Are we rapidly getting transformed into a 24 x 7 working society? Globalization of businesses has set in. Employees, business partners in the enterprises are pushed and pressurized to respond and make decisions faster than ever. The sun never sets in the 'follow the sun' business model; someone's night is some one else's day in another country at the opposite side of the globe. Work takes place anywhere, anytime, anyplace. Fuel crisis apart, people still seem to travel heavily; just observe how crowded the airports are these days and how many new airliners have come up. When people travel, they still need to work. Thus, work seems to be moving out of the traditional offices into homes, hotels, airport lounges, and taxis. The employee is no longer tied to an office location and is, in effect, boundary-less.
Workforce Mobility or Mobile Workforce
It is important to understand what types of jobs may align well with working from home option. First and foremost, whether the work from home is for you, depends on the nature of the work you do and your team situation. For example, it has been seen that it works wonderfully for certain jobs such as freelance journalism, freelance writing assignments, for those who work as independent researchers, to some extent for musicians where the seclusions and the peaceful noiseless environment is conducive for composing music. To a large extent, it is suitable for some roles in the IT/Software industry where work is mostly discussions and task allocations through telephonic meetings, accessing the Internet and web-based applications, using the company intranets and filing reports through emails, etc. To some extent 'work from home' may work for certain types of consulting work but not all types. It is certainly not at all suitable for jobs involving heavy client interfacing or interactive work (sales force, teachers doctors and other medical professionals, etc) and for those in manufacturing jobs in factory environments. From a team supervision perspective, it depends whether you, your team and your manager is co-located with you. If this is not the case, and it so happens that either your team or your manager/supervisor is located in another city/country, then it really does not matter whether you work from office or from home; as far as the team logistics is concerned. There are communication technologies such as web cameras, Net meeting utilities, video conferencing facilities, chat rooms and document hosting web-sites that let you manage that.
| Categories of Mobile Workers Total Employee Mobility' is defined as: a management concept and business strategy that takes a more holistic and integrated approach to the mobile workforce, all with the goal of improving an organization's talent management results, profitability, and agility, and ensuring employee satisfaction and well-being. There are many types of 'mobile workers: (1) Tethered/Remote Worker - An employee who generally remains at a single point of work, but is remote to the central company systems. This includes home-workers, tele-cottagers, and in some cases, branch workers. (2) Roaming User - An employee who works in an environment (e.g, warehousing, shop floor) or in multiple areas (e.g, meeting rooms). (3) Nomad - This category covers employees requiring solutions in hotel rooms and semi-tethered environments where modem use is still prevalent, along with the increasing use of multiple wireless technologies and devices. (4) Road Warrior - This is the ultimate mobile user-spends little time at office, but requires regular access to data and collaborative functionality while on the move, in transit, or in hotels. This type includes sales and field forces. |
Green aspects
If organizations consider providing the working from home option (of course, based on organizational policy and defined rules to help make judgment about who should be allowed to utilize the option), many benefits could follow; being able to retain a critical talent, which otherwise could have left the organization due to personal or family related time constraints, the 'green' factor - not having to commute would mean reducing a large amount of carbon foot print. In the context of supporting the 'go-green' cause, for example, IBM estimates that something in the neighborhood of 58,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions were not released into the air during a single year of its work-at-home program, thanks to the elimination of daily commutes for 25,000 employees. Another interesting question to explore in the 'green' regard is this � greater the number of people working from home, greater would be the reduction in the number of people working at offices and as most offices have air-conditioning units, this could eventually bring down the HVAC (heating, ventilation and air-conditioning) requirements down. Of course, the peak load calculations will need to cater for the scenario wherein all the headcount could be working from offices; but suppose an organization has a permanent mobility program for some of its employees depending on the type of work they handle, then this could possibly be a building design consideration right from the beginning. For instance, you can come across a very high-skilled professional and it so happens that he is physically challenged and so commuting is very difficult or say impossible for him. The work from home option could come in handy to attract this employee.
Challenges in working from home
Technology is not the only factor that goes in the working from home option. There are other aspects too and many other challenges and concerns to be managed that come with the 'working from home' option. The first and foremost that comes to mind is the concern about 'work productivity'. How do we 'measure' the work productivity of while collar workers when they are away from office and away from their managers/superiors who assign them the task? For blue collar workers, measuring work productivity is not an issue because most tasks for this worker class are well defined, discrete and they produce 'physical' output. There are home infrastructure and logistics issues if an individual finally ends up working from home. In Indian metros, with the space scarcity, how many of us would have the luxury of setting up an office like space in our apartments so that we can work without any disturbance even when operating from home? One would worry if the family is going to get disturbed. For example, you could be in a situation when you are constantly on calls working with you virtual team members in other geographies. If your house is a small apartment, it is but obvious that you could be disturbing the entire house-hold with your long calls!
A typical question asked by management is this � 'who should we allow to take the 'work from home option'. Clearly this is not an easy question to tackle. Precedence can be set and expectations can get built if the option is exercised indiscreetly. First of all, there has to be a clear and well thought out policy on mobility and flexibility that an organization wants to provide to their employee. The percentage of employees to take the mobility option should be known in advance with justifiable business cases with the Human Resources department involved in the evaluation of case to case basis of the circumstances under which an employee would want to opt for work from home option.
| Those who are working from Home: What they feel about it?... �I work from home as a freelance writer, and have done so for almost 17 years. Every day, I wake up, grab a mug of tea and commute from my bedroom to my home office. I haven't met most of my editors or clients. I file my work by e-mail and we communicate by e-mail unless an issue seems complex, in which case I pick up the phone. Occasionally, I attend initial client meetings, but they are rare. While I'd love to attend a meeting with my client in Belgium, I don't think that will happen any time soon. In addition to freelance writing, I teach continuing education business writing and copywriting courses for the University of Toronto. Until last year, that involved commuting downtown one night a week. Not any more. All the courses I teach are now online. That means, students and the teacher are not driving or taking transit anywhere. All that being said, I do not have the world's most sophisticated technological set up. I have a phone and a three-year-old computer with a broadband Internet connection. If I can use this technology to successfully work from home - with editors, clients and students across Canada, in the United States and in Europe - then why can't more people in corporations, organizations and government offices do likewise? Why do they have to clog our highways every morning and afternoon to commute to work? � The above excerpt has been taken from the article, �Working from home: Is it for you?�at http://paullima.com/blog/?p=144 Some other useful articles and their links where you can get more information on working from home are: 1] Refer �Avoid the commute: Work at home� at http://bit.ly/8QeQlt 2] �Home working: does it make sense?� at http://bit.ly/4Fxj2u 3] �Working from home: does it really work?� at http://bit.ly/6Rc8r8 4] �Trying to increase productivity? Send your employees home� at http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=10336 |
Security and privacy
Given the fact that most information assets now seem to be digital in nature and residing on corporate servers, this becomes a big concern. Copying, transferring and replicating documents is easier than never before when most information exists in soft copy forms and powerful tools for document handling and emailing are easily available. Will the employee, working from home guard the confidentiality of the information he/she is handling? How will be the sensitive information be handled? Organizations will need to implement adequate security and privacy measures to prevent breach of security and privacy in the working from home scenario. Providing remote log in access will be a matter that security administrators will need to handle appropriately. Management would feel uncomfortable about not being able to watch an employee working away from office. However, this concern is valid not only for those who work from home but also for other types of 'mobile workers' that we mentioned earlier. To push the security patches and virus scanning software as well anti-virus software programs that are run on laptops connected to an organization's server for those who work from office, the same will be needed to be run on the remotely connected laptops of those working from home for an organization.
Conclusion
Mobility is not a new phenomenon; workforce has always been mobile; people have been commuting to and from work, people in sales need to complete sales transactions at a customer's site, people need to meet suppliers and prospects. The only change is that mobility is on the rise and working remotely/working from home has become a viable option. However, it has both ups and downs. Working from home has some appealing benefits, however, there are constraints, issues and challenges; it is a situation of clear trade-off. Providing mobility/remote working option to your workforce is not just about procuring and providing the latest technology and devices. There are IT infrastructure challenges to deal with when working from home. The Green benefit is worth considering in current times. Other challenges for workforce mobility include the legal, statutory and social challenges; technology is not the only challenge as is the popular belief. Organizations with clear and long term thinking supported by well thought out mobility policies have a fair chance of cracking the mobility challenge and reaping benefits.
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