May 2007 – Better ways of working

There was something niggling about working from home last Friday. I would have been doing so anyway but an organisation called Work Wise UK had declared that this was National Work From Home Day.

Sooner or later every day in the calendar will be stuffed with competing promotional designations. Once it was only the Church and the greetings card industry that felt emboldened enough to declare a special day for mums, dads or saints.

Now everyone is doing it. If it’s not Red Nose Day then it’s Bring Your Daughters to Work Day. Should you be thinking about introducing your own day, there are just two rules. The first is to make sure that all the words are capitalised for added importance. The second is to circulate your day throughout the public relations sector that is desperate for any kind of promotional hook on a slow news day.

Rule two had worked well for Work Wise. I had five separate emails from various outfits all keen to clamber on to the bandwagon. The more I received, the more I became determined to do anything but work from home. I went to the gym, walked the dog, played tennis with my son, chatted with friends and thought I had just about managed to get through the day without working.

Then I looked back and somehow I had written a couple of articles. The work had filtered itself in to the day, almost unconsciously. That’s the best thing about working from home on the good days. Work just happens.

But is it right to be evangelical about home working? Work Wise wants to see the number of people working from home rise from just over 3m, some 11 per cent of the workforce in 2005 to 14m, about half the workforce in the next five years.

The benefits, it argues, are better productivity, big savings in transport costs, less need for office space and no time wasted in getting to work.

The downside is that away from the office you may cease to be noticed. An opportunity might crop up and you’re not there. Then there’s the worry that you might be perceived as a slacker since the term “working from home” is still interpreted by some as a euphemism for skiving. The thing is that anyone who has worked from home knows how easy it can be to fit other things around the paid work.

Employees, however, will always face these dilemmas. When you’re self-employed the rules change. You don’t work, you don’t earn; it’s that simple. The really clever thing is to find ways of making a living from the things you enjoy.

I thought I was pretty good at this until I met a GP at Lord’s on Saturday who was getting paid to sit in one of the best seats in the ground as medical cover for the West Indies team. The only occupational down side, as far as I could see, was that he couldn’t drink while on duty.

It was a far cry from a Henley Management College lecture in London last week given by Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology and health at Lancaster University Management School.

Prof Cooper spends much of his time immersed in the dark side of work, writing and lecturing extensively on workplace stress. Sadly his stories of companies struggling to deal with long hours of working seem only too familiar.

A third of all new health cases are related to stress at work according to the Health and Safety Executive and every new case equates to the loss of six working weeks. Stress at work is a big problem but too few companies are willing to tackle the causes, choosing instead to count the ever increasing costs. Stress-related compensation claims against employers in the UK today are running at about £250,000 a case on average, says Prof Cooper.

He estimates that there are something between 35,000 and 40,000 published studies on stress around the world. Yet, for all this work, people and companies are failing to handle the problem, often through a lack of understanding about the causes and symptoms. As Prof Carey pointed out, not all stress is caused by increased workloads. It can just as easily result from having too little work if people do not understand what is expected in a job.

Prof Carey said that role ambiguity, poor working relationships and poor management communications were strong causes of workplace stress. “We make a big mistake in the way we manage human beings. We try to manage them by fault-finding and rarely tell them they’re doing a good job and this causes people to feel they are not valued,” he said.

None of this has anything to do with the length of time people spend in an office. One day last week I spent the morning at the Purcell School of Music based in Bushey, Hertfordshire, watching Sir Simon Rattle, chief conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker, first rehearse then conduct the senior school orchestra, playing parts of Brahms’ second symphony.

The hour-long rehearsal was a far more intensive work session than anything you are likely to find in the average office. But how many employees have their boss’s undivided attention for an hour, engaging face-to-face with constant guidance and direction?

While some of the advice was technical much of it was about the way he wanted people to play. These were extremely talented young musician who knew the piece well. They needed help, nevertheless, with the interpretation in order to strike the right balance between technical mastery, their individual contributions to the overall sound, and the passion that must be invested to ensure that the composition is delivered with feeling.

Here was an artist painting music with people. When you can say that about office management? In a typical interruption he told the orchestra: “I don't get the feeling that means anything apart from a crochet and F-sharp major. You have to make it mean something.”

In what was perhaps his most telling piece of advice, Sir Simon quoted Brahms who once advised his own students to practice “one hour a day less and read one more good book.”

But how many companies advise their employees to shorten their hours? Maybe we should have more days in the calendar to do things differently. Today, for example, is Buddha’s birthday so it would be entirely appropriate to sit at home meditating. Tell your bosses, they’re sure to understand.

See also this column: Home working