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It works for me
I have worked from home for the last two and a half years. I'm lucky in as much as I am self motivated and do not miss working with colleagues. I don't suffer the daily commute getting stressed in traffic jams.
I have flexible working arrangements, I do the daily school run and often make work phone calls out of hours to new clients. In school holidays my son (9) can play with his friends around his house rather than going to a child minder.
It works very well for me, the only problem being knowing when to stop as work is always there and there is no getting away from it.
Me too
I'm like Sally and benefit from the flexibility of homeworking to spend maximum time with my family. I've just taken on my first employee and, after her initial training, I intend to put things in place for her to work from her home too.
My local businesslink tell me that they can help with the risk assessments for homeworking.
Proper planning needed
I too am sold on the concept, my main fee earner works from home and now only visits the office maybe once every 2 months, similarly I can log in from home or anywhere else and work with little loss in effeciency and with a a significant reduction in carbon shoe size.
A potential problem arises in communicating between colleagues, ie the sort of info flow that takes place when you overhear another conversation or shout a question across the room. We use Skype for messaging & calls and this has been great but unless you have a central email facility and client data (eg on a server or good online facility) trying to keep each other and clients updated effeciently can be a problem.
We have a client with 10 employees, 8 of which work remotely most of the time, they have no central server and rely on Google email and Google docs (but only for some documents) and are vanishing into a mist of emails and several versions of the same documents, between themselves & clients. This has come about because 2 years ago there were 4 of them and with rapid growth there was no planning or enhanced facilities to cope.
Trust
I don't work from home - I work from the house next door which was bought & converted to offices, and expanded since, so my daily commute is a walk of about 20 yards. We do have a mixture of home working & office based working. It's really left to the employee how they want to work, and we find that (ignoring snow etc) most tend to do a couple of days at home, but like to come into the office 2 or 3 days a week, so it works well for us.
Some may think that having totally flexible hours for all staff, and allowing home working, we are risking being taken advantage of, but our experience has always been that if you treat staff as trustworthy adult professional staff, they usually behave as such.