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UK telecommuting study bolsters case for remote work

Jessica Stillman — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:09:58 +0000

As we reported a few months ago, on February 8th UK telecoms giant O2 sent nearly 3,000 staff based at its Slough office home to telecommute for the day. Now the analysis of how the experiment went is out and, unsurprisingly considering a slew of earlier studies on telecommuting, O2 discovered a day at home was an all-around good thing for its workforce.

The exercise was partly designed to test how the company might respond to disruption caused by the arrival of the Olympics in nearby London this summer, but the results of the experiment again illustrate the benefits of flexible working even if thousands of world-class athletes aren’t about to invade your city. O2 found:

Telecommuting staff saved a £9,000 (currently $14,000 and change) in reduced commuting costs
1,000 hours that was usually spent commuting was instead spent working, while staff also got an additional 1,000 hours of sleep
14 percent said they saw more of their families
More than one in three (36 percent) said they were more productive than when at work
12.2t of CO2 was saved in one day — that’s equal to CO2 emissions from driving 42,000 miles in a medium-sized diesel car

IT World offers some explanation of the technical details, which apparently produced no major issues: “In preparation, O2 upgraded its virtual private network (VPN) as well as its network infrastructure, which saw a 155 percent increase in users on the day, and a 110 percent increase in VPN data sent across the network. The company automatically redirected traffic between servers in the north and south of its offices to ensure that the load was spread efficiently and that there were no local bottlenecks.”

“The success of O2′s experiment extends much further than just allowing some of the workforce to stay at home and work. It proves that with the right thinking and planning, even the largest organizations can protect themselves from the most severe disruptions to their business,” Ben Dowd, business director at O2, is reported as saying in IT Wor. He also stressed the importance of proper preparation.

“Four weeks of intense preparation across the business – everywhere from HR and internal comms to IT and property services – laid the ground for an almost completely empty building and a widely distributed workforce,” he said.

Might a one-day trial of telecommuting be a good step towards remote work for your business?

Image courtesy of Flickr user team|b.

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O2 sends 3,000 staff home to telecommute for a day

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:01:36 +0000

Remote work may be a reality for freelancers with no managers eager to look over their shoulders, at plenty of tech firms that are comfortable with remote collaboration tools and edgy, young companies, but it’s still a long way from wide acceptance at your standard, stodgy corporate headquarters, right?

Maybe not. Even big companies without a particular reputation for cutting-edge practices are slowly starting to realize that the real estate savings and employee morale benefits of remote work make it an attractive option. Take UK telecoms giant O2 for example, which closed its headquarters in Slough this week, sending all 3,000 staff home to work for an initiative designed to test the company’s ability to manage remote workers.

“We believe a cultural step-change is underway affecting staff and businesses, as work increasingly becomes something we do, rather than a place that we go,” O2 business manager Ben Dowd told UK tech news site, V3. “Today’s office-wide flexible working initiative is an opportunity for us to tangibly demonstrate the opportunity and potential available to British businesses today.”

Of course, O2 has a horse in this race as it sells a platform to support remote workers, so the firm is hardly the least likely to push the practice. Dowd acknowledges that this week’s experiment had obvious marketing benefits for the company. “By sharing experiences from across our business, from business divisions to operations, we hope to encourage more organizations to help their workforce become mobile,” he said.

But on the other hand Slough (home to Wernham Hogg Paper Company in the British version of The Office) is hardly Silicon Valley or SoHo either, so the large-scale experiment still offers some evidence that telecommuting is seeping out of trendy enclaves and into the business mainstream.

Image courtesy of Flickr user teamjb.

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Is telecommuting feeling the economic squeeze?

Jessica Stillman — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:01:29 +0000

For exactly all of its obvious benefits to productivity, the environment and even the bottom line, telecommuting has experienced explosive growth. There may be plenty of chatter about the practice and even government cheerleading for companies to get on the bandwagon, but outside certain specific professional niches and geographical regions, working via the Internet is hardly the day-to-day norm for most.

Nor is the uptake of telecommuting speeding up, according to recent research. In fact, the rate of growth is slowing down, claims a recent post on the blog Workshifting:

The latest research from the Telework Research Network indicates that while telework is growing, it’s not increasing at the pace we might have expected. According to 2009 U.S. Census data, 61 percent more employees considered home their primary place of work versus 2005. But that number translates to only 2.3 percent of the total workforce.

When compared with a recent report from WorldatWork, which indicates that the overall number of teleworkers declined between 2008 and 2010, a trend emerges. The frequency of telework has increased, meaning fewer workshifters are doing more flexible work.

What’s behind this decrease in the number of teleworkers? Workshifting suggests a number of possibilities, including:

Not everyone wants to telecommute
Companies struggling to quantify the costs and benefits
Inadequate tools and resources available to support the lifestyle
Businesses still unsure how to manage people they can’t see

All of these are certainly hurdles to increased telecommuting, but a separate recent study suggests the slowdown in the increase in remote work may have a simpler explanation: the terrible economy.

That seems to be true in the UK at least, where communications company O2 has recently published a report looking at the future of work and flexible working. The poll of 2,000 workers found that two out of five feel pressured to be in the office because of the gloomy economy. O2 has dubbed the fear of prejudice against remote work “presenteeism” and says the condition is on the rise among Brits.

“With so many organizations facing economic uncertainty, our research suggests large numbers of businesses are missing out on the productivity gains, improved employee and customer engagement and efficient processes that such flexible working practices can deliver,” said David Plumb, O2′s general manager for enterprise.

At Net:Work in December, we’ll discuss the future of the mobile workforce and how managers can better manage remote workers. Get your tickets today.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Images_of_Money

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Tethering the Untethered: O2 and iPhone OS 3.0

Imran Ali — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:00:22 +0000

One of the most anticipated features of the new iPhone OS 3.0 has been “tethering,” or the ability to share your iPhone’s 3G Internet connection with your laptop, via Bluetooth or USB.

For web workers — “the great untethered” — iPhone OS 3.0′s tethering represents an opportunity to work with greater freedom, mobility and flexibility. Even for those already using 3G datacards and dongles, the feature means you have one less device to carry. Official tethering has been a long time in coming. Unofficial iPhone apps such as Nullriver’s Netshare and PDANet have provided tethering capability to jailbroken iPhones for some time. Netshare was an official App Store release for a while, until Apple forced its withdrawal due to the lack of tethering rights in AT&T’s terms.

Here in the UK, O2′s tethering support for iPhone launched today, coinciding with the launch of iPhone 3G S. Sadly, despite the fact that O2′s iPhone contracts include “unlimited” data usage, tethering will cost an additional £15-£30 ($25-$50) each month, with no pay-as-you-go option. It’s worth noting that this pricing is identical to O2′s standalone 3G data charges.

O2 is claiming that “using your laptop can be more data-intensive than using your iPhone,” but doesn’t apply the same terms to other contracts and handsets. It’s likely that the carrier simply senses an opportunity to charge iPhone users for something for which they’ve effectively already paid.

In response, enterprising users are already creating patches to tether iPhones to O2 without jailbreaking, albeit running the risk of breaching their contracts as well as disabling MMS and Visual Voicemail. Indeed, even AT&T’s yet-to-be-launched tethering feature is being prised open.

It’ll be interesting to see if O2′s pricing has a negative effect on take-up and usage, diminishing a feature that’s clearly in demand and extraordinarily useful.

Do you plan to take up tethering services for your iPhone…and do you expect to pay?

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