In article ,
Jethro_uk writes:
On Thu, 01 Mar 2018 10:40:15 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 01/03/18 10:11, Andrew Gabriel wrote:
I'll bet many more people are working from home today, given the
weather, for those lucky enough to be able to do so.
I am, but that's normal for me.

If only businesses were to realise that by and large not only does it
save them a fortune in expenisve office space and heating, but it saves
their employees massive amounts of time and money lost commuting.

As well as the nation huge amounts of wasted resources in transport
infrastructure and pollution.

Yes, I learned that at Sun Microsystems. When I started (back in ISDN
days before ADSL), first thing my manager did was push me to get a
company ISDN line installed at home. I had temporarily moved to my
parents' place whilst looking to move somewhere nearer, so I sort of
delayed as I only expected to be there a month or two. No, they pushed,
didn't care about the 12 month min contract being wasted, etc.

Well, when I settled in, I realised why. The productivity you get from
a home worker, in this sector at least, is way higher. At that time,
the push was just in a few departments, but it became company policy,
and Sun saved millions by closing out office space. Sun had to get home
working right anyway - a comment Bill Joy had made (one of the founders)
was that if you want the best people in the world working for you, most
of them won't be anywhere near one of your offices, so you have to get
home working working well, or you prevent most of the best people in
the world from working for you.

A couple of jobs later, I took what I had learned there and applied it
to my team in a financial institution which had never considered remote
working before. It worked very well, and enabled me to get and retain
staff I would not have been able to do with office-only based work.

One of my "if they really cared" arguments.

We're going *backwards* by the way. Fewer roles in 2018 seem to allow
remote working than did in 2008.

I am aware of some companies pulling it back in. In those cases, the
companies are trying to shrink workforce, and it's used as a way to
get rid of workers without having to lay them off - insist they come
in to an office every day, when the nearest one is hundreds of miles
away, or not even in same country. Oracle and IBM have both done
this in recent years.

--
Andrew Gabriel
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