Home Sweet Office
Long before the advent of the Web, evangelists were confident that cordless phones and faxes had already made the office a relic. “Working from home holds the promise of a new American dream,” Paul and Sarah Edwards gushed in their 1985 manifesto, Working From Home, in which they extolled the virtues of commuting from breakfast nook to den.
Two decades later, however, most workers still trudge to the office. Though a third of the more than 150 million working Americans telecommute at least occasionally, most do so just a few days each month. Only 40 percent of companies permit any sort of work-at-home arrangement, which means most insist on full-time attendance. According to a 2006 survey by the Telework Exchange, the top fear among resisters is that they’ll lose control of their employees, whom they doubtlessly envision frittering away the hours between 9 and 5 playing Minesweeper and munching Cheetos.
Earlier this year, an IDC report from Asia found that 81 percent of managers believe telecommuting improves productivity, up from 61 percent in 2005. The increase is attributable largely to the proliferation of unified communications technologies — tools that connect mobile and remote workers. These include products like LifeSize Express, the first hi-def videoconferencing system priced at less than $5,000, as well as Web-based services like Google Docs and Glance, which let users view a remote colleague’s onscreen work in real time (in the case of Glance, with cursor movements and all).
The traditional office, meanwhile, remains a black hole of interruptions, procrastination, and soul-crushing politics. According to Gloria Mark, an informatics professor at UC Irvine, the typical office worker is interrupted or switches tasks every three minutes — hardly enough time to accomplish anything of substance.
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Photo by wachbrit.typepad.com.
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