THERE ARE A NUMBER OF ‘PET PEEVES’ REGARDING REMOTE WORKING COLLEAGUES
organisations including HSBC, Allianz, Accenture, Centrica, Unilever, Logica and Deutschebank all offer it to some degree. In some instances, the term simply denotes a degree of flexibility around working core hours in the office, but in others it can mean working from home.
WORKING FROM HOME ISN’T FOR EVERYONE AND DEPENDS ON WHAT YOU DO
and data requirements they need to uphold,” says Mawson. The Microsoft survey also revealed that there are a number of ‘pet peeves’ regarding remote- working colleagues. These included ‘not being able to work face-to-face’, ‘difficulty communicating’, and ‘lack of accountability of individual working remotely’.
face to colleagues, contact them instantly, contribute to meetings, access desktops and servers and share information instantly. That said, the very act of being away from the office, with all of its distractions, can often improve performance. This is the opinion of Nick Moody, a tax co-ordinator at Unilever, who works remotely at least once a week due to a long commute. “Whenever I need to dedicate a couple of hours to a complicated task, I try to schedule it on a day when I’m working from
everyone and very much depends on what you do. “There are some jobs, particularly in financial services businesses, that it
recommend remote working as a permanent way of working however, even proponents of the
These ‘peeves’ have been addressed to some extent, by technological advances, such as Microsoft’s Lync software, which incorporates video, audio, instant
The latter isn’t for
home where I have fewer distractions and can really focus my efforts,” he says. Few people would
becomes very difficult to do outside of a constrained office environment, purely because of the regulatory
messaging and desktop sharing. Anyone with a broadband connection and telephone line can theoretically talk face to
concept such as Andrew Mawson. “You don’t want to be at home constantly without any interaction from your team mates – it’s not a great place to be,” he says. “But the nice thing about working two or three days a week at home, is that you’re still experiencing the very rich social soup of the office, while still being able to operate more remotely.”
Types of flexible working
If a company says it offers flexible working it will just mean that there is
Other ways of working
Flexible working doesn’t always affect where you work, it also can refer to the