My whole team could work from home. Every single one of their duties could be undertaken away from the office, all that's needed is to implement a few technologies and I my team would be a highly effective distributed team working from home being as productive as they are now whilst sitting in the office, but without the commute to look forward to every day.
So, why don't we do it? What is the obsession with getting people to work together in an office? Particularly now when surely companies are looking to reduce fixed costs in a time of recession.
I think the heart of the issue lies in the desire to see people face to face and do business face-to-face. Having the ability to be instantly face-to-face with your team or your colleagues makes communication and preparation for that communication very lazy, if non-existent. So much business is done on the hoof and in corridors that many people believe that to be effective they need the office environment and be able to eyeball their people/colleagues.
I recently experienced this problem for myself, a member of my team was working from home and had joined my meeting by phone. The meeting went fine until we started to work through a document, editing it via a projector as we went along. The team member working from home couldn't see the document, couldn't take part in the heated debates whilst at the end of a telephone line and struggled to get air-time in the meeting room for his points. I got frustrated at the guy on the end of the phone because the meeting wasn't working very well and we weren't achieving what we set out to do and in my irritation I blamed the one person not in the room for the failure, but he wasn't responsible for the failure.
I should have been blaming myself and my lack of appropriate preperation and planning for the meeting. With a little forethought, we could have easily shared the document with the home-worker through any number of web or software based vehicles and joint editing of the document would probably have been more successful for everyone than doing it in a meeting room.
The thing is, if I felt this way and I'm a technologist and fan of new ways of working, how difficult is it going to be to change the way we work in other areas of the business where the culture of office-based working is even more ingrained.
For me it is just a technology issue and because of that, my technology function should be leading the way and showing others how easy it is to utilise the technology. In fact I believe that technology now available could well enhance the experience of what would otherwise be face-to-face meetings even though people are at the end of a data-pipe. I say data-pipe, because I think now we need to be looking at systems that either enable the meeting to take place exactly as it would do in the office (for the comfort of those who cannot change their habits) or to the other extreme where we start to do things in a manner that is so different that it has no relation to the old ways and enables people to go through a step-change that means it's something new rather than a change from old habits. It's things like Second Life that could enable this step-change, even teleconferencing is going through another revolution to give it a better reputation and look/feel of the office meeting.
Either way, surely we need to be changing our office-based culture. The age of the massive office with everyone having to experience some form of horrible commute whether it be by public or private transport must be ending. If we as senior management don't kick such a process off, the masses will do it for us as they rebel against the cost of commuting and the craziness of the office-bound culture that interferes with so many aspects of life. Let's not even think about those kids joining companies over the next few years and their attitude towards work and the office environment, although where the power will lie once the dust has settled on this latest financial upheaval will influence that outcome, but that's another debate entirely!
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