurdle for home working to overcome is the management fear of losing control of the workforce.
2. Mark
The biggest problem for wfh is not "the management" but time management (sort of). Some people are able to prioritise and manage their time and produce good results when working at home. Some people are not be able to and are, therefore, not capable of working from home effectively.
It strikes me that the technology is largely there (broadband, mobile, wireless, vpn etc) but core skills are not, in a lot of cases.
3. Andy
I have been running a tiny virtual company for four years now. We do not have any physical offices, just an address for legal purposes and mail. All five of us in the company work from home/home offices/client offices/toilet seats/anywhere there's wi-fi.
We've got access to all our emails, mini-ERP/CRM and all client info. We even have our phone extension running virtually on our laptops - as well as an IP desk phone at our respective bases - with Skype/MSN as a backup.
The technology is certainly there, works just fine and is relatively cheap. But it takes lots of fine-tuning and constant tweaking to get it right.