The Right Call | The Working at Home Debate

May 1, 2010

Collins-Nakai: We have a lack of both federal and provincial policies on early child care and development. We only have minimal standards for health, safety and staff ratios. If a woman has the option of working at home, it would probably decrease her need for child care and allow her to give better quality care to the child. And so long as she had effective productivity evaluations, providing that type of flexibility would allow a worker with a young family to continue to be productive. It could be of great benefit to the company.

Keeping: More interesting is the request, because it’s easier to grant, that a person work at home, coming into the office only when face-to-face meetings are required. But there are serious considerations on the other side of the coin. Can the kind of work that this person does be well executed at home? How much of the job involves face-to-face meetings, and how much of what you do depends on the relationship amongst the people in the organization? And how do you develop those relationships if somebody is working at home?

These questions have to be asked and answered honestly.

I would expect that, with many jobs, the person does not need to be in the office for the full 35 or 40 hours a week. I can also imagine that with many jobs, it would not be helpful in the long run to have somebody working at home nearly all of the time. I’ve seen examples of what happens when someone works at home – and we’re talking about a team member, not a consultant. The distance between the employee working at home and the rest of the staff grows, to the point when the day comes when the line has to be drawn in the sand because the arrangement isn’t working very well.

Chapman: It’s a major attitudinal challenge for some employers in a global, interdependent, high productivity, knowledge-based economy which operates on a 24/7 basis, and where anything that can be digitized can be outsourced. If people are slow to respond to this, they will suffer the consequences. There’s not a chance that they will be able to survive and compete without having a great deal of adaptability. It’s not a matter of tolerance or accommodation; it’s a matter of adaptability to the more integrated life-affirming needs of the workforce. More and more, the workers, in a buyer’s market, will be in the driver’s seat.

Collins-Nakai: Increasingly, in other countries, employers are providing on-site, high-quality developmental care in order to retain their employees. The foremost employers in the world are experimenting with a variety of means to retain employees. Some provide on-site daycare, some allow flex hours and some are allowing flexible vacations, allowing employees to take vacations as they feel they need them.

This has not become the mechanism of choice for Canadian employers. Yet. Our productivity rates are relatively low and have not been going up at the rate seen in other countries. We will have huge problems in the future unless we can find ways to encourage, not just the retention of employees, but making them happier.

Keeping: There are ethics and principles involved. We ought to be doing what we can to allow people to live their lives the way they want to, but we also have to be realistic about what the real demands of the job are.

The request to work at home could have a positive effect on the bottom line – you wouldn’t have to rent as much space, for one thing. With respect to on-site daycare, it can depend on how much of the cost employees will pick up.

One of the most important points to make is that the question flows from an increased appreciation for human rights. People have to be willing to deal with complexity in a way that was not required in the past. The old nine-to-five model is not going to work anymore because you will have people with all sorts of special needs.

Chapman: The technology is there now. Facilities like Skype and video-conferencing utilities are cutting down on travel and still allowing people to have face-to-face contact. The reliability of these technologies is improving, the costs are coming down and they are easier and easier to use.

Government is by far the slowest in adapting to this new world.

Collins-Nakai: Companies that are run by young people have a very different attitude to worker management. They are much more liberal in terms of employees checking in; they base their evaluation much more on output or outcomes, rather than on hours spent at a desk.

Employers should talk to some of the cutting-edge human resources research people and look at the documentation in terms of absenteeism and productivity of employees who are able to work from home. Managers will find that there is a significant advantage to it. They should talk to their companies about ways to implement more flexible work hours or work from home policies.

THE FINAL WORD
It’s interesting that Dr. Collins-Nakai approached the question from a child-centred perspective. In the long run, nothing is more important. But, in the short to medium term, as all of our commentators have underlined, creating a more flexible, more employee-centred workplace can be a good business decision with a positive impact on the bottom line. The fact that you’re also acting in an ethical manner is a bonus.