Hi All,

I've been tasked with researching Homeworking as a future strategy. However, I have no experience of any homeworking.

Does anyone have any experiences that they could share?

What difficulties did you face? How did you get round them?

Any help that you could provide gratefully received.

Luke

Great question.

The biggest difficulties are people-based: working from home is perceived by some as an 'easy option' and relies heavily on the discipline of those involved. It also involves trust and effort needs to be made to ensure that those who are working from home don't end up 'distanced' from the day-to-day operations.

Also, assuming technological barriers can be overcome (and there's no reason that this shouldn't be the case) there are bureaucratic issues to consider: it's a change in the way things work and many larger corporates just aren't flexible enough to make the changes necessary to make home-working feasible.

In smaller companies it is far more feasible as there isn't normally the 'red-tape overhead' that there is in larger companies.

On the plus side: it's perceived by most as a perk and so to be granted the ability to work from home creates a good feeling, and it's accommodating of those whose personal circumstances might not fit into the 'conventional' mould, such as parents of young children, people who live a long way from the office, 'road warriors' who don't need to work from a fixed location, and so on.

Thanks John.

Great points and just what I was thinking. We sit as a medium sized enterprise, so I'm sure that we wouldn't have too many difficulties if we decided to have this as an offering.

From a technology point of view I've seen many different solutions recently, but all of them bring me back to the question of day to day management.

The difficult question in my mind is how to maintain control in a live environment and ensure that the undoubtedly lower overheads this solution brings aren't eaten into by inefficiencies driven by the distance management.

There are many agents who would embrace the additional responsibility this brings and would have the discipline to make it work. But how to account for and manage those who don't?

Hi,

My department has just run a trial for homeworking. Some people found it a positive as it allowed them to accommodate their home situations better e.g picking up children sooner from school/childminders. They also found it less distracting to work at home, there are no constant interruptions by questions etc. Others found it a little lonely at home all day and it can be difficult to communicate with colleagues in the office if advice or assistance is required.
My suggestion is to conduct a small pilot of staff homeworking to iron out any potential problems early.

If you want to do a trial of homeworking, we can offer a fully hosted solution with all the management tools that you need.

Thanks Emma & Paul,

A trial is definitely the way to go. Emma, how did your team manage the agents? Did you have any difficulties ensuring productivity?

The nature of our call centre is that you can set priorities to each agent to receive incoming calls. Each agent is normally set at the same priority to ensure calls are distibuted evenly. Our agents were not able to take any paper based work home due to data protection so to ensure that they still met productivity targets with calls only we increased their priority to receive calls. It has proved a positive for some agents as they have increased their daily productivity this way by not needing to concentrate on other work, just calls.
Of course I think it depends what sort of call centre you are?