Happiness and the End of the Working Week

Nick, working from home (or anywhere remotely) is one of my favorite topics, so thank you for this post.

I love that line “The future is yesterday”. Over the years I’ve noticed more of my employed buddies working from home, even before Ferriss encouraged it in his 4HWW. Eventually most companies will have to adopt some form of remote working if they want to remain competitive.

Looking forward to your article on working smarter from home.

This is a terrific post!

Convincing employers will be the hard part, there are many that want an old fashioned physical presence above showing results regardless of from where you work.

Check out Best Buy’s ROWE (results oriented work environment). They are on the right path.

I’m in a company that expects 8-6. If you don’t answer your phone instantly, they give you a hard time. Email should be responded to instantly. Everything is an emergency. I’m working on changing all of this of course….

I am a secondary school teacher and the notion of working from home for me poses certain logistical issues - unless society rethinks education (which I think they must). Many schools already have flexible instruction times but I wonder if remote instruction would work. It would require a certain restructuring how families live and operate. One advantage? - We could actually raise our children and the village would be far better company for our children than the playground melting pot - depending on your neighbourhood of course.

My employer allows me to work from home for a day or so every couple of months due to health issues. When I do work from home I feel more relaxed, more positive about the work I am doing, more creative and more productive.

As with Victor, my work environment runs on crisis and panic management. I try to disengage from this but it is still stressful (as well as counter-productive and unnecessary).

I’m currently transitioning to working for myself as a writer. I hope my current employer will agree to keep me on as a part-time freelancer but, if not, there are many other companies realising the benefits of offering more flexible employment.

Recently my boss just announced that our team could start working from home for one day each week. She saw that stress levels rising in our work environment and realized that giving us that opportunity to work from the comfort of our home might be one way to help alleviate it.

You present a great plan for those who don’t have management who are so gung-ho about telecommuting (is there a better word for this yet?). Great stuff!

Wonderful post, Nick. I’ve Digged it, I’ve blogged it, I’ve shared it on Facebook via Google Reader. Must get the word out because I HATE COMING INTO WORK MOST DAYS!!

Great post - I’m looking forward to the subsequent posts.

Nick, this is a great post, if only a small percent of the employers will make a small change and allow the employees to work from home (those who can) the world will be a better place, people won’t be cranky all the time, when I work from home and don’t have to drive 30 min in the morning and 60 min in the afternoon I get more to do then when I spend a full day at work.

There are some places that want their employees to work from home but only if they live close by,

Tanny

Awesome post Nick. I will definitely be sending this to the proper people around work. Thanks!

Nick;

Wish you were on our board of directors. You’d set my company straight.

At least half of us can work from any lap top computer, we dont’ actually need to physically be here to do our job.

Yet Uncle Big Brother will NOT allow telecommuting. We’ve been told, is so many words, that we can’t work from home and be trusted to put in the required hours.

Never mind that there is a parking crisis, and offices are critcally over-crowded. Nope, you CAN’T work from home.

But they WILL lecture us on car-pooling and saving the planet.

Save us, Nick!

Hi, thanks for this great article !

I’ve made a french translation on my blog :
http://bigornot.blogspot.com/2008/06/business-is-broken.html

Ah, the holy grail of the working class.

@Friar: I think you and I must work at the same place!

Question for all — Why do so many employers think you are more accountable for your work when you’re in the office? Isn’t it accountability for the work you do that really matters?

Ok, that was two questions.

@Brad Grier -

I’ve two examples (I play devil’s advocate ;)

1) Consider a development team working with Extreme Programming methods. Working at home full time may be hard to manage because they can’t work in pair.
In this case, a good practice is lost.

2) Human contact is good for communications and relationship. Emails communications can lead to misunderstandings and develop tensions between teams.
Maybe employers are afraid of loosing human contact for this reason.

Very inspiring post, thanks :)

Too bad here in Italy management is usually too pointy-haired to even think of letting people work from home…

@Sterling - I agree, Sterling. I too, feel that many companies will be forced to take action, partly by employees who insist on a better deal, but also as attitudes to working remotely take a social swing for the better.

It’s warming to hear that you already know people who’ve been offered that opportunity, though.

@Bengt - Agreed, Bengt: much of it is territorial. There’s a false notion of power in having 1000 square feet of office space in the centre of the city. It will be tough to convince some to let go of that, but I think it’s possible.

Originally Posted By Victor
Everything is an emergency.

You’ve summed up in four words one of the key problems: business owners don’t like to feel out of control. The reason you’re asked to jump on every email is the same reason they want you in the office: so they can feel in control of things. But if they worked smarter and learned better communication practises, they’d create an environment with less stress, lower employee churn rates, and higher productivity and personal happiness.

Thanks for the ROWE suggestion. I’ve put off checking it out for too long.

@flotoonie - I was hoping we’d get some insights from teachers, as this is one area that needs the most radical change. Thanks for chipping in.

If you consider that remote learning is already a very viable option for thousands of higher and further education students, I think there’s promise here lower down the educational chain too, even if the changes would have to be somewhat radical. It would require a lot of co-operation between parents and teachers, and I’m not sure that the level of respect needed between the two parties exists for that to take place yet.

But with home schooling rising by more than 60% in the last 5 years, there’s certainly a strong case that remote learning could be a viable option, and I’d love to get involved in that.

@Rebecca Leigh - freelancing for my former employer was one of the ways I was able to make the transition, Rebecca, and it certainly helped pay the bills for the first couple of months!

Many aren’t brave/mad enough to suggest it, but I think it’s a much undervalued option. Good luck with your move into the world of freelancing; I’m sure it will prove worth it for you.

@Mike Templeton - Your boss sounds smart. Kudos to her for finding a solution (which you’ll now know is also the best one!).

Re telecommuting — I prefer “remote working” or “eworking”. You just can’t stick the letter ‘e’ in front of enough words these days…

@Sunili - Thanks ever so much for spreading the word, Sunili — I genuinely appreciate it. What you said in your blog post was right: Mondays really are better from home! (But only just!)

@Matt - Stay tuned!

@Internet Business Ideas - I agree about the stress of the commute. A great exercise that I recommend is to go around your office and ask everyone how long their morning and evening commute is. Then add those figures, and present them to your boss as ammunition. If you work in a big office, the figure can often be in the hundreds of hours.

I understand employers who say that they’re happy for employees to work remotely if they live locally. Unfortunately, the type of emergencies they envision having to call staff in for are often manufactured at best, so the security they’re giving themselves is somewhat false.

@Shawn Kulla - Thanks, Shawn! I hope it gets a positive response.

@Friar - It can be tough. If I were you, I would be trying to work out what the grounds for their objection was (in a very delicate, tactful manner — don’t just say “why not?” — try, “how could I make it a more attractive option?” instead).

Then, you need to tackle their concerns and come up with a solution to appease them. It may be that they have a genuine reason to say no, but my experience is that this is very rare. Respect their choice, but know that it can be changed with some careful planning and tactful suggestions presented as benefits for the company and not just the staff.

@Mat - C’est fantastique! Thanks ever so much for taking the time to do that. I’ll add a link to your post from the top of the article.

For the record: I’m always willing to support and link to anyone who’s kind enough to take the time to translate my posts. If you’re interested, just drop a comment in the relevant article and I’ll be happy to add the link.

@Brad Grier - It certainly started off as the working class dream, but now everyone wants a piece of the independent action!

And you’re right — accountability shouldn’t be location-dependent.

@Mat [2] - The social/contact element is important. I suggest that teams who work remotely full time still meet up offline about once a month if geography allows.

@Raibaz - Sì! I understand that Italy has its own unique working practises. It could probably do with a younger government to help the notion of remote work gain acceptance, but I think there’s a lot that can be done by motivated employees too, regardless of geography.

–
Thanks for your thoughts, everyone. Keep them coming if you wish!

Of course, the ultimate goal is that the term “remote work” becomes aligned with “work” entirely. One day, we’ll all be doing it!

Hi Nick, thanks for the great post!

I’m anyway convinced that the best solution is in the middle - working half from home, half in the office. We all need colleagues, sometimes (well that’s my opinion!)

Being a freelance, I usually work from home, but sometimes it’s really boring and this puts me in an unproductive mood. So I decided to join one of the few coworking offices here in Italy. Weird huh?!

Looking forward for your post about entrepreneurs!

@Nick Cernis -

Thanks for the link ! I’m happy if it can help to share the remote work spirit ;)

@Davide -

I agree with you, I think the solution is a smart balance between remote working and working at office.

Your wonderful comments section design is surpassed only by your lovely manners — and a great post, natch. And the “…people who linked” is a smart resource that I’ve never seen before — a useful tool for your Readers, and a graceful share with your linkers — man, well done Nick. Reading your blog delivers ideas inside ideas…
(but your great design skills at Goburo is making it tough to put off my site’s much-needed face-lift…!)

@Mat:

Yep, there are times when physical presence is required, but does it have to be in an ‘office’?

I have had team meetings at the local (Wi-Fi equipped) coffee shop. My library offers Wi-Fi, and has great workspaces and couches. Lots of print reference too! :) For the type of work I do (nay, many of us knowledge-workers do), physical presence is not a requirement to accomplishing the work. In fact, your physical presence should be considered a ‘bonus’ or premium. And should only be required when there’s absolutely no way for the work to be accomplished otherwise.

I liked your post about this subject. I agree with you wholeheartedly that “business is broken”.

I worked in offices in low level positions and was miserable especially considering all the office politics, profit driven companies/bosses, and “trading the hours from nine to five for cash” (as you put it) working at just putting in my time even when there wasn’t any actual work to do. That’s just what I was taught to do in order to live (though in my opinion that is just surviving - barely).
Seems to me that unfortunately the old fashioned work ethic has been rendered extinct by the 9-5 money for time mentality. I can see where many employers, even though they did hire their employees to do the work, wouldn’t trust them to do it unsupervised. From my experiences even supervised some workers still don’t get the work done without a lot of prodding by the supervisor. It often made me wonder why they were hired. I gave up trying to figure that one out.

Needless to say I do not enjoy the office grind.
I used to buy and read books about working from home but never was able to get anything going. Two years ago I finally turned to working in a non-traditional environment doing manual labor for a small business on a pay per day basis. Although it’s better than office work, I’d still like to start my own home-based business. What’s stopping me? Well, my excuses (lame though they may be) are: 1) I’m lazy, 2) I don’t have a lot of time or energy (I’m physically exhausted at the end of the day and sometimes work more than 10 hours a day), 3) I don’t have lots of skills that translate into work at home opportunities, 4) I’m afraid of failure (with my track record working in MLMs, blogging with affiliate marketing, and doing surveys for money - didn’t earn a cent, actually lost money- this fear isn’t unfounded), and 5) I’m rather disillusioned about even being able to start my own business. With all these excuses it’s easy to “put things off”.

Perhaps that’s more than you all wanted to know about me but I figured I’d give you a little background so you know where I’m coming from.

At any rate, I hope lots of people can benefit from your insights and tips.

Maybe one day I’ll be able to work from home and enjoy life more while still earning a living.

Hi Nick -

Thanks for the walk down memory lane. The only positive thing about my old commute of over an hour was listening to NPR and being “up” on all the latest political news. Funny, I’m still up on all that, but I’m a whole lot saner working from home (for myself).

I would love to see businesses embrace your way of thinking - if not to save the human race, to save the planet.

Great post - yet again!

@Brad Grier -

Of course, meetings does not have to be in an ‘office’. But office is the common place to meet coworkers. If the employer followed “Phase1″, the office environment can be a good place to meet co-workers.
I think the most important thing is : you are free to work remotely when you’ve no one to see.

Another thing, be careful : Working in another place can be cool, but unsecure. I will personnaly not use a public Wifi network to do my business work without a VPN.

Wish more people felt this way. Keep spreading the word!

Fortunately, I do work from home - though I often wish I could run to the office and away from home demands in order to get some work done.

Recently I did some back of the envelope calculations on how much land area would be needed to create about the same amount of ethanol, by volume, as the amount of gasoline we’re currently using, and came up with some numbers that were a bit scary. If switchgrass were used, you’ld need to plant an area a bit smaller than Texas — 146 million acres — to supply that amount of ethanol. If corn were used, you’ld need an area about 480 million acres of land — an area bigger than the state of Alaska and 80 million acres more than the available arable land in the US, to make the same amount of ethanol. In short, there’s no way it’ll work. The links used for the calculation are on my site.

At any rate, I came to a similar conclusion that eliminating commuting was the way to go, or that we need to re-engineer business to make things sustainable.

I am all over this. A few weeks ago I worked out an informal 2 days at home a week deal, and I’m loving it.

So is my wallet :-)

Great post- I am commuting 4 hours RT each day (train) right now, and recently negotiated working remotely on most Fridays… But it’s still a lot of traveling! Something has to change. But I think your line of work matters a lot… I am in consulting and face time is very important. But a lot of knowledge workers could work from home easily.

Hey all, a bit of an update on my situation. After discussing things with my boss, we’ve come to an arrangement that ‘when needed’, working from home is an option.

The org. culture still isn’t on board with this concept yet, but it’s neat to know my boss is.

– Brad