As the audience of the old BBC television show Tomorrows World will remember, a lot of fuss was made in the 1970’s and 1980’s about the forthcoming increase in work from home opportunities. It was eagerly anticipated that by the the next millennium (i.e. ten years ago) a large part of the populace would find it possible to carry out their tasks for employers in their own home without having to trek to employers sites. Work From Home opportunities were expected to become the answer to highway congestion issues across the country as the daily commute would slowly drop away as fewer and fewer people found it necessary to make that daily journey. Economic benefits would be enormous as not only would the economic cost of traffic problems reduce, but workers productivity would increase as they dispense with the commuting dead time. Of course there would always remain a proportion of jobs which would continue to need the attendance of workers at employers’ sites. Most manufacturing jobs would require this, but many service based jobs lend themselves to the work from home idea. And as Britain continues to move away from manufacturing and towards service provision as the major economic activity, so it was though that the work from home revolution would by now have been complete.
IT 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 catalyst 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 data and work from home with as much effect as from an office.
The net was not forecast, but it now turns out that the internet can give 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 kind of document, video conferencing in the form of on line virtual meetings, training conducted on line perhaps in the form of webinars add further opportunity. Add to that the abundance of broadband provision throughout homes in the UK means that fewer and fewer individuals are barred from this new way of working. But the dawn of Online Jobs and the internet business per se have also increased work from home possibilities. Online Jobs encourage workers to carry out rather complex tasks at their own computer and the web enables them to transmit the fruits of their labours anywhere worldwide almost instantly. The Internet Business itself, designing, building and optimising internet sites, also contributes.
So it does seem that at last the work from home experience is becoming accessible to more and more people. In the UK broadband is now supplied to nearly 60% of homes and that figure continues to increase. However there will always remain a hub of jobs, mostly 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 appear 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 beginning of the work from home revolution.
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