Working from home sounds idyllic, but it has disadvantages such as loneliness and missing out on office gossip
DILBERT is my hero. Well, one of them, along with celebrity chef James Martin and actor Jude Law. I would love to be as witty, perceptive and cleverly observational as the little cartoon character who satirises life in business. I won't tell you what
I love about the other two.
But, to be honest, the only thing I can find in common with Dilbert and his comic sketches is the fact that his creator, the American cartoonist Scott Adams, and I both work from home. We're part of that growing band that has decided to eschew the normal way of working life and take the Sinatra approach.
Adams enjoys life in California while home for me is several thousand miles away, but we share the freedom of home office working. We share the luxury of rolling out of bed and making that all-important phone call while still clad in our jammies. We share the luxury of choosing our hours of work and place of work: home office, bedroom, bed, kitchen, even the garden.
Who needs to fight for a spacious, nay prestigious corner office with views of the city when you can walk into your garden, open your laptop, enjoy the countryside view and communicate with the world at your own pace? Why battle your way through the rush-hour traffic, arriving at work feeling even more stressed than when you left it the day before and having made a significant personal contribution to global warming in the process? Why endure the infighting, backbiting and office politics when you can choose whom you want to speak to, and when?
And why, oh why, try to learn the hierarchical rules of your employer's business when the only rule required for working from home is to do what you like when you like, as long as the job is done to the very best of your ability and the satisfaction of your client?
It was Adam's experience working in a multi-storey office block, huddled over a PC in one of thousands of identical cubes, that inspired him to create Dilbert and his scarily accurate office observations. He says now that his job wasn't that bad, except that "every day I went to that cubical a little bit of my life force was sucked out of my body". How many of you know exactly how he feels? I thought so.
But now the trend to work from home has shifted from being choice-driven to economics-driven. The force of the credit crunch, rising overhead costs associated with office premises and Government legislation on flexible working has resulted in a new variation on the trend: closing offices and sending employees to work from home.
According to an O2 survey, fears over the stability of the economy and the need to cut costs is forcing more than 50,000 small businesses a month to close down their offices (the figure is based on the proportion of the total number of small businesses in the UK currently operating from home that had previously operated from a commercial property). In the past eight months, more than one in 10 have chosen not to renew a lease and are now working remotely.
O2 also estimates that more than 400,000 small businesses have quit their offices since last November. In addition, almost two-thirds of those still working from dedicated business premises are considering giving them up within the next year.
Indeed, figures released by the CBI in May lend credence to this paradigm. These results show that fewer firms expanded their property portfolio over the past six months and 20% now plan to reduce their property space – a marked increase on the 12% of firms contracting their property in the past six months.
Add in the fact that around six million UK employees have the right to request flexible working, including working from home, and you can see quite clearly that what was once a trickling trend is now positively overflowing.
Working from home does sound idyllic, but it also has its disadvantages. Loneliness is one, as is missing out on the latest office gossip about the chief executive and that slapper from marketing.
Collaboration suffers significantly: you miss having a colleague right next to you who will have a quick and honest scan over your latest revision of a wordy communications strategy for your most annoying client. And meetings tend to be solitary affairs.
The worst disadvantage is probably lack of self-discipline. The trend for duvet days as business perks becomes very difficult to resist when the duvet calls from just a few rooms away. I will admit to cleaning the bathroom in a bid to put off the time when I have to open my office door and sit down at my desk.
So how do you manage productivity when your staff is working from home. If surfing the internet at work is such a costly problem (CBI figures show that 4.4% of working time is lost through non-business-related surfing, equating to £10.6bn every year) then how on earth do you monitor that if all your employees are at home? How do you ensure consistency of quality in the delivery of your product or service? And what will your customers think?
The work-life balance is clearly becoming increasingly important, and rightly so. But it can't ever be your sole goal. Ultimately, whether you work in a conventional office or from home, there are other significant factors such as the bottom line, your cash flow, your P&L and your balance sheet. And, vitally, your customers' satisfaction. Without that, you won't be working from home; you'll just be there.
