Small Business vs. Working at Home
I’ve seen these numbers thrown about several times lately (perhaps you have too): only 40% of small and medium businesses support working at home, compared to 76% of large businesses. Thus, web workers have a better chance of finding a home at big organizations. As someone who is not exceptionally fond of working for large companies, I found this rather disquieting; it also doesn’t match up with my own track record of web work for a variety of outfits of all sizes. So, I finally took the time to track those numbers to their source, and here’s what I found.
The basic figures come from a press release put out by the UK arm of Citrix Online. If you’re interested, you can pop over and read the whole thing, but I’ll summarize: they commissioned an independent study of 202 private-sector businesses in the UK, talking to the head of HR where there was one or the Managing Director otherwise. SMBs were defined as firms with no more than 500 employees. Here are the core findings that they hang their headline about small businesses on:
“Just 40% of SMBs allow staff to work from home compared to 76% of large companies.
“Only 43% of SMBs have any technologies in place to support home working, compared to 76% of bigger companies. However both sectors have been slow to take advantage of the full range of technological options available to support home working and increase employer productivity. Of those companies that do provide technological support, a laptop is the most popular choice, cited by 70% of respondents, followed by mobile phones offered by 35% of companies; however, in third place, only one in four UK employers offer remote access to internal systems so that employees can work from home as if they were in the office.”
Now, before we jump on the “small businesses don’t support working at home” bandwagon, let’s take a closer look at some of what we don’t know here:
- We don’t know how the companies interviewed were chosen, whether they were a random or representative sample of UK businesses, whether that sample would hold for US firms, or what proportion of them were SMBs.
- We don’t know whether the companies that provide “technologies to support home working” actually allow anyone to work at home. It’s quite possible that some firms offer laptops and mobile phones without having any sort of telecommuting arrangement in place.
- We don’t know what proportion of employees at larger firms participate in any flexible work arrangements. If only a small percentage of large firm employees work at home they could still be outnumbered by SMB teleworkers even if many SMBs have no support for teleworking.
- We don’t know whether the Managing Directors at small firms actually know everything that’s going on under their own roofs.
- We don’t know anything about the industries of the firms that were interviewed.
I could go on, but you get the idea. I don’t mean to pick unduly on Citrix, who are a fine firm; I’ve happily used their products myself. But you need to remember that they’re in the business (among others) of selling remote-access software to the SMB market. So the next time you hear these numbers echo back, about how small businesses are not friendly to working at home – consider the source, and exercise some healthy skepticism.
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For me, the principal statistics missing here are those that match the actual number of SMB’s that frown on and / or don’t support home working to the number of employees they have on their payroll.
My guess would be that the figures for those businesses would be 10 employees or less. In which case, the reason for not support home working would be lack of resources and simply losing key resources by having people working from home.
After all, most very, very businesses rely on their employees sharing duties, like answering the phone, for example.
In addition, it’s a waste of office space if someone isn’t sat at a desk…
“In addition, it’s a waste of office space if someone isn’t sat at a desk…”
It’s still a waste if the person is sitting at the desk is being unproductive (a.k.a desk jockeys). Sometimes being in a hustle and bustle of a small office is just not conducive to those that have to create (especially code). Small businesses would actually save money if they got smaller offices and worked remotely. VPN software/hardware is getting cheaper (relative to rent). I think this is on the rise and I hope it continues as well.
Also considering the larger and larger amount of cafeworkers, or digital beduins, the stats seems a bit old-school, and not in line with the development of the workforce.
An other note from Denmark: SMB’s defined under 500 empl. seems as a high number – wihtout knowing the average size of companies in DK.
If you want so desperately to work from home, why work for a company at all?
The other key point is — how many of these large companies “support” telecommuting and flexible arrangements yet in practice leave it up to “manager discretion” so many people lose out on the benefit even if there is no rational business reason why they couldn’t be a web worker. That is the hidden statistic that no study will really bear out (because no one can measure it or get behind the curtain as to what is REALLY happening).
From my experience, small businesses are not very open to working at home. Usullly, small businesses are run by the owners who are pretty much bent towards controlling everything. So they like all thier employees to be in office where they can see them.