What Did Happen To The Home Working Calculations Made Decades Ago?
As viewers of the old BBC television programme Tomorrows World will remember, a lot of fuss was made in the 1970’s and 1980’s about the imminent increase in work from home opportunities. It was keenly anticipated that by the turn of the century (i.e. ten years ago) a huge section of the populace would find it possible to carry out their work for employers in their own home without having to trek to employers offices. Work From Home opportunities were predicted to become the answer to road congestion issues nationwide as the daily commute would slowly fall away as fewer and fewer people found it necessary to make that daily journey. Economic benefits would be huge as not only would the economic cost of traffic congestion fall, but workers productivity would rise 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’ buildings. Most production jobs would require this, but many service based jobs lend themselves to the work from home approach. And as Britain continues to move away from production and towards service provision as the chief economic activity, so it was though that the work from home revolution would by now have been in full swing.
Technology would need to take part in this work from home revolution. The major focus of the predictions being made focussed around bettering telecommunications. One often touted advance which would act as a key launch pad was video conferencing. This would allow teams of home workers to attend virtual meetings with colleagues and managers. This could replace the conventional meeting and allow workers to share knowledge and work from home with as much effect as from an office.
The net was not anticipated, 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 practical. Communication by e mail and the attachment of any type of document, video conferencing in the form of on line virtual meetings, training delivered on line perhaps in the form of webinars add further opportunity. Add to that the proliferation of broadband provision throughout houses in the UK means that fewer and fewer individuals are excluded from this new way of working. But the advent of Online Jobs and the internet business per se have also increased work from home options. Online Jobs let workers to carry out relatively 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 sites, also contributes.
So it does seem that finally the work from home experience is becoming available to more and more people. In the UK broadband is now supporting nearly 60% of houses and that figure continues to increase. However there will always remain a hub of jobs, largely in manufacturing, that will not give in to this change. There will also continue to be a necessity 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 postscript, 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 start of the work from home uprising.
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