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HOMEWORKING IN THE MEDIA
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Catch up on all the latest news about homeworking, homeworkers and flexible working. We'll be publishing all the latest press releases here so check back regularly to see what's happening in the world of homeworking.
Ciaron Dunne of Desk Space Genie explains why desk space rental is taking off in the UK: "Desk space rental is different to traditional office rental because the space is generally available on short, flexible contracts and the 'desker' gets to move into an existing set-up, complete with broadband internet and work colleagues. We estimate that there are currently more than 200 desk schemes in operation serving thousands of freelancers and small businesses, which vary from singles desks to much larger schemes.
"The growth in spare desk rental is driven by economic conditions, which are making companies take a serious look at cutting costs and at making the most from their existing space, and also by environmental concerns and a desire to reduce wastage.
"The supply has been more than matched by demand, as the past decade has seen an explosion in remote working due to improvements in communications and an increased reliance on freelancers and contractors, particularly in the creative and IT industries. Typical deskers include web designers, translators, architects, consultants, and others from professions where day-to-day location is less important."
Desk Space Genie allows potential deskers to search by location across the whole of the UK, and to send enquiries through to advertisers. While the website is new and in its "feedback" phase, it's free-of-charge for businesses to list their spare desk space at http://www.deskspacegenie.co.uk Giles Kendrick, who runs a desk space scheme in Cambridge, endorsed the idea of letting spare desks: "We've let six spare desks in our office over the past two years, and it's made a real difference to our small business. The income from the desks covers our office overheads and allows us to invest more money in our actual business. Over and above that, the guys who rent desks have been a really positive influence in our office environment; the scheme has helped to create a buzzy atmosphere and we actually now use several of the deskers as contractors to our own business."
Four out of five new mothers would like to return to work but don't think they'll ever find suitable working hours. The Jobs for Mums Awards were borne from a campaign to help mothers who want to get back to work but can't find the right job. These Awards recognise employers who are ready to help them.
The Jobs 4 Mums campaign wants to find the boss who is most committed to giving jobs to mothers. Since its launch the campaign has triggered a great response.
Jobs4mothers.com is a leading online jobs site for flexible, family friendly work. "Even in these hard economic times many businesses see the value in offering flexible, family friendly work," explains jobs4mothers co-director Selina Smith. "We felt they deserve recognition which is why we were delighted to be part of these awards." The three winners represented different sized enterprises:
Award categories - winners
Over 1000 employees: Winner - BT
Telecoms giant BT employs nearly 122,000 people, operating in 170 countries. Flexible working is available to every employee - and a good proportion take up the offer: it has
- 14,500 homeworkers,
- 5,000 part time workers and
- nearly 400 job sharers.
100-1000 employees: Winner - Henmans LLP
Henmans LLP is an Oxford-based law firm with 136 employees. It has 26 employees with children under 10; all of them use the flexitime hours it offers, and several work flexibly or work from home. The firm has an onsite caf‚ where parents in the firm can bring their families, and social events are organised to include the children too. At least one solicitor was made a partner while on maternity leave; while a managing partner and head of department work a four day week. "We do not regard maternity leave as an obstacle to promotion!" says Viv Matthews, Head of HR for the firm.
Under 100 employees Winner - Achieving Quality Leads
Achieving Quality Leads is a sales consultancy firm based in Chiswick, south west London. It employs 8 staff, of which seven are women and three have children. All employees work part time from home and choose their own hours. The pay levels are good - a minimum of £15 an hour plus a quarterly performance bonus. "All our work is flexible - that is part of the company ethos," explains Larry Miller co-director of the company. "Everyone works from home, even the directors. That means we can attract people who once had highly professional jobs, but either could not, or chose not to continue with them, due to family or other commitments."
Yorkshire-based Ventura and Castlebeck Care were highly commended.
The judges were Minister for Women and Equality Harriet Harman, co-directors of jobs4mothers.com Selina Smith and Kristina Abdat, and deputy editor of Take a Break Sophie Hearsey.
A severe economic crisis provides the best time to start a new business, according to Jonathan Jay, founder of business growth consultancy SuccessTrack. To prove his point he is inviting nearly 500 aspiring entrepreneurs to a free Start-Up Now! seminar day in London on Sunday 23rd November. Applications for a place will be considered at www.startupnowuk.com
Multi-millionaire Jay who has successfully grown and sold businesses, is adamant that with the right attitude and approach, the fleet-of-foot will thrive despite the fiscal gloom. Recession will simply prove Darwin's evolutionary theory, applied to business, of the survival of the fittest. Jay provides seven reasons why now is a good time to start a business:-
- Reason one: The nervous will be getting out of your way - there is less competition from other start-ups.
- Reason two: The 'top dog' in any industry is often so weighed down in administration and tradition they will struggle and make cutbacks. You can enter markets the big companies can't afford to market to any more.
- Reason three: The job market will be flooded with talented people made redundant by struggling businesses. These people have the fire in their belly to work with you to be the next market leader.
- Reason four: Commercial rents are lower and you can pick up good property bargains.
- Reason five: While everyone else is moaning about how bad everything is, you have the opportunity to build your own empire and then everyone will say, "How did that happen?"
- Reason six: Excellent sales and marketing always wins and if you focus on these two areas of your business and don't get your attention diverted by other details you will come out of any recession stronger as a result.
- Reason seven: Get used to not using credit and build a strong business out of cash flow; negotiate harder and get discounts wherever possible; if you can make it happen in lean times you will be the winner in better times.
A number of important business laws came into force last week. To save business time and money Government departments now issue all their changes to business regulations on only two dates per year - 6 April and 1 October. This is part of the Government's overall approach to promote better regulation, regulating only where necessary, doing so in a proportionate and targeted way, and reducing bureaucracy wherever possible. To read more about the key changes made visit http://www.homebusinessuk.co.uk/legal.htm
One in eight Britons are now working from home regularly or permanently, many claiming that it is more productive, less stressful and generally the work mode of the future. Yet, how many home workers are tempted to scrub the Weetabix from the dining table instead of finishing that spreadsheet or pop on the TV to keep them company? iVillage.co.uk, the UK 's leading women's community site, reveals the top five working from home distractions and how to avoid them. They are:
- The Kitchen
- The children
- Personal calls and visits
- Housework
- The skiving urge
"The first thing you must do when working from home is set up a designated work space", says Ronita Dutta, editor at iVillage.co.uk. "By having a designated work area, you are mentally putting yourself in an office environment even if you don't have a separate room. This is especially important for women who work from home as they tend to want to multitask to save time".
Ronita who as a journalist worked from home for two years is an expert on avoiding temptation; here are her tips for getting the job done:
Distraction: The kitchen
As you struggle with a tough work project, you manage to distract yourself by popping into the kitchen and eat six cheese
sticks, five biscuits, one leftover piece of birthday cake, crisps, etc. And you never knew you were capable of drinking
so much coffee!
Prevention:
Bring healthy treats into your work space to discourage frequent and fattening trips to the fridge. Crunchy cut-up veggies, whole-grain crackers and dried fruits help satisfy cravings when you're in the mood to munch. Try to drink water. But if you can't work without several cups of coffee or tea, stick to decaf or herbal teas, and bring a thermos into your office so you don't have to venture near the kitchen.
Distraction: Your children
You started working at home to spend more time with them, but now you can't get away from them. Even when you do
manage to convince children that, 'Mummy needs to work,' the interruptions are endless. You abandon all business tasks
until the kids are in bed and then pull an all-nighter trying to get everything done.
Prevention:
Set a work schedule and get some child care. A regular work routine helps you set boundaries between work and family life, so that you block out the time you want to spend with your children and keep it sacred. Having part-time child care will allow you to work uninterrupted. Soon, your children will learn to respect your work hours, and you'll have plenty of planned times where you can play with them guilt-free.
Distraction: Calls and visits during work time
You're at your desk when the phone rings and it's mum telling you about uncle Bob. Then, the door bell rings, and it's the
neighbour, who thought this would be a good time for coffee.
Prevention:
Learn to say no. Have polite phrases at the ready to deter people from zapping your work time. For example, tell the neighbour: 'I'm sorry, but today's a work day and I really must get back to my desk. Let's get together when I'm off duty.'
Distraction: Housework
You're supposed to be making cold calls, finishing off a document or preparing a business plan, but instead you've done
three loads of washing, cleaned out the kids' cupboards and washed every window in the house.
Prevention:
Enlist family members to help with household chores outside of office hours. Even young kids can help load the dishwasher or sort clothes for the laundry. Older children can be responsible for clearing the dinner table, taking out the rubbish and collecting recyclables. Also, talk with your spouse about sharing household chores, and designate the ones each of you will be responsible for.
Distraction: The skiving urge
You should be working at your desk, but you'd really rather be tinkering in the garden, popping out to the grocer for lunch.
Before you know it, you're out the door, with stacks of unfinished work projects left behind.
Prevention:
Hang 'Not Now, I'm Working' signs, in tempting areas to nudge you back to your desk. If gardening is your downfall, tack one of the signs to your gardening gloves or tape one to the steering wheel of your car to keep you from heading to the shops.
"It's all about time management," continues Dutta. "Especially when you're working from home, it is important to plan ahead. Be sure to write into your diary upcoming school holidays so you complete important projects before the holidays sneak up on you. Or before the kids get up, log in and send out any emails you didn't finish the day before or complete easy work tasks that don't need any concentration time".
Responding to reports in Sunday's papers suggesting that Gordon Brown is to extend the right to request flexible working to parents of children aged up to 12, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has called on the Government to be bolder and extend the right to request to all workers.
The reports suggest that Imelda Walsh's review into flexible working is to recommend extending the right to request to parents of children aged up to 12, and that the Prime Minister will embrace the recommendations.
Mike Emmott, CIPD Employee Relations Adviser, said:"We wholly support moves to extend the 'right to request' to more parents. But the government should be bolder still and extend the right to all workers. The danger with ever larger groups of people entitled to request flexible working, and a smaller number not entitled to do so, is that divisions will grow up in the workplace.
"Many enlightened employers already allow employees to work flexibly regardless of their family status. An extension of the right to request to all workers would level the playing field, without compelling employers to offer flexible working where this is incompatible with business needs. Our research shows that it would also deliver improved employee engagement, and therefore contribute to boosting productivity and performance in the workplace.
"The government can rightly claim credit for the light-touch 'right to request' legislation that has encouraged employers to consider employee requests without the need to wield the big stick of compulsion. However, it is a shame that a desire to appease the most vocal in the business lobby appears likely to limit the new extension to flexible working rights to parents of slightly older children than at present. John Hutton gave a clear public signal in February that he wanted Imelda Walsh's review to only recommend a limited extension, so it is unsurprising that this now seems to be what will come out of the review."
The Work Foundation last week published a new essay that asks what is 'meaningful work', why more people seem to be seeking it, and what employers can do to make work more meaningful?
The paper argues that while thinkers and writers have long wondered at the value of work to human beings beyond providing a living, the notion of 'meaningful work' is a relatively new phenomenon that would have made little sense to our forbears of a couple of centuries ago.
Author Stephen Overell says: 'The way people talk about 'fulfilling their potential' in a job could only happen in the modern world of work - it is simply not something that would have been said a few generations ago. Meaningful work rests on the rise of individualism and identity as pressing concerns for large numbers of people. It speaks of huge and perhaps excessive expectations of working life - the historically unusual sense that fulfilment occurs, or should occur, in the everyday, ordinary business of going to work.
'People are very different - what is meaningful to one person may not be meaningful to another, and what someone finds meaningful at the age of 23 may not be how they feel at 43. Nevertheless, meaning is unmistakably in the air of the 21st century culture of work; this essay marks an attempt to describe what is going on. The raising and dashing of hopes around meaning has become one of the major psychological forces within working life. What goes on inside workers' hearts and minds about work has become profoundly important to what they produce and how they do it.'
The essay argues that the discovery of meaning in work relies on balancing three sets of motives. They are moral motives - the idea that the 'ends' of work are worthwhile; compensation motives - including money, but also including status, authority, responsibility and the appropriate use of skills and abilities; and craft motives - the desire to do a good job for its own sake.
Meanwhile, the work that people do today has changed in such ways as to prompt more questions about meaning, fulfilment and rewarding work - relatively well-paying, highly skilled professional and managerial jobs now account for over a third of all jobs in many advanced democracies. Work is more about intellectual problem-solving and how people communicate and relate to each other than it used to be. This does not make work more meaningful, but it helps create the conditions in which issues of meaning and identity arise.
The paper argues:
- Employers have a role in enabling the search for meaningful work by providing high quality jobs for people - jobs with autonomy, security, variety, a reasonable balance between effort and reward, and between skill level and demand. But employers cannot create meaning and should not try to. It is up to individuals to find work that is meaningful for them. However, employers are capable of destroying meaning through exploitation, disrespect, and poor organisation of work.
- Social values that affect work have changed: a basic psychological orientation towards maximising income and status is today being balanced by a stress upon self-expression, diversity of view, aesthetic concerns and issues of self-fulfilment.
- Meaning, identity and individualism at work have risen at the same time as traditional collective institutions such as trade unions, communities and corporate hierarchies are seen has having declined.
- Doing excellent work for no other reason than its own sake is intrinsic to the notion of meaningful work. However, increasing bureaucracy and market forces may undermine the search for meaning.
- Having a sense of vocation is very similar to the idea of doing meaningful work. The difference is that meaning is more self-conscious than vocation: the service of others as a personal experience rather than a 'calling'.
Home Based Working Becoming Commonplace
Britain is turning into a nation of homeworkers. According to home insurance company, Zurich, purely office-based working is moving aside as the nation’s workforce embraces a more flexible working week. New research has found that almost a third of full-time employees surveyed (30 per cent) spend time during the month working from home, clocking up an average of 15.73 hours - nearly ten per cent of the working month - in the home office.
One in ten of the ad hoc homeworkers surveyed spend more than 40 hours each month and nearly one in twenty (four per cent) clock up more than 80 hours working from home. Even those who don’t officially work from home find it difficult to leave the office behind, with one in five (21 per cent) respondents saying that they occasionally check emails or read documents from home.
Avoiding the commute to and from work is the most popular reason for homeworking, with 66 per cent of respondents citing it as an advantage. Peace and quiet from colleagues (55 per cent), freedom to choose working hours (50 per cent), flexibility (48 per cent) and lack of distractions (46 per cent) complete the top five reasons for home working. Those surveyed also appreciate a few home comforts; one in five (22 per cent) welcome the chance for a lie-in, while nearly one in ten (eight per cent) tune into daytime TV during their working day.
The trend looks to become more popular in the coming year, with a third of ad hoc homeworkers expecting to spend more time working from home than they have in the past twelve months. In fact, by August 2008 they expect to be working for an average of 26 hours a month from home.
To accommodate the homeworking boom, many respondents have invested heavily in office equipment for the home, with the average replacement value of these items totting up to an impressive £1,140.93. One fifth (21 per cent) have equipment with a replacement value of more than £1,500. Despite their investment, more than one in ten (12 per cent) don’t have their equipment insured against loss, damage or theft on their home contents insurance.
The top five pieces of office equipment owned and used for work purposes at home are computer (88 per cent); email and internet (77 per cent); printer (47 per cent); USB flash drive (35 per cent) and scanner (21 per cent).
Mark Searles, Zurich’s Managing Director, Retail comments: “We are going to see the popularity of homeworking rise and rise as both workers and employers seek a better work/life balance. However, those who have invested in their home office need to safeguard their working arrangements, should the worst happen. Making sure that office equipment is adequately insured as part of a home contents policy is crucial for those who rely on home computers and other technical equipment for work purposes.
Sign the petition in favour of flexible working at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/flexworkbenefits/.
All the research and case studies (including government initiatives) over the last two decades indicate that flexible working provides significant business benefits to organisations as well as a better quality of life for individuals. It could also be a more effective and popular way of reducing congestion and pollution than road pricing.
There is no ‘one size fits all’ that could be implemented by government targets or legislation, but there is plenty that government could do to educate and inform, to support and encourage, and to publicise and promote flexible working so that individuals, organisations and UK plc can reap the benefits. This is why we have just started our e-Petition.
It is not about being for or against road pricing, it is about being FOR changing the way we work so that everyone benefits and so does our environment. Individually employees are for it, unions are for it, even ministers are for it, but somehow getting widespread acceptance into organisational cultures is proving elusive, perhaps because the government, misguidedly perhaps, insists on pigeon-holing it as being about employee rights and carers rather than about the wider benefits. You can help raise the profile and shift the debate up a gear by signing the petition now at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/flexworkbenefits/) and by forwarding this to your own contacts.
If you have any questions or comments then please contact http://telework.org.uk/.
The Orange Future Enterprise coalition report identifies the principle challenges for employers and employees in dealing with flexible working practise. It emphasises that effective management of flexible working will help organisations be more competitive, successful and retain the best talent. You can download the full report from Orange.
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