Flexible Working Good, But Mistrusted

usefool writes "iTNews has a report commissioned by Toshiba Australia, which stated flexible working (the ability for people to work from whatever place offers the greatest suitability and productivity for the employee and their employer) offers up to six times the level of return through the cost savings associated with fewer overheads, parking, technology and recruitment and training costs. However it is perceived as difficult to monitor and supervise, therefore not always practised by employers."

Comments

The bourgeoisie doesn't trust us

[Anztac]

So we have something that's massivly economically feasable, but it would pull some control out of the hands of the bourgeoisie. I wonder why this bothers "managers".

Maybe because they're afraid we'll figure out we don't need them.


Yes, I know this is a simple and almost disingenuous statement and the language is clear cut "us and them." :: shrug ::

Re:The bourgeoisie doesn't trust us

[bstarrfield]

You've got a good point. Most corporations currently spew out lines talking about how "everyone is a member of the team, employees are our most valuable resource, we want you to develop as an individual, yada, yada...". If employees work at home, a fundamental construct (hierachical management) is called into question.

Nearly every organization (both government and business) is replete with layers of management and administration that must do something to justify their continued existance. Having employees work from home - directing their own tasks, planning their own days, working whatever hours are necessary to complete their jobs, essentially eliminates mid-level management, a large part of Human Resources (what a tragedy), facilities, etc. More people would be actually producing instead of well, I'm not sure what management actually does (increase transaction costs?).

Fundamentally, your challenging the assumption that professional workers need "leadership" to get their tasks accomplished. Once people figure out they themselves are capable of directing their own work, they may begin to ask terrible questions such as "why does the PHB earn $120k and I earn $45k when I do the work?" Even worse, people may figure out that working themselves to death in the office is not exactly the best way to live life - they may stop working twelve hour days, weekends, whatever, and simply do their assigned tasks.

Freedom! What a goal! Realizing that your office is not your life, wow.

This is a Double, Double Edged Sword

[thecampbeln]

For the employees, this sounds like a rocking idea (well, really, it is). You'd not have to worry about traffic, parking, or the noisy bastard in the cube next to you. BUT, the technology enabling employees to work from home is the exact same technology that enables outsourcing of that same employees work across oceans.

For employers, they are untrusting of their at home employees because they cannot run task over them all day, making sure they're getting their work done, etc. BUT, this same paranoia is probably helping to keep these same managers from outsourcing the same work over the same fears.

So, put this all together - if an untrusting manager tries out the work from home approach, and finds that it does indeed cut costs as well as have the same (or greater) output, then why not cut costs a little more by using cheaper employees across an ocean?

Personally... I think that once managers (and employees for that matter) are able to grasp the idea of working from home, it will revolutionize the work place. I can do a hell of a lot more work in 6 hours at home then I can in 8 hours at the office (well, 8 hours + 1.5 hours of commuting, so 9.5 hours of "work"). The employers could save bank by letting me work from home, and only coming in on a day or two a week for face to face meetings by letting someone(s) else use my cube the other 4 days a week. I also personally believe that outsourcing will garner some really bad press sooner rather then later, scaring off many businesses from the practice. Don't believe me? Ask your local hospital =)

Re:This is a Double, Double Edged Sword

[shfted!]

Not necessarily so. Quite often, collaboration and other activities require employees being together, with management. Out-sourcing has been shown to work, and its drawbacks known. If it were really the case that the employees could be outsourced, I doubt they'd still have jobs. I don't believe this technology is a huge concern.

Re:This is a Double, Double Edged Sword

[bigsteve@dstc]

There are big differences between flexible working and outsourcing. For example

• Flexible working retains management control of how things are done, where outsourcing largely surrenders it.
• Flexible working retains key knowledge / skills within the organisation, where outsourcing quickly results in their loss.
• You can always pull in a "flexible working" employee in for a face-to-face meeting. With (offshore) outsourcing, this is often not an option.
• With "flexible working" employees, you can resort to the civil/crimoinal law; e.g. if an employee leaks IP or confidential customer data. With outsourcing, it is much harder to sue, especially if you have outsourced overseas.

Re:This is a Double, Double Edged Sword

[thecampbeln]

Let me clarify... I was not supporting the outsourcing argument (though I am a self outsourced American in Australia, but I don't think that counts ;). I was simply drawing out the logical progression of thought from the point of view of a PHB. Outsourcing != "Local Work at Home Employees" by any means, but do you trust your boss/the shareholders in making that distinction?

As I alluded to above, I believe the drawbacks of outsourcing will be played out publicly sooner rather then later. The case in point is of course the Pakistani transcriber -vs- UCSF for the medical transcription industry, but I think the scarier (for Corporate America) stories are yet to come.

How long until an outsourcing company gets a bid on making a widget for a piece of (let's say) financial software that they just happened to have just completed for a competing product/company. Of course they'll be able to undercut their competition cause they've already got 95% of the code in hand. So they make the necessary modifications and ship off the (slightly revised) code to the second company. With this, you of course get a huge shit fight over who owns the blessed IP of said code. Of course this particular situation could be quietly covered up, but only if the first company never gets wind of it. I'd bet Quicken would love to be able to say that "...our product is soooo good, Money stole some of our source code!"

Or wait until the first outsourcing company goes out of business with projects still in the pipeline. How is small-to-medium company X going to be able to mount a suit in India (or Russia or where ever)? Of course these companies could (and should) get a middle man company to provide such indemnities, but that takes a decent portion of the savings away from outsourcing. Couple this to the time when labor begins to tighten up in the outsourcing markets and any savings could be wiped out entirely.

As for the assertion that all employees that could be outsourced have been outsourced (well... "If it were really the case that the employees could be outsourced, I doubt they'd still have jobs." in your words)... Everyone cannot learn everything new all at the same time (or at least they don't). I'm sure there are quite a few jobs that "could" be outsourced that haven't been. Here in Oz, there seems to be very little in the way of outsourcing, in the programming market anyway. BUT, the technology that enables people to dial in from across the street is indeed the same technology that enables an Indian (or Russian, or) to "take" a job from another country. Though the cat's outta the bag on that one, so there's nothing that can be done about it anyway. And companies rarely outsource a single employee, so they get the "collaboration and other activities require employees being together, with management" in the deal, unfortunately.

Re:This is a Double, Double Edged Sword

[bondgrrl]

I've just spent the last 18 months working from home (as a freelancer, not as an employee). I loved it so much that I am now applying for all the permie office jobs that I can find as I have finally lost it with working alone.

I really, really hope that working from home does NOT become commonplace. If you work in an office then you probably think "wow, work from home in your PJs. Fantastic!". The reality after a few months is so different. You really begin to miss people. You just want to talk. You want to trade jokes while you're coding. You want silly little things like someone offering to get you a coffee. You want to go out for a group drink at lunchtime.

We need interaction. You might think that you hate your office environ, but doing solitary in your home office is far worse.

Okay, I agree that people should have the choice about working from home (at least some of the time, when you just want to get away from the office) but I hope that it doesn't become mandatory.

Re:This is a Double, Double Edged Sword

[nvrrobx]

I absolutely agree with you. I was self-employed and worked from home for almost a year. There were some fantastic perks (I'm a night owl. I enjoy coding at 2 am.) but there were some dramatic downsides.

In my current job, I share an office with two other people. This leads to some annoyances, but also some great collaborative efforts. We bounce design ideas off each other, for example.

You really do start to miss human interaction after a while. I think it's also harder to evolve your skills when you're by yourself. It's always interesting to hear a peer's viewpoint on an emerging technology, etc etc.

I would go back to working from home a few days a week, if possible, but not full time. I'd lose my mind.

Neal Stephenson said it best WRT offshoring

[0x0d0a]

When it gets down to it-talking trade balances here-once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here-once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel-once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity-y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:

music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery

-- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash.

XP feels the same

[gnovos]

I've been doing hard-core "turn the knobs to 11" XP for a while now, and I feel quite the same feeling as this... We've proven that we can offer bug-free code, on time, every time, in a manner that allows new employees to come up to speed in days as opposed to weeks, but still, it just "feels" wrong to most management that the increased productivity is completely ignored...

It doesn't matter that we've gon from 6 month release cycles of mostly bug-fixes to one week cycles of new features, nor that we've gone down from two or three critical bugs a week to a total of TWO medium level bugs in two years. Those numbers are meaningless to the upper eschelons... but having two programmers working at the same machine, now THAT's a definite "problem area" that they feel needs to be addressed.

Re:XP feels the same

[clambake]

Many of the XP stories I've heard have been tales of woe, so I'm interested in hearing about your project. Has somebody on your team written up this success story somewhere?

Well, no success story written anywhere, but even though it's off topic, I guess I can explain a little better here. But before I do, I think I should start by saying that XP woe stores that I have read usually have more to the company NOT following XP practices. If you read any of the major books on they subject, they all say that you can't expect XP to work at all unless you have ALL the pieces, not just a sub-set of them. Our version of XP is "hard core", meaning we DO sweat the small stuff, and subsequently we have a remarkably smooth running system. I've worked at MANY a software company, and from that experience, I have to say that I am absolutly amazed at how we can keep up a bug free system from day to day, with a staff od 80-90% junior programmers, while still introducing new features on a weekly basis, and without missing deadlines.

The single most important facet of XP taht we've been using is so called "test-first" programming. It mean, as it sounds, before you write a line of code, you write the test for it. I used to moan and groan abotu this for a long time, until I started to notice it maked programming remarkably easier both in the long AND the short term.

In the long term, it means that you have 100% automated test coverage at all times, so you can change the system with confidence that whatever you are changing is not going to break something else in the system in any subtle way that you are unaware of.

Before XP, this problem was the bane of my programmign existance... fix on bug and watch another bug pop up somewhere else. As long as you have a system with a full set of FUNCTIONAL tests, then it doesn't matter how madly you manage to mangle the system, becuase if those tests pass (and if you were dilligent and did not add any functionality without adding the test first) then it means your system is production worthy. It also means any bugs you DO create will only ever happen once, because you'll be putting in a test that covers the bug as soon as it is discovered so that it can never happen again without you knowing about it.

Additionally, it means junior programmers who cannot understand the concepts involved in large functionality additions/changes can also participate. a senior member can write the tests, and the junior programmers can "paint by numbers" and implement the functionality. As long as thier code makes the tests pass, it is code that can go out into production. And since the senior member knows the pitfalls that are likely to occour, he can write the tests in such a way that all of the most likely danger areas and edge cases are accounted for.

Now, the junior programmers are still likey to make mistakes from time to time, so the tests first paradigmn is supplemented by agressive refactoring. The rule is, when you see suspiscious or odd code, no matter what part of the system it's in, and no matter what you are currently working on, you drop everything and refactor it.

This is something else I used to moan about, becuase it often means rolling back what you are working on to refactor, which means some lost time... But this is further supported by a policy of very small incrimental change. If you are working on a bit of code and it's taking you more than, say, ten minutes or so to write and check in, more often than not, you've taken too big a bite.

We nibble at the code, making small change after small change, and it means that even if every system were to crash at once, we'd never be more than ten minutes away from what's checked into CVS. It takes practice to know how to do this right, becuase it often involes writing bits of code that you know you will be throwing away in an hour, but in the long run, this system of development allows you a great deal of flexibility in terms of priorities. We can always drop what we are doing

both

[austad]

Both my last job and my current job allow me to work from home. I come into the office when I have a meeting, or go to a client's office when needed. Otherwise, I sit at home. I don't even have my own desk at work.

I get more work done not having to stare at a gray or beige cubicle all day, I can crank up the tunes, and if I get sick of sitting at home, I can go to a cool coffee shop and get things done.

A couple of my friends do the work from home thing also for two different, but very large american corporations. They both love it. They get their work done more quickly, and they don't have to deal with traffic.

Probably one of the greatest things about being able to work from home is that you can also get things done that are not work related, like wait around for a repair person, let the cleaning in, pay your bills, etc. I know this would sound to an employer like you were goofing off, but there is some downtime when you are waiting for a phone call or email so you can continue what you are working on, or when you've finished your work for the day and are waiting for something else to come up.

I no longer spend every waking minute of my day "getting stuff done." I spend my 8-10 hour day doing work for my employer and getting menial tasks done, and when I'm done at 5 or 6, I relax. My stress level has dropped like a rock, I no longer feel like I don't have enough time to live my life, and consequently, I'm likely more productive since I've just stopped worrying about things that I don't have time to do. The article a couple of days ago about stress causing $300 billion to employers every year is spot on, and a good way to solve this problem is to allow employees to work from home.

If an employer finds that people aren't doing their job when working from home, either make them come into the office, or fire them and hire someone more responsible.

Re:both

[Piquan]

If an employer finds that people aren't doing their job when working from home, either make them come into the office, or fire them and hire someone more responsible.

Or possibly figure out why they're not being productive at home. In my case, my chair broke once so that the back wouldn't stay up. I didn't think much of it, but it was so uncomfortable that I couldn't concentrate for more than 10-15 minutes. My productivity was hurt severely. It took me a while to identify the problem, but once I did, a quick bit of dealing on craigslist and I was back in business.

Just because somebody isn't working effectively from home doesn't necessarily mean that they're irresponsible.

self-employment was the solution for me.

[shapr]

I own a company with my fiancee, we've been working from home for a few years.

I really enjoy it. I can sing loudly, jump up and down and scream at my code, or hack obsessively for 36 hours in a row.

We have clients in four countries and the variety keeps me interested and continually improving.

Our overhead is much much lower because we live in a very small (low rent, inexpensive food, etc) town in Sweden and our clients are mostly located in the high population density areas of Europe.

I suspect that the ultimate in flexible working is where companies range in size from one to eight people, with four being the best size.

I believe a good company works like a good jazz band, you're always improvising the next solution, so it's best to have team (band) members you know and trust.

I suspect that a company of one hundred people would be more efficient as many separate partner companies of two to six. 'Corporate reorganization' would still happen, but in that case it would show up in the changing business relations between those many units.

Think of Conway's Life applied to business.

I believe this would dramatically improve the agility of businesses.

Any feedback on these ideas?

have you seen my stapler?

[sevinkey]

I work in an office and talk to almost no one in person. In fact there's been many days when the only conversation I had was over IM with people in the same office, which is exactly what I would be doing at home, only I would know that my employer wasn't reading my conversations.