The smart/hard balance
It's a popular myth; in the future we'll all work 'smarter'. I'm not entirely sure when the future is supposed to be (tomorrow, next wk, year, decade, century) and the intentional ambiguity just leads me to realise that for 'smarter' we can actually substitute the word 'harder'.
I was given cause to think about this by the 'shock/horror' statistics used last week when most of us had to take a day-off from commuting. Apparently our very absence from the workplace causes the economy to suffer to the tune of many millions. These statistics never seem very scientific to me, just some random multiplication of number of people absent by average financial output per person. The latter must be somewhat difficult, if not impossible, to calculate as we don't all work on production lines; only in this instance could you say an absence amounts to a specific number of things that remained unpacked or unscrewed, etc.
As successive Governments have destroyed our manufacturing industry I'd imagine that the bulk of us actually now work in clerical or 'service' industries. If we don't turn up at work then we probably have to find a way to complete that work either at home or by cramming it into the next working day. On that basis I fail to see how the money has been lost to the economy.
For years now I've had the capacity to do a vast quantity of my work from my home, possibly as much as 80% of the same functions I could perform from commuting to any office. The bits you miss out on from not being physically present are things like being able to read your bosses body language when he/she's bawling you out and to be present at interminably long meetings which resolve nothing. In theory you could do the former by video link and the latter by audio conference (whilst enjoying a nap) but this seems not to happen at my level.
The differences we need to impose are in management culture. The real reason that home-working hasn't taken off to the levels where it could have a positive impact on problems such as commuting-congestion is that most managers don't trust their employees to work from home, they'd rather see the whites of their eyes, the shape of their actual presence while they're wasting work-time at a work-desk rather than being more productive at home. It's all question of trust, no-one has any, consequently why would we trust that the money claimed to be lost to the economy is actually lost.
The smarter/harder equation means that our work-days might not be spent in an efficient way and that they no longer resemble the normal 9-5. The work-day is now a sprawling mess that has the capacity to eat away all your spare time. You might call this the blackberry effect - employers and work can contact you at any time and you feel obliged to respond.
I haven't held down a full-time job in over three years. Partly this is through choice, I set up my own company following redundancy from an employer who'd I'd slaved for - earning them many millions in a ten year period - not that I'm bitter (at least I no longer wake up screaming abuse....often). Being your own boss has many benefits but these do not generally include working fewer hours, usually the opposite is true as you've just substituted one set of bosses for any number - depending on how many contracts you can tie down at any one time.
If I do have to travel to London I'm surrounded by people tippy-tapping on their laptops or jabbering into their mobiles. I take calls at all times, particularly if working on projects linked to America, and I have clients who are known to e-mail at bizarre times like Sunday mornings when I'm usually in a muddy field trying to manage an under-10's football team. Work is usually far from my mind at times like that.
The internet age means you're never far from it though and whilst it should free up time for us to be able to enjoy more leisure, I suspect it doesn't - particularly in a recession when most are in fear of our jobs and/or our savings.
Thankfully we can all be secure in the knowledge that a Labour Govt. wouldn't sell our precious British industries and utilities into foreign ownership or make the entire UK economy dependent on volatile services such as banking. Oh, bugger.
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Paul Flower - Paul Flower works in the music industry, a promoter, critic, (self)-publicist and all-round consultant to clients.
Its true, bosses have no trust in their employees working at home, which is unfounded because the employee who works at home work harder to prove they are actually working.
I think Blackberries are a nightmare and should be banned from the planet. Far from freeing you from the constraints of an office they actually cause more pressure by making you available at all times. On the plus side, if you're chronically antisocial and old enough to understand the evil workings of corporations, technology does make it possible to escape the rat race and work at home, so thatâÂÂs good.