Home sweet home office?
Intriguing questions about working from home have been raised in a couple of recent blogs.
Wednesday, Sun Microsystems employee Marion Vermazen asked whether Sun's flexible worksite program, iWork, makes sense. "We get feedback all the time that Sun's policy about employee work environment choice is a big incentive for people to come to Sun and stay at Sun. But there are still managers at Sun who believe that their people need to come into the office every day," Vermazen wrote. "Are they wrong or are the people who push for choice naïve in thinking that innovation and collaboration can still thrive when workers are geographically distributed?"
Part of what makes Vermazen's perspective interesting is her role at Sun: she coordinates information technology for the iWork program. According to Vermazen, attitude may matter more than geography when it comes to working effectively with others. "??what is perhaps most important is the desire to be connected, to build trust, and to be transparent," she wrote. "It really doesn't matter if your co-worker is in the office next to you or half way around the globe. If you don't value and seek out others to connect with, to have conversations with and to build relationships with you aren't going to build an effective, creative team."
Figuring out how best to set up remote work situations has a certain urgency these days, because a number of firms in the tech industry are giving more employees flexibility in the way they do their jobs.
In the wake of Vermazen's posting, Stephen O'Grady of analyst firm RedMonk asked on his blog whether the rise in working from home will change demographic patterns: "??is there the possibility for a slight reversal of the the Industrial Revolution pattern of 'move to the city?'"
O'Grady argues that some portion of the population, given the choice, would move away from cities. "I think the effects will be interesting to watch over the next several years, as a slight reduction in urban population density could have a profound, but positive, effect on both urban and rural cities and towns."
