It's National Work From Home Day today - an event designed to promote the benefits of homeworking to both employees and employers. Likely as not you haven't noticed - the trains and roads seem to have been as busy as ever this morning, and if you're on your own at home it's business as usual.
A survey carried out by insurer Cornhill Direct seems to suggest that for many people homeworking would be a good thing for them to do, and a bad thing for their colleagues to take up. While they know they would work as hard - or even harder - when they escaped the distractions of the office, they don't really trust their co-workers to do the same.
Employers seem to take the same view - although some have started to encourage homeworking, in many offices a request to spend the day out of the boss's beady eye results in a grudging 'just this once' at best. The image of someone slumped in front of the kitchen table in the pjs, killing time until Cash in the Attic seems to be hard to shift - despite the success companies like BT have had with homeworking.
Perhaps big business's new found love of all things green will tip the balance in favour of the home office. While productivity may be hard to calculate in some lines of work, employees' carbon footprints are more easily assessed. Unless the worker in question chooses to sit at home with all the lights on and the heating turned up to maximum, and getting them to stay at home rather than jumping in the car or on the train will reduce emissions.
So if arguments about worklife balance and productivity fail to convince your boss, you could try the green approach.
