Can the snow start a workplace and telecommuting revolution?

Apparently this is day of the year upon which the most number of people normally pull a sickie: pretending to be ill for sake of not having to face the trawl to work.

Now I don’t want to comment about whether people are honest or not but many of us can quite readily work from home and still get as much done as if we’d been in the office.

Telecommuting isn’t new and the technology to enable us to do this has been around for nearly 10 years but very few employers seem to want to trust their staff to work from home. The old adage that ‘you must be seen to be working’ seems to ring true. In a previous job, I was told I couldn’t work from home to write a report because I was expected to be in the office: even though it took me much longer to write the report in the office because of all the interruptions.

However, today has brought about an interesting situation. The snow has meant that many people can’t go to work for quite legitimate reasons: namely the (not quite unexpected) weather.

Many working parents are housebound because so many schools are closed. This means that they will either have to give up the notion of getting anything done or try and work from home.

So my thought is this: if some of us can get work done at home because we’ve been prevented from getting into the office, how easy would it be for many of us to work from home on a more frequent basis?

The technology is there, it’s affordable and it could save money all round in travel expenses etc. Not only that but it would save countless hours in daily commuting time which would start to reduce the number of cars on the roads. Some businesses could even move to smaller and cheaper premises. There’s also a positive environmental implication too because many homes are more energy efficient than offices and tele-commuters tend to use their cars less.

So if you tele-commute, or have staff who do, let me know by writing a comment below. Even if you don’t I’d love to hear your thoughts on the concept of telecommuting or working from home.