I’m often asked how a regular columnist comes up with ideas (I’m often asked why, come to that) and the answer for this month’s column is startlingly easy: all I have to do is look around me because I’m writing this at home or, to be precise, in the study. I won’t admit to the hour but let’s just say it’s outside a conventional working week. It always is.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not claiming sympathy or heroics - just pointing out what a massive boon technology is. The laptop means I can write anywhere. The internet means I can search more databases and research resources in an evening than a month of visiting reference libraries ever did. And broadband means I can do at home what I only used to be able to do in the office. Great.
But after more than a year of broadband access and many years of remote logging on, I’m not so sure that all this connectivity and working from home is such a good thing after all - or if it is, it needs to come with a thumping great health warning.
Mind you, the DTI and other worthies such as the Work Foundation (usually such a sensible lot) have been throwing their weight behind working from home as part of enriching the work-life balance, and their thoughts are nowhere near issuing health warnings.
In case you missed it, Work From Home Week 2004 finished just seven days ago and was accompanied by a flurry of reports on how Working From Home is Good For You. Now I don’t want to seem a Luddite in all this, but there are three big issues that seriously make me question whether the great and the good should be promoting it with quite such zeal (and with quite so much of our money).
My first problem is that casualty nurses can’t work from home, or come to that surgeons, soldiers, van drivers, plumbers, chambermaids, bar staff or (better get this one in) nearly anyone in retail.
In fact, the few that can are pretty much all people who work in offices…and all too often in head offices, which makes all this working from home nonsense pretty inequitable.
The second big niggle is that some people now have the right to work from home - or at least they have the right to ask their employer - and the law makes it difficult to say no.
So if you’re a parent (but not a casualty nurse), you can have the force of the law behind you in demanding flexible working. But if you are single or don’t have children you can’t, which makes this working from home nonsense doubly inequitable.
My third problem is more of a personal observation.
The reason that I work from home is that I want to get more done - it’s quiet here and I can concentrate. But the problem is, the more you do and the more connected you are through internet and broadband, the more blurred the distinction becomes between what is and what isn’t work.
In other words, it cripples your work-life balance, which is precisely what the great and the good are trying to sell us with their Work From Home Week.
In some cases I can, of course, see some good in it. In theory, in our own company, practically everyone could work from home given the right level of technology and connectivity.
We have made the distinction between working from home (something you do occasionally in order to concentrate on a particular project) and being home-based (something some parents can do in certain roles as long as caring for a child does not impinge on the working day), and people take advantage of both opportunities.
However, if someone is not ‘in’ they are not part of the team which gathers around the water cooler. They can’t pop into that impromptu meeting and they’re not there to help their colleagues by picking up the unanswered phone - so it’s far from perfect.
I’m afraid there are enough people who have no choice but to work at home and will tell you that they go stir crazy.
So in fact if it is a better work-life balance you’re after, then you really should keep as much work out of the home as possible.
n Simon Howard is a founder of Work Communications and writes the Jobfile column for the Sunday Times.