By now, most of the responses will be in. The Government has solicited opinions on extending the right to ask for flexible working beyond people who have dependants either under six years old or with a disability and will be considering whether to enact legislation (see last issue of Enterprise). Many small businesspeople will be nervous about this possible change. The technology can be daunting enough if you're unfamiliar with it, but there is also the cultural change — away from managing people who are in front of you towards getting them to work efficiently when they are out of sight.
The gadgets are impressive enough. James Caan, private equity investor and That Bloke Off Dragon's Den, swears by his ability to use his T-Mobile BlackBerry on a train and monitor his business during what would normally be regarded as dead time. The technology enables productivity, he says. "My key performance indicator when I walk into a business is: How productive is it? Most organisations that don't do very well are ones that don't have their productivity very well measured."
One of the first things he initiates in any company is a system enabling people to collect and respond to emails on the move, usually through a BlackBerry, as simple as it sounds. "People spend an hour, an hour-and-a-half travelling. If I give people a BlackBerry, the need for someone to be in the office seven or nine hours a day becomes nothing more than habit."
Face time, as its detractors call working from a fixed place, is not essential, he believes, and an individual might well be more productive away from the office. Caan urges people to start with an analysis of the job and how much of it needs to take place actually in the office. Often the answer is "not much". It's at this point that a lot of newer entrepreneurs start to get nervous: how, they ask, can you trust people not to watch daytime TV, or visit friends if they're on the road rather than in the office?
Remote control
There are a lot of arguments about trusting people to work because they're adults, rather than children who'll try to misbehave at any given opportunity, which Caan certainly accepts. In fact, he believes the objection is something of a bit of a red herring. "Technology eradicates that problem," he says. "Right now, if I want to know what my employee is doing I can tell you in 30 seconds. I only have to check the activity on their email, whether they've been on Skype … It's very transparent."
It's this sort of flexibility that can lead some people to abandon the idea of office work altogether. Again, the traditionalists start to worry: won't people judge them if they abandon their office all together? The answer is often "no". James Curd operates a wholesaler called It's A Hair Thing, which sells to hair salons all over the country, from his vehicle. Nobody cares that he doesn't have a conventional office.
"I know these guys, I've worked with a lot of them in the past," Curd says. "It keeps the cost down so I'm cheaper than the competition by about 30%. I work from home; my office is my car." Nobody has even asked about it. "I've been in the trade for 10 years, I know hundreds of salons." He has a few tricks, mind — such as giving his house a name rather than a number, so anyone writing to him might assume it's an office. But he regards his car as his workplace, and his customers are content.
Another entrepreneur to abandon the traditional office, at least initially, is Penny Power, who owns social network site eCademy. She uses self-employed people rather than staff, and not only considers mobility to be people's preferred working model, but also believes it will shape the entire economy. "We found it wasn't absolutely critical to have an office," she says. "We all work from home, and my four colleagues have a team who also work from home." The advantages are massive; she has a colleague in Portugal who needed some training, and by using Gotomeeting.com she was able to offer tuition remotely as if she was on the spot rather than bringing him to the UK.
This ethos could encourage a project-based economy, based on people's outputs rather than the more traditional salaried people at desks. She learned this in a previous job in which she managed a team of 250 people. "The best way to manage people is by measuring output rather than trying to control them," she says. "This is the way the world has to go — people can't juggle their lifestyles very easily, and you need to learn to trust people to produce the output you need. And if one person can produce that in one hour and another in four it doesn't matter: it's much more about achieving objectives in the business."
The cost-savings involved in keeping someone at a desk rather than allowing them to work remotely can be considerable. Caan says one of the first things he does when looking at something he may invest in is evaluate the real cost: not just the salary but the cost of the desk space; the cost of having a location in which everyone sits at the same time; the cost of having software licences for everyone rather than just whoever is using a piece of software at any time. He calculated the cost per employee in a London company he had recently invested in as £3,860. "I asked around and got quotes for someone doing the same thing in the Philippines, and the cost dropped to £780," he says. In this instance, the work undertaken would have been no different.
Outsourcing overseas won't be suitable in every case, of course. When the economy has been under threat, though, it's worth looking at costs and seeing whether they can be reduced. And if this can be done in such a way that the employee ends up more enthused and allows for their payment by output and achievement rather than unproductive face time with costs attached, that may be no bad thing.
