On 09/02/2012 16:08, Cynic wrote:
On Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:29:31 +0000, Clive George
wrote:

Sure - and *for you* it might work out OK. The problem facing
employers is that as soon as they permit one employee to work from
home, they are pretty much obliged to allow other employees to do the
same.

Um, no. Not even slightly. I work from home, a couple of other
colleagues do, the rest aren't allowed to.


And you think that is not a very significant potential problem? How
would you feel if one of your collegues, who does a similar type of
job to yourself was permitted to work from home and you were not?

If it were reasonably explained, it would be fine. Those of us who work
at home don't live near any office - I'm about 200 miles from my "home"
office. If I had an office available near me I'd use it - working from
home does have disadvantages too.

And what would your employer do if one of your
black/homosexual/female/Muslim collegues screams, "Discrimination"?
And/or the union gets involved?

They'd have to demonstrate it's because of that that they're not allowed
to, and there's sufficient number of counterexamples to demonstrate
otherwise. Ie their complaint will go nowhere. I'm in a professional
business. There's no unions here.

It is an unfortunate fact that whilst some people (and you may be one
of them) are able to discipline themselves to do the same amount of
work at home as they do in the office, the majority of people will not
do anything like the same amount of work unless it is something that
can be monitored pretty much continuously.

People have found the opposite in many cases - the work/life boundary
gets blurred the other way round, and many people working at home put in
rather more time than they would at the office.

Unfortunately IME the people in the "less work" category are rather
more prevelant than those in the "more work" category. The majority
of UK employees will take all they can get away with - many even view
the maximum number of paid sick days as being a supplementary holiday
benefit.

Round here that attitude would get noticed, and we don't have much space
for dead weight. If somebody working at home was underperforming, it
would get noticed and dealt with, if necessary by revoking the right to
do so.

In order to allow working from home for most jobs, it is necessary for
an employer to pay in accordance with actual work done rather than a
fixed salary - and that change leads to all sorts of problems for both
employer and employee.

No. Experience says that doesn't need to happen. Performance is measured
in the same way as for a normal office worker, and apparent
underperformance dealt with in the same way.

Whose experience?

Mine, my employer. See above.

The biggest issue is that the only way to
measure "work done" in many cases is to look at "results achieved".
Which is tough luck on the salesman working from home who has spent a
solid 8 hours a day all week following up leads that didn't result in
a single sale, or on yourself who has spent a week writing a
particularly difficult specification that gets paid the same as a spec
that you can knock out in a day.

Your premise is wrong, therefore your deduction is wrong too.

How many people do you employ and what experience in this field do you
have?

I manage people, I work from home, I have colleagues who work from home,
I have friends who work from home. None of us are doing crappy jobs -
mostly IT related, and at the skilled end of that.

Get the right people and they'll work well at home or in an office. If
they're too crap to work well at home, I'm not sure how keen I am at
having them in an office either.

Now in case you're confused, I'm not saying everybody should be able to
work at home. I'm not even saying the majority ought to. I'm just
pointing out that your claims about the situation are wrong.