What if Working From Home is the ONLY Option?

California, 6/2/2008
Nari Kannan

Yes. I know. I have been working completely from home on and off since 1994. It's not as much fun as we think it is! I have gone back to working in an office, shunning a laptop but having only a blackberry. I found it to be liberating in fact!

With energy prices poised to shoot up, it makes no sense for employers to force employees to commute everyday to work. Not to talk about the Carbon Footprint left by commuting! Working from home is an option I discussed in my previous entry here.

In 2003, I was working for a small 25 person startup company in downtown San Francisco. We had completely outsourced our Customer Service operation to Working Solutions.

Our customer service agents were home-based call center agents that have dedicated phone lines and broadband access at home. Customers called a 1-800 number. We had a set up with an Austin based Telecom company where they got the calls and had an online system that could distribute the calls to these agents. Homebased employees of Working Solutions logged in during their "shift hours" from across four timezones. They took calls from the US and Canada across even more timezones. Hence the need for a long "day". Worked out perfectly since New York based agents came online early in the morning and California based agents brought up the tail end of the day, covering almost 21 hours in a 24 hour day! May not be possible if it were not for home based agents! We could not afford to set up call centers in different timezones.

Worked perfectly! Many companies may seriously evaluate the options as Ralph Wilson pointed out in his comments to my blog entry. This is convincing employers that they can actually save money and make it productive, and monetarily attractive for employees to spend a day or two working from home in a workweek! Ralph is right. The technology has been there since 2003! I know that it works since we have used it back then!

Totally working from home, however is not as much fun, or practical, as people think it is. After a while, you miss the water cooler and the social interactions you have with fellow employees.

Face to face interaction is the ONLY way to communicate properly, still, no matter what people claim about telephones, the internet or video conferencing. As Ralph points out, it may still work very well if it is done in combination with face to face meetings periodically. Smaller office spaces may be adequate if this is the case, saving money on rent, energy, etc.

If energy costs were to go up significantly, employers may go to this model, quickly. The question is are we ready for it yet as employees?