The Workplace: An office at home can work
03.02.05 (6:00 am)
[url=http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/se... Thomas Fuller&sort=swishrank]By Thomas Fuller[/url] International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, March 2, 2005

[b]When Jane Crossley looks out of her office window, she sees the pastures and rolling hills of the Welsh countryside. Sometimes when she needs a break from e-mail messages and telephone calls, she goes horseback riding on a black-coated Friesian named Jet. Other times she does her shopping in a nearby village.[/b]

Crossley's office is, in fact, part of her home, a 19th-century Georgian farmhouse. Enjoying the bucolic setting and spending more time with her family are the upsides of working at home, she said.

The downside is that when her husband returns from work, he sometimes wonders out loud why, since she has been at home all day, she hasn't done the dishes and cleaned the house.

Crossley works for Jaywing, a company with 60 employees scattered around England and Wales. All of them work from home except for Claire Wilby, the receptionist in the company's office in Wakefield, in north-central England, a loftlike place with a few leather couches and a refrigerator filled with beer.

Jaywing is a profitable, privately held company that specializes in database analysis. It is also a good example, the staff say, of the delights, efficiencies and challenges of working at home.

Last week in this column, I wrote about BT and its work-at-home program, a large-scale effort by a long-established company to allow 100,000 employees to work more flexible hours. Jaywing, by contrast, is a smaller experiment, a start-up company with a very particular philosophy.

Martin Boddy, a founder of Jaywing, says creating the company was a sort of rebellion against the office culture he experienced as a marketing manager early in his career.

He used to take the 6:30 train every weekday morning to London and return before 8 p.m. He knew precisely where to stand on the platform to position himself in front of the train doors. He has vowed never to commute again, never to wear a tie and never to have a formal evaluation system for his employees.

"Rather than this control culture, suddenly people are given responsibility where they have to sort everything out themselves," Boddy said.

He is not concerned about the working hours of his employees, he said, as long as clients are kept happy.

Boddy works from a converted stable in a village outside of York, in northern England.

He often spends afternoons with his four children and works at night once they've gone to bed.

Jan Gardner, a Jaywing staff member who works from an old stone house in northern England, says there have been an average of about six or seven births a year among the company's employees, a significant spurt of fertility for such a small company.

"It's a proper baby-making machine," she said.

In speaking to Jaywing employees I wondered what would happen if more people adopted their work-at-home lifestyle.

Families would spend more time together. Air quality would presumably be better with fewer people driving to work.

But would mass transit systems survive the fall in revenue?

Would fewer commuters mean a sharp decline in newspaper readership?

Would cities hollow out?

The questions are only academic today, because the percentage of people in the developed world who have work-at-home jobs is still in the single digits.

There are also signs that the business world is not ready for a massive switch to home working.

How does a bank manager assess the value of a company if he or she can't see it? There is no office with rows of cubicles, no large neon sign on the street.

Boddy says the lack of physical presence initially perplexed his bankers and gave them pause when he sought a loan.

"It's difficult to see what the business is," Boddy said. "You can't touch or feel it. It exists in people's homes."

The bank eventually gave him a loan, he said, mainly because the books look good at Jaywing: The company had revenue of about £5 million, or $9.6 million, and profit of £1 million last year, a healthy result after just six years in operation.



Thomas Fuller can be reached at fuller@iht.com


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