As viewers of the old BBC television programme Tomorrows World will recollect, much fuss was made in the 1970’s and 1980’s about the pending expansion of work from home opportunities. It was keenly anticipated that by the new millennium (i.e. ten years ago) a large portion of the populace would find it possible to carry out their duties for employers at home without having to journey to employers buildings. Work From Home opportunities were tipped to become the answer to road congestion issues nationwide as the daily commute would slowly 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 problems fall, but workers productivity would rise as they dispense with the commuting dead time. Obviously there would always remain a percentage of jobs which would continue to necessitate the attendance of workers at employers’ buildings. Most manufacturing 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 manufacturing and towards service provision as the chief economic activity, so it was though that the work from home revolution would by now have been in full swing.
Tools would need to take part in this work from home revolution. The key focus of the predictions being made focussed around improving telecommunications. One often touted advance which would act as a huge launch pad 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 data and work from home with as much effect as from an office.
The web was not forecast, 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 sort of document, video conferencing in the form of on line virtual meetings, training delivered on line perhaps in the form of webinars add more opportunity. Add to that the abundance of broadband provision throughout houses in the UK means that fewer and fewer individuals are barred from this new way of working. But the arrival of Online Jobs and the internet business per se have also increased work from home options. Online Jobs let workers to carry out quite complex tasks at their own computer and the net enables them to send the fruits of their labours anywhere worldwide almost straight away. The Internet Business itself, designing, building and optimising 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 supplied to nearly 60% of houses and that figure continues to increase. However there will always exist a hub of jobs, largely in manufacturing, that will not give in to this change. 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 seem likely to always be the need for face to face meetings. As a footnote, it does seem in recent years that the unremitting growth in daily motor car use might have actually slowed, though not actually reversed. Maybe we are at last seeing the start of the work from home uprising.
