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Businesses The Almighty Buck IT Technology

Flexible Working Good, But Mistrusted 41

Posted by timothy from the mandatory-webcams-like-slashdot-uses dept.
usefool writes "iTNews has a report commissioned by Toshiba Australia, which stated flexible working (the ability for people to work from whatever place offers the greatest suitability and productivity for the employee and their employer) offers up to six times the level of return through the cost savings associated with fewer overheads, parking, technology and recruitment and training costs. However it is perceived as difficult to monitor and supervise, therefore not always practised by employers."
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Flexible Working Good, But Mistrusted More

Flexible Working Good, But Mistrusted

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  • So we have something that's massivly economically feasable, but it would pull some control out of the hands of the bourgeoisie. I wonder why this bothers "managers".

    Maybe because they're afraid we'll figure out we don't need them.


    Yes, I know this is a simple and almost disingenuous statement and the language is clear cut "us and them." :: shrug ::

    • You've got a good point. Most corporations currently spew out lines talking about how "everyone is a member of the team, employees are our most valuable resource, we want you to develop as an individual, yada, yada...". If employees work at home, a fundamental construct (hierachical management) is called into question.

      Nearly every organization (both government and business) is replete with layers of management and administration that must do something to justify their continued existance. Having employe

      • Managers also have another purpose -- as an interface between the worker and the corporate monolith. Without a manager, tasks will arive at the employee from multiple directions, and everyone want's their "thing" done first. A manager is good at taking the heat off the worker so he can actually get his job done. In a way, I view my manager as working for me, not the other way around.
    • your company still has managers? ;)

  • This is a Double, Double Edged Sword (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thecampbeln ( 457432 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @02:07AM (#10174648) Homepage

    For the employees, this sounds like a rocking idea (well, really, it is). You'd not have to worry about traffic, parking, or the noisy bastard in the cube next to you. BUT, the technology enabling employees to work from home is the exact same technology that enables outsourcing of that same employees work across oceans.

    For employers, they are untrusting of their at home employees because they cannot run task over them all day, making sure they're getting their work done, etc. BUT, this same paranoia is probably helping to keep these same managers from outsourcing the same work over the same fears.

    So, put this all together - if an untrusting manager tries out the work from home approach, and finds that it does indeed cut costs as well as have the same (or greater) output, then why not cut costs a little more by using cheaper employees across an ocean?

    Personally... I think that once managers (and employees for that matter) are able to grasp the idea of working from home, it will revolutionize the work place. I can do a hell of a lot more work in 6 hours at home then I can in 8 hours at the office (well, 8 hours + 1.5 hours of commuting, so 9.5 hours of "work"). The employers could save bank by letting me work from home, and only coming in on a day or two a week for face to face meetings by letting someone(s) else use my cube the other 4 days a week. I also personally believe that outsourcing will garner some really bad press sooner rather then later, scaring off many businesses from the practice. Don't believe me? Ask your local hospital [slashdot.org] =)

    • Not necessarily so. Quite often, collaboration and other activities require employees being together, with management. Out-sourcing has been shown to work, and its drawbacks known. If it were really the case that the employees could be outsourced, I doubt they'd still have jobs. I don't believe this technology is a huge concern.
      • Let me clarify... I was not supporting the outsourcing argument (though I am a self outsourced American in Australia, but I don't think that counts ;). I was simply drawing out the logical progression of thought from the point of view of a PHB. Outsourcing != "Local Work at Home Employees" by any means, but do you trust your boss/the shareholders in making that distinction?

        As I alluded to above, I believe the drawbacks of outsourcing will be played out publicly sooner rather then later. The case in point i

        • I'd bet Quicken would love to be able to say that "...our product is soooo good, Money stole some of our source code!

          As an aside, I think that Quicken is (and has been) largely mature for quite some time. They're now resorting to changing their import specifications from the "QFX" (I think) format to a live connect format - that costs financial institutions to use.

          I think that kind of stunt will put them into second place behind Money.

          Would be nice to be able to play with a Windows version of GnuCas

        • Stolen code heightens offshoring fears [itworld.com]

          Computerworld Today 9/9/04

          Companies are already finding that their intellectual property is getting stolen, and their lawyers don't know the legal turf well enough to be able to enforce their contracts.

          The other bad news about outsourcing is that savings are at best, about 20% for anything more complex than putting a Nike sneaker together. While the hourly rate is lower overseas, the cost of building infrastructure, workarounds where one can't build infrastructure,

    • Neal Stephenson said it best WRT offshoring (Score:5, Interesting)

      by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @02:34AM (#10174751) Journal
      When it gets down to it-talking trade balances here-once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here-once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel-once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity-y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:

      music
      movies
      microcode (software)
      high-speed pizza delivery

      -- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash.
    • There are big differences between flexible working and outsourcing. For example
      • Flexible working retains management control of how things are done, where outsourcing largely surrenders it.
      • Flexible working retains key knowledge / skills within the organisation, where outsourcing quickly results in their loss.
      • You can always pull in a "flexible working" employee in for a face-to-face meeting. With (offshore) outsourcing, this is often not an option.
      • With "flexible working" employees, you can resor

    • Re:This is a Double, Double Edged Sword (Score:4, Informative)

      by bondgrrl ( 255302 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @06:16AM (#10175471) Homepage
      I've just spent the last 18 months working from home (as a freelancer, not as an employee). I loved it so much that I am now applying for all the permie office jobs that I can find as I have finally lost it with working alone.

      I really, really hope that working from home does NOT become commonplace. If you work in an office then you probably think "wow, work from home in your PJs. Fantastic!". The reality after a few months is so different. You really begin to miss people. You just want to talk. You want to trade jokes while you're coding. You want silly little things like someone offering to get you a coffee. You want to go out for a group drink at lunchtime.

      We need interaction. You might think that you hate your office environ, but doing solitary in your home office is far worse.

      Okay, I agree that people should have the choice about working from home (at least some of the time, when you just want to get away from the office) but I hope that it doesn't become mandatory.
      • There is a very simple solution for this: work from home 1-2 days a week. It is awesome, I've done it.

        I agree with you, if you're alone, you go nuts from lack of company. And to be honest, if you dislike your job so much that you can't stand to ever be at work, you're in the wrong job...
      • I absolutely agree with you. I was self-employed and worked from home for almost a year. There were some fantastic perks (I'm a night owl. I enjoy coding at 2 am.) but there were some dramatic downsides.

        In my current job, I share an office with two other people. This leads to some annoyances, but also some great collaborative efforts. We bounce design ideas off each other, for example.

        You really do start to miss human interaction after a while. I think it's also harder to evolve your skills when you
      • I work in an office and talk to almost no one in person. In fact there's been many days when the only conversation I had was over IM with people in the same office, which is exactly what I would be doing at home, only I would know that my employer wasn't reading my conversations.
      • You really begin to miss people. You just want to talk...We need interaction. You might think that you hate your office environ, but doing solitary in your home office is far worse.

        Where is the home office located? Is it part of the suburban Sprawl? In that case you are simply trading one unnatural environment for another. Human beings were not meant to live in big separate dwellings, insulated from each other by lawns, fences, cars and streets.

        The arbitrary friendship of working for the same employ

        • Human beings were not meant to live in big separate dwellings, insulated from each other by lawns, fences, cars and streets.

          Oh, I do see people here in my friendly, almost suburban neighbourhood - neighbours, local kids, my family. I get out, I walk my dog, I goto the shops, etc. But 90% of the time is still spent working by myself. All in all, I'd rather be working in an office, in a professional environment.

          American society can be a very lonely place.

          Well, this is the UK I'm on about here. Same plan
      • I've been free-lance writing for 17 years. I have no trouble working in my pajamas or stark naked, it's just a matter of good work habits that don't require a boss to supervise them.

        The only way I'd go back to an office would be for a lot more money or for a change to go back into building new technology.

        But this isn't for everybody.

    • I think that once managers (and employees for that matter) are able to grasp the idea of working from home, it will revolutionize the work place.

      I work as a software developer in a team of 10-15 people and a part of the team tried working from home, but it really didn't work out that well. Sure, some of the work can be done anywhere alone, maybe even better than at the office, but we found out that email and phones suck compared to getting physically together with relevant people, looking over some piece

  • XP feels the same (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gnovos ( 447128 ) <gnovos@ c h i p p e d . net> on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @02:36AM (#10174759) Homepage Journal
    I've been doing hard-core "turn the knobs to 11" XP for a while now, and I feel quite the same feeling as this... We've proven that we can offer bug-free code, on time, every time, in a manner that allows new employees to come up to speed in days as opposed to weeks, but still, it just "feels" wrong to most management that the increased productivity is completely ignored...

    It doesn't matter that we've gon from 6 month release cycles of mostly bug-fixes to one week cycles of new features, nor that we've gone down from two or three critical bugs a week to a total of TWO medium level bugs in two years. Those numbers are meaningless to the upper eschelons... but having two programmers working at the same machine, now THAT's a definite "problem area" that they feel needs to be addressed.

    • Many of the XP stories I've heard have been tales of woe, so I'm interested in hearing about your project. Has somebody on your team written up this success story somewhere?

      • Re:XP feels the same (Score:3, Interesting)

        by clambake ( 37702 )
        Many of the XP stories I've heard have been tales of woe, so I'm interested in hearing about your project. Has somebody on your team written up this success story somewhere?

        Well, no success story written anywhere, but even though it's off topic, I guess I can explain a little better here. But before I do, I think I should start by saying that XP woe stores that I have read usually have more to the company NOT following XP practices. If you read any of the major books on they subject, they all say that y

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @03:47AM (#10175038)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:both (Score:4, Informative)

      by Piquan ( 49943 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @05:05AM (#10175271)

      If an employer finds that people aren't doing their job when working from home, either make them come into the office, or fire them and hire someone more responsible.

      Or possibly figure out why they're not being productive at home. In my case, my chair broke once so that the back wouldn't stay up. I didn't think much of it, but it was so uncomfortable that I couldn't concentrate for more than 10-15 minutes. My productivity was hurt severely. It took me a while to identify the problem, but once I did, a quick bit of dealing on craigslist and I was back in business.

      Just because somebody isn't working effectively from home doesn't necessarily mean that they're irresponsible.

  • This may seem a contrary view, but I did (and do) telecommuting for a government agency. I find it saves the taxpayer money, but costs _me_ more.

    See, I have a little counter/clock. I tap 'start when I work', and 'stop' when I step away from my desk (to get a drink, to do a personal call, to check the mail, to play games on my personal-use PC, et cetera).

    So in 8 hours of clock time, I only tally up maybe 5 hours of billable time. My paycheck is less, but my employer is getting a bargain because he's onl

    • Re:Telecommuting cost me money (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Why do you consider 'stepping away to get a drink' as not work-related? Would you stop your billing time doing the same when in the office?
  • I own a company with my fiancee, we've been working from home for a few years.

    I really enjoy it. I can sing loudly, jump up and down and scream at my code, or hack obsessively for 36 hours in a row.

    We have clients in four countries and the variety keeps me interested and continually improving.

    Our overhead is much much lower because we live in a very small (low rent, inexpensive food, etc) town in Sweden and our clients are mostly located in the high population density areas of Europe.

    I suspect that the
  • I've been working from home the majority of the time for the past 3+ years. It works out for my company because we are small and there is no overhead cost for a phyiscal office location. When we need a conference room for a planning meeting best done in person, we rent it out, but the majority of the time things can be taken care of over the phone and email.

    The thing is, it works out great for me, I eliminate the expense of gas, time caught in traffic, and pay less for auto insurance. Works out great f
  • I personally believe that I would do fairly well with a telework situation, but in a large corporation, it's more important to have face time with your superiors (if you care about advancement, which I do).

    For most people, however, I think they would take advantage of it and work less. Not to impugn the fine folks who replied above, but in my personal experience most employees exhibit the 'Lake Wobegone' effect, where everyone is in the top 50% of diligence. The truth is, time and time again, I have see

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