Working from Home

This morning I sat at a cafe in Tokyo eating breakfast and looking out the window at all of the people coming from trains and heading to work. On Monday evening I got to visit one of my work colleagues that lives here in Tokyo for dinner. This morning I realized that most everyone here lives in a tall building, takes a train to another tall building, works in the tall building, takes a train home at the end of the day, only to repeat the process the next day.

Think of the infrastructure required to move everyone around and how much smaller it could be if we didn't require so many people to work in an office every day. Furthermore, think of how much cost savings there would be if you didn't require office space for everyone.

I work from home on Friday's. I chose that day of the week as it allows me to spend more consecutive time at home. Remember that I fly to work on Monday mornings and don't return home until Thursday evenings. Let's assume I have 5 people on my team and we all decide that each of us will work from home one day per week. Someone works from home on Monday, someone else on Tuesday, etc. My team no longer needs 5 work spaces at the office, we now only need 4. Of course this does have the problem that we never have the entire team in the office at any given time. However that is a problem that can be easily solved. A number of companies don't assign permanent work spaces and just provide the technology so people can move around at will.

As I sat at breakfast this morning, I wondered how many of these people really need to go to an office anyways. There are a number of jobs where people only go to an office because of tradition. There are some forward thinking companies that allow people to do their jobs from home. I have a neighbor that used to work in JetBlue's call center. She woke up every morning, logged into the system to say she was working, and took phone calls all day long from the comfort of her home. At the end of the day, she logged out of the system and stopped receiving phone calls. If a manager felt the need to monitor her work, a number of key indicators exist: number of calls answered, average length of calls, average time between calls, etc. Even then if the manager felt my neighbor wasn't doing a good job, the manager could listen in on the calls.

Call centers should be small and everyone should follow the telecommuting principle. My daughter used to work for one and she was required to go in every day. She hated it. Eventually she quit and took a different job. Now the company needs to retrain someone else and while it probably doesn't cost very much, it isn't free.

There are a number of other jobs that could offer telecommuting as an option. Technology is advancing to the point where simulated face-to-face meetings are getting better and less expensive. WebEx and GotoMeeting are a step in the right direction but they could be greatly improved simply by improving their interface for allowing multiple cameras and screens to be used. That would allow for people's faces to be viewed along with whiteboards and presentation materials.

I am a manager and feel like I need to be in the office to monitor what is happening with my team. Perhaps I am the one that needs to take a step back and figure out how my job responsibilities can be streamlined through telecommuting. I have figured out how to make 1 day per week work. My next step may be as simple as figuring out how to make it 2.