With the last few weeks' snow and ice I have had to work from home for a few days. Not because I could get out of my road, but because the trains were not running due to the fact that the trains were electric and used a third rail to pick up the electricity which iced up and hence stopped the trains. Perhaps they should bring back steam trains. We never had these problems when steam was king !
However, I digress. As I was saying – I have been working from home for a few days. What I found was that I could do as much at home as I could in the office. I could log onto the company Intranet (using VPN). I could access all of the company servers. I could communicate with other members of the team using Microsoft's Office Communicator and could use web cams to hold video conferences. So it turned out that I could do everything I could at home that I could do in the office. With my laptop on my lap (where else ?) I could be as effective at home as I was in the office. One drawback I noticed is that I missed the camaraderie of my fellow workers – you could not just turn around to someone and have a chat to them. The converse of this is that other people could not just up to your desk and start chatting to you. So I found that I actually got far more work done as I could start something and not get interrupted until I had finished it. So there are pros and cons of working remotely. However, there is still a legacy problem. That is that managers and customers are more comfortable when they can see "bums on seats" rather than when people work remotely. That is probably the largest problem to people working remotely in the future. So the technology is there to allow people to work remotely, but people's attitudes to remote working still exist and will, in my opinion, prevent it happening on a large scale in the near future.