- First, do your homework. Find out if anyone else in the organization is working — or has worked — from home. Your union as well as the personnel department may know. If so, arrange to have a drink or meeting with them, to find out how they tackled the subject, how the arrangement works or, if it has stopped, why it ended.
- When I decided to move to the Isle of Bute, in Scotland, I thought I’d have to leave the bank,’ says Kevin Attwood, Strategic Planning Development Officer for Nat West who now works two days from home, and three in London. ‘In fact, I kept the move so quiet that when I told my boss I’d moved to Scotland over the weekend, he was flabbergasted. When we had lunch I said flippantly, that if I’d got my act together I would have come up with a strategic plan for teleworking. He told me to come up with a proposal. I rung up people in the bank who were already working from home some of the time and talked to them extensively before coming up with my plans. Listening to their experiences helped me make a convincing proposal.’
- Marshall your arguments. Do as much as research as you can about homeworking and the arguments for it. The Teleworker magazine also has lots of information about teleworking and how to manage it.
- Be clear as to why you need to work from home on a regular basis. Some situations — like moving several hundred miles away — are easy to explain. Most employers will also understand your reasoning (although that doesn’t necessarily mean they will be sympathetic) if you need to care for a sick relative or child, or if you are disabled.
- Pick your moment carefully. Choose a time when you will not be interrupted, when the boss is not in a hurry and when you feel comfortable.
- Beware of committing yourself to a non-fallback position. Do not threaten resignation unless you really mean it. Suggest that you try homeworking for a trial period — say a couple of months. You may also find it easier to phase in the homeworking. ‘My boss and I agreed that at first I’d work one day from home, then two and then three,’ says Kevin Attwood. ‘We both agreed that working two days from home was enough for both of us, but at least we had that flexibility.’
- Be prepared to be flexible in your demands — you cannot expect flexibility of your employer if you are not prepared to be flexible yourself. However, if not being allowed to work from home will mean you having to leave — in the case of relocation, pressing family commitments or a severely reduced train service, for instance — make that clear. Many firms are prepared to try teleand homeworking rather than lose a valued employee. This is particularly true if you have been employed by the company for a considerable period of time. Newcomers and casual workers may find it much harder.
- Explain clearly just what jobs you plan to do from home, e.g. writing reports, assessing market research, processing data, thinking about issues, reading, answering letters etc. You may also need to reassure your boss as to the suitability of your home and related issues, e.g. how you intend to ensure client confidentiality. (The London Borough of Enfield insists that those homeworkers working on community charge files have lockable filing cupboards, for instance.)
- Suggest ways in which your output can be monitored. The most common gripe of those managers who use homeworkers is that they are hard to manage and cause communication difficulties. For that reason, it’s very important that you develop a strategy which makes your manager feel that s/he will know what you are doing — and can talk to you about it. You might for instance suggest completing a certain number of tasks in a day, or ask for the quality of your work to be measured. It’s a good idea to fix a meeting to go over what work has been done at home. But remember, one of the
- Prime rules of working from home is that output (i.e. what you accomplish) is more important than hours worked (how long you can sit at a desk).
- Explain how you intend to keep in touch with the office. A survey for the Department of Employment and Education found that the most common ways for teleworkers to keep in touch were :
- mailings
- meetings
- informal approaches
- the telephone
- memos.
Even if no one contacts you, make it your business to keep in contact with them.
Tell your boss what is in it for the company. S/he may be interested to learn that repeated surveys have shown that people working from home are up to 40 per cent more productive, the quality of their output is improved and they work harder than office-bound employees. They also take fewer days off sick, largely because they are less exposed to other people’s germs while commuting. It may also interest your employer to know that employers who already encourage homeworking report the major benefits are cost savings. Indeed, the Economic and Social Research council estimate that the average saving per employee is estimated at £1,500-0,000 a year — largely because they save office space. ‘I don’t care quite frankly if people working from home do drink coffee some of the time or play an occasional round of golf,’ says Ken Davey of Mercury Communications, who piloted their independent location working scheme. ‘What I care about is the quality of work produced and if they can do that work best at midnight, that’s OK by me. There are areas — like those which require client contact — where you do need to work a more regular day, but that’s not always the case.’
This is an enlightened attitude, likely to lead to productive and happy employees. However, it has to be said that not all companies are so open-minded. Some of the most common excuses (rather than valid reasons) for turning down any form of homeworking include :
- It’s not been done before — so it’s not being done now. An illogical argument, since followed through this would lead to total stagnation in the company.
- If you do it, everyone else will want to do it too. Not necessarily. Many workers prefer to work in the office. If everyone, irrespective of their circumstances, wants to get out of the office as quickly as possible, there must be something badly amiss in the office itself.
- I like you where I can see you. This is shorthand for ‘we don’t trust you to do your work properly without supervision’. Only you can know if this is fair comment.
But don’t despair. Carefully handled and researched, you have a good chance of sympathetic response if you have checked out the issues dealt with above. According to one Department of Employment survey, the qualities most likely to persuade an employer to allow someone to work from home at least part of the time were:
- Self sufficiency (listed by 45 per cent of employers)
- Maturity (listed by 25 per cent of employers)
- Already experienced (15 per cent)
- Suitable home (9.4 per cent)
- Communication and time management skills (9.4 per cent).
Self-sufficiency and maturity have already been discussed. Clearly, it is also important for those working at home to be trained/experienced, in that there is much less help on hand for a homeworker than for someone working in an office. In fact, one of the enduring problems of teleworking is how to cope when your equipment breaks down ! For this reason, most firms with a formal policy on teleworking have support staff and back-up systems in place.
However, it has to be said that at the moment, the majority of firms have no cohesive policy on working from home. But that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. What appears to be happening is that certain departments or even individual employees are being allowed to work from home in response either to their demands or the particular set-up of the department. This form of working from home is neither officially encouraged or discouraged, but seems to depend largely on the whim of the managers concerned — and the determination of employees. If you feel your working life could be substantially improved by working from home, take a close look at your firm and ask yourself whether it has taken on other forms of flexible working — part-timers, job-sharing etc. If the answer is yes, then the chances are good that you will be able to persuade them to let you work from home — at least some of the time.
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