As viewers of the old BBC television show Tomorrows World will remember, an issue was made during 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 significant section of the population would find it possible to carry out their tasks for employers at home without having to trek to employers offices. Work From Home opportunities were tipped to become the answer to road congestion issues across the country as the daily commute would eventually drop away as fewer and fewer people found it necessary to make that daily journey. Economic benefits would be massive as not only would the economic cost of traffic congestion fall, but workers efficiency would increase 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 ethos. 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 complete.
Tools would need to take part in this work from home revolution. The chief focus of the predictions being made focussed around bettering telecommunications. One often touted advance which would act as a major springboard was video conferencing. This would let teams of home workers to attend virtual meetings with colleagues and managers. This could replace the conventional meeting and let 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 possible. Communication by e mail and the attachment of any form 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 arrival of Online Jobs and the internet business per se have also increased work from home options. Online Jobs let workers to carry out rather complex tasks at their own computer and the net enables them to deliver the fruits of their labours anywhere worldwide almost straight away. 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 available to more and more people. In the UK broadband is now supporting nearly 60% of homes and that figure continues to rise. However there will always exist a hub of jobs, mainly in manufacturing, that will not yield to this change. There will also continue to be a need 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 persistent 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.