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Snow

December 2, 2010 By Ken Eastwood Leave a Comment

Credit: www.mirror.co.uk

So it’s here again and public sector workers up and down the country are struggling to get to work and deliver essential services.

For an increasing number the ability to work from home is a real saviour at times like this. The economic value is enormous though in many cases the increase in demand tests remote access arrangements to breaking point and exposes the vulnerabilities in arrangements put in place to support ad hoc home working.

It’s time we universally recognised the opportunity here and invested properly in the proven technologies to fully support remote and home working.

Are you working from home today – share your nomad experiences with others – let us know what could have made the experience even more effective.

Filed Under: nomadNEWS Tagged With: home working, nomad, snow

The Big Freeze – A Convincing Case Study?

January 20, 2010 By Ken Eastwood 6 Comments

As we get back into the swing of things after the recent snow, home-working seems to have become the talk of the day.  However, despite fully supporting the mobile working principle and agreeing that breaking the confines of the office can help out in emergency situations, I’m not convinced that the recent “snow crisis” was actually a good case study for the need for home working.

The first and, by far, the most important concern is that the mobile working concept is not a crisis resolution model.  Don’t get me wrong here, it’s not that people working from home doesn’t work well in a crisis – it does!  However, I’ve spoken to countless people who were given permission to work from home during the snow who found the experience tedious, difficult and even said it interfered with the professional vs personal work life balance.  One told me: “Working from home is great for a day, but doing it all the time would be difficult, I’d get distracted.”

Excuse me if I take the moral high ground here, but actually, I don’t think they were right, and this is the point I’m getting at.  The reason working from home for a day in a crisis doesn’t work isn’t just that systems aren’t in place for checking email and keeping in communication  – in many places of work they are.  No, the crux is that we don’t have a culture that accepts it.  We have nothing in place to train, support or encourage staff to look at home working and how they can manage their time and how work life balance can work.  There are models to explore, from working in community hubs to working in local cafes through to having an office space at home.  I remember reading an article in the mid 90s about home working ,where an employee always got up in the morning and dressed in a shirt and tie, because that helped them feel at work.  When they clocked off, they got changed to civvies again.  That model wouldn’t work for those who like to mix work and personal time, but it’s tools like this that can make working from home not only a tolerable but even a pleasurable experience.

The second point I noted in the snow was the other end of the scale of home working – the customer.  There are many customer facing jobs that needlessly put people into offices because we have a mistaken belief that customers want to come into a building to see us.  Some undoubtedly do, however I’m certainly one customer who much prefers the online, especially in working hours.  During the recent snow fall, the country ground to halt not just because people couldn’t get to work, but because people knew if they did struggle out into the white stuff, they’d find businesses closed anyhow.  Those organisations that had mobile customer communications in place fared much better, of course, with every statistic imaginable reporting massive spikes in the use of Twitter, Facebook and other web media during the freeze.  However, those that tried to set up web media quickly in response, failed.  My local bus company cancelled, reinstated and diverted buses throughout the day and realised that this needed to be on their website.  The fact that their website wasn’t compatible with my old-school mobile handset and was only updated at apparently random points of the day, made this form of communication next to useless.  Luckily, they are part of an urban transport network who DID have Twitter, Web and Email feeds in place, so it was easy to keep up to date.

Obviously all these utopian ideas come with very real considerations – what are the health & safety implications of people working in community cafes and what about customers who are digitally excluded?  These are questions we need to work on and there are probably many different approaches to tackling and solving them.  However, one thing is clear.  While mobile working will undoubtedly aid crisis situations, it isn’t something that can be implemented when, or just before, the crisis occurs.  It’s an organic culture that needs to be seeded as early as possible, so that it blossoms not just in a crisis, but all year round.

Guest post by: Kevin Campbell-Wright, West Yorkshire, UK http://kevin.campbellwright.co.uk/
Filed Under: nomadGENERAL Tagged With: freeze, home working, mobile working, snow

Snow Online?

January 19, 2010 By Ken Eastwood Leave a Comment

John Popham, Head of Skills & Regeneration for Sheffield-based Sero Consulting, asks:-

Why, in 2010, are we not making more use of the Internet to cope with these conditions. As in many areas of British life, you will probably tell me that the UK has such extreme weather conditions so infrequently that it is not worth the cost of preparing for them, but, as this is now the second consecutive winter where we have had significant snow fall, and it appears likely that climate change may well make this a regular event, surely we should seriously think about how we prepare for such occasions. And, in this context, as we are supposed to be moving increasingly towards both delivering more education online, and adopting more flexible working practices, surely these should come into their own at these times, shouldn’t they? 

Read the rest of John’s excellent blog post and ensuing thought provoking comments here.

Filed Under: nomadGENERAL Tagged With: flexible working, home working, internet, snow

It’s space, but not as we know it….Sharon Williams, Team Manager Flexible Working Design Team and Adam Crevald, SSD IT Manager, Nottinghamshire County Council

June 23, 2009 By Gary Marston Leave a Comment

This case study outlines the initial concept and evolution of flexible working in Nottinghamshire County Council.

  • The constraints of a traditional office.
  • How we developed the team and developed systems to support work style analysis/ storage audits.
  • How this enabled us to design a more flexible work space /office.
  • Development of electronic record mgt, home working and ITC.

Click here for case study

Filed Under: Case Studies, Mobile & Flexible Working Tagged With: Asset Management, culture change, flexible working, home working, local government, transformation

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