As the audience of the old BBC television programme Tomorrows World will recollect, an issue was made during the 1970’s and 1980’s about the pending increase in work from home opportunities. It was enthusiastically anticipated that by the new millennium (i.e. ten years ago) a large portion of the population would find it possible to carry out their duties for employers in their own home without having to travel to employers buildings. Work From Home opportunities were predicted to become the answer to motoring congestion issues nationwide as the daily commute would slowly fall away as fewer and fewer people needed to make that daily journey. Economic benefits would be huge as not only would the economic cost of traffic congestion fall, but workers productivity would rise 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 production jobs would require this, but many service based jobs lend themselves to the work from home approach. And as Britain continues to move away from production and towards service provision as the main economic activity, so it was though that the work from home revolution would by now have been in full swing.
Equipment 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 launch pad was video conferencing. This would let teams of home workers to attend virtual meetings with colleagues and managers. This could replace the usual meeting and let workers to share knowledge 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 offer a much broader set of resources and communication options that should enable working from home to become even more viable. Communication by e mail and the attachment of any form 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 explosion of broadband provision throughout households in the UK means that fewer and fewer individuals are excluded from this new way of working. But the dawn of Online Jobs and the internet business per se have also increased work from home options. Online Jobs enable workers to carry out relatively complex tasks at their own computer and the world wide web enables them to send the fruits of their labours anywhere worldwide almost immediately. The Internet Business itself, designing, building and optimising sites, also contributes.
So it does seem that at last the work from home experience is becoming available to more and more people. In the UK broadband is now supplied to nearly 60% of households and that figure continues to rise. However there will always remain a hub of jobs, mainly in manufacturing, that will not give way to this movement. There will also continue to be a requirement for one to one human contact on many activities. One thinks particularly of sales and business development, where there would appear likely to always be the need for face to face meetings. As a postscript, 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.
