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/