April 27, 2009

  • Illness, Outworking and Efficiency

    There's been some discussion on Twitter recently about the latest cross-species pandemic - the Swine Flu currently on it's way out to developed nations from its source in Mexico.  One of the more interesting questions arising out of this is the concept of working from home as a means to minimize one's exposure footprint.

    Nathanael blogged about the response typically offered by management with respect to working from home when sick (as opposed to dragging one's contagions into the office to share with the rest of the workforce) and supporting outworking in general. What follows is my response to his article.

    If employers issued decent laptops, implemented the hardware (radius servers, VPNs, etc) and software (in the microsoft space, Groove, LiveMeeting, etc) infrastructure to support "outworking", I'd be willing to bet that the cost of absenteeism would be more than compensated for by the extra productivity when people DO need to stay away from the office.  Note that staying home from the office doesn't necessarily have to be an illness thing - could be a sick kid, or waiting on contractors, or a delivery, or a bunch of other stuff.  I know I'm far more likely to work a 10-12 hour day if working from home than from the office, just because I don't have the extra hour or so of fundamentally unproductive effort doing things like ironing shirts, commuting to the city and so on.  I'm fairly sure that others would report the same experience.

    There's another factor here that needs to be considered: Carbon emissions.  People who commute to work in cars, buses, taxis, trains, etc... are all generating a carbon load by doing so.  The further they have to commute, the higher the carbon load.  If businesses were required not only to account for their direct carbon emissions, but their indirect emissions as a result of requiring people to be onsite each day, there'd be an instant push towards "outworking".  Some cities in the USA are already headed in this direction - not so much on the basis of carbon cost, but just the raw pollution impact. 

    Other than directory assist operators, Australia has a poor track record of pushing this new kind of operational agenda.  I think part of that is our management culture is skewed towards control over productivity.  Note that with modern workflow tools, management can track work and effort in a number of ways that have nothing to do with standing over an employee's shoulder.  Forcing people to front up to the office on a daily basis is an anachronism being persisted by change-/risk-adverse PHB's who can't let go of what they have learnt is "the way things are done".

    My $0.02 only... but interested in other people's feedback.