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

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

[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.

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.