As the audience of the old BBC television programme Tomorrows World will remember, a lot of fuss was made in the 1970’s and 1980’s about the forthcoming explosion of work from home opportunities. It was keenly anticipated that by the turn of the century (i.e. ten years ago) a significant portion of the populace would find it possible to carry out their work for employers in their own home without having to journey to employers sites. Work From Home opportunities were predicted to become the answer to traffic congestion problems all over the country as the daily commute would gradually dwindle away as fewer and fewer people needed to make that daily journey. Economic benefits would be enormous as not only would the economic cost of traffic congestion go down, but workers efficiency would increase as they dispense with the commuting dead time. Naturally there would always remain a percentage of jobs which would continue to need the attendance of workers at employers’ sites. Most manufacturing jobs would require this, but many service based jobs lend themselves to the work from home ethos. And as Britain continues to move away from manufacturing and towards service provision as the major economic activity, so it was though that the work from home revolution would by now have been in full swing.
IT would need to take part in this work from home revolution. The major focus of the predictions being made focussed around improving telecommunications. One often touted advance which would act as a key catalyst was video conferencing. This would allow teams of home workers to attend virtual meetings with colleagues and managers. This could replace the conventional meeting and allow workers to share information and work from home with as much effect as from an office.
The internet was not anticipated, but it now turns out that the internet can provide a much broader set of resources and communication options that should enable working from home to become even more feasible. Communication by e mail and the attachment of any type of document, video conferencing in the form of on line virtual meetings, training delivered on line perhaps in the form of webinars add further opportunity. Add to that the proliferation of broadband provision throughout homes in the UK means that fewer and fewer individuals are barred from this new way of working. But the advent of Online Jobs and the internet business per se have also increased work from home options. Online Jobs allow workers to carry out rather complex tasks at their own computer and the net enables them to send the fruits of their labours anywhere worldwide almost instantly. The Internet Business itself, designing, building and optimising internet sites, also contributes.
So it does seem that finally the work from home experience is becoming available to more and more people. In the UK broadband is now supporting nearly 60% of homes and that figure continues to rise. However there will always remain a hub of jobs, mostly in manufacturing, that will not acquiesce to this change. There will also continue to be a necessity for one to one human contact on many activities. One thinks particularly of sales and business development, where there seems likely to always be the need for face to face meetings. As a footnote, it does seem in recent years that the relentless growth in daily motor car use might have actually slowed, though not actually reversed. Maybe we are at last seeing the beginning of the work from home uprising.