As the audience of the old BBC television show Tomorrows World will recall, much fuss was made throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s about the pending expansion of work from home opportunities. It was enthusiastically anticipated that by the the next millennium (i.e. ten years ago) a huge portion of the population would find it possible to carry out their work for employers at home without having to trek to employers offices. Work From Home opportunities were predicted to become the answer to traffic congestion issues nationwide as the daily commute would slowly drop away as fewer and fewer people needed to make that daily journey. Economic benefits would be huge as not only would the economic cost of traffic congestion reduce, but workers output would rise 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 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 main economic activity, so it was though that the work from home revolution would by now have been complete.
Technology would need to take part in this work from home revolution. The main focus of the predictions being made focussed around bettering telecommunications. One often touted advance which would act as a huge launch pad was video conferencing. This would enable teams of home workers to attend virtual meetings with colleagues and managers. This could replace the conventional meeting and enable 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 viable. Communication by e mail and the attachment of any sort of document, video conferencing in the form of on line virtual meetings, training conducted on line perhaps in the form of webinars add more opportunity. Add to that the explosion of broadband provision throughout homes in the UK means that fewer and fewer individuals are excluded from this new way of working. But the arrival of Online Jobs and the internet business per se have also increased work from home possibilities. Online Jobs enable workers to carry out rather complex tasks at their own computer and the web enables them to send the fruits of their labours anywhere worldwide almost instantly. The Internet Business itself, designing, building and optimising sites, also contributes.
So it does seem that now the work from home experience is becoming available to more and more people. In the UK broadband is now linked to nearly 60% of homes and that figure continues to rise. However there will always exist a core of jobs, chiefly in manufacturing, that will not yield to this movement. 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 seems 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 start of the work from home uprising.