Increased costs for all leads to more home working?

Been a while since I have written one of these but a lot has been going on recently so it’s time to write some of it up!

As anyone who lives in the UK and has to drive to work knows fuel duty and VAT both went up recently pushing fuel prices to triple what they were in 1990.  Accompanying that are the calls for static salaries, salary reductions or even redundancies within companies who are trying all they can to cut costs.

Cost cutting tends to focus on the “big numbers” and office spends are a big number for any organisation with any real return on investment.

From both the employer and the employee, therefore, “home working” becomes an attractive option to save money in both office and travel costs. Reduction in travel costs for the employee and office space for the employer seems attractive but masks the true cost of someone working from their home environment and the implications for both the employee and employer.

From an IT perspective there are further costs and considerations which need to be addressed in a move towards home working.

In no particular order these could be:

• Home equipment - what are these people actually going to use? If they are coming into the office and hot desking then likely these will be laptops. You may also wish to use docking stations and screens for home use. This adds up quickly to become multiple times more expensive than a normal desktop.
• Security - a bit like the above. How are you going to ensure the security of your network? What about computer theft from the home and consequent data loss?
• Home internet connections - how are these going to be provisioned? There are a lot of options here depending on your set-up but lets assume for now we are talking about an ADSL line. Are they going to be supplied by the company and therefore maintained by the company or are you going to run it all through expenses?
• Infrastructure - All these people now working from home are going to place demands on the existing firewalls which might not be able to handle the multiple VPN sessions or the increased throughput. Use of back office applications that are needed throughout the organisation may suffer in performance and thus decrease productivity. Investment in technology to bring LAN-like connectivity to the home workers is needed which costs money and resources to run them.
• Telephony - How is your organisation going to communicate? Are you replacing the cost of an office with the cost of having everyone travel to meetings and claiming it all back on expenses? Video conferencing and VoIP are good technologies but can put stress on existing networks and, again, require resources to implement and manage them.
• Hot desks and meeting rooms - Ultimately you are going to have people coming into the office for meetings. When in the office they are going to use hot desks and meeting rooms; does the organisation have enough of either?
• Remote workers - you might already have a set of these but remember they are often coming back into the office or making allowances for the things they cant do remotely. They NEED to be out of the office (Sales people for instance) and their productivity would decrease further if there access methods were under performing due to increase use from home workers.
• Training - All this new technology that everyone is going to have to use to do their jobs (such as VPNs and Citrix) are your staff going to know how to use it or are they going to require training?

When a CEO or CFO starts talking about home working I can’t help but think of the infrastructure upgrades that are neccessary to facilitate this change. Failure in IT to provide a similar service to that experienced in an office environment could easily lead to a loss in productivity and confidence with the IT department. Uptime and redundancy within the infrastructure also costs money and a higher level of technical skill to maintain. Outsourcing is a option to overcome so of these scale issues but that similarly pushes costs up.

So; does people working home actually save an organisation money? Probably not and it really shouldn’t be your primary business driver for change.