Home or Away

In the previous post I touched on working from home. Many of us have PC's at home or work laptops on our desks so in theory many of us could be doing the same job from home. In the main, however, we don't and I believe that there are a number of reasons for this:

- Communication - I think face to face communication is great and by working from home we'd lose this. However, as I've already touched on in "The Great Lost Art of Communication" I think this is becoming less relevant in today's workplace. If we're emailing each other arcoss the office floor we might as well be emailing each other across the city.
- Management vision - I don't for one moment think our management have seriously sat down and debated whether they should contemplate offering work from home options for large parts of their workforce.
- Measuring how we work - Easy enough for Sales guys and call centre workers but what about the rest of us. Performance is usually measured on hours and perception of our abilities, etc. at our annual reviews. These can be difficult to assess when you work from home. If we effectively want to measure how our home-based workers are doing then we would need to put a lot more effort into assessing how long tasks should take. Perhaps we even need to a system of paying not based upon hours but based upon achievements!
- Trust - If we still measure by hours then this brings the question of trust into the equation. Often work from home is abused.

None of the above is insurmountable, but they do require management vision and an ability to think outside the current way in which we allocated work and measure our success in achieving our goals.