Real Business

You may already be working at home, running a small business from a home office. Or you may be empowering your staff to work from home more frequently. Or you may be considering setting up a homeworking business.

Wherever you sit, a huge shift is taking place in UK business. Recession and wide-scale redundancies have forced many former employees to become their own employer. Technology now enables people to work from home seamlessly, often improving (rather than damaging) their productivity.

Real Business has covered the homeworking issue in detail over the past few years (in association with Brother) and we’ve brought together our advice and insights into this special guide.

We’d also be interested in your views on how you work from home; have created jobs from home; or indeed when homeworking doesn’t work. Do let us know by posting your comments below.

And don’t forget: you can register for your own free subscription to Britain’s best business management magazine, Real Business, by subscribing online.

Okay, onto the issues.

Why work from home?
First, here are good reasons to let your staff work from home:

• Improves staff loyalty
• Reduces office costs
• Eliminates geographical constraints on finding recruits
• Offers customers a 24/7 service
• Increases likelihood of mothers and fathers returning to work
• Reduces time wasted in meetings
• Accommodates disabled workers
• Cuts carbon emissions

We couldn’t possibly create home jobs…
The law is probably the world’s stuffiest profession. So if a law firm can be built around homeworking, then so can you.

Keystone (formerly Lawyers Direct) is a unique legal practice with no expensive overheads and, therefore, it claims, lower professional fees. The firm retains a small central London office, but rejects the culture of large offices with lots of subservient trainee solicitors. Instead, “our solicitors operate from their own satellite office, our clients’ offices or a combination of the two, accessing central precedents, databases, intranet and other essential tools by the use of cutting edge technology. They know each other well and very often work in teams just like a regular law firm.”

Here’s how they make this radical formula work.

The technology will be too complex, insecure…
Many in business will be concerned about the technology issues when considering working from home.

At PR agency Department 83, where employees are largely made up of women, founder Lucy Handley was “terrified of a security breach.”

With clients such as BT, everyone needed to be sure about data security. “When I started Department 83, homeworking worried me. What if someone lost a laptop with data on it? What if we didn’t back up properly and everything went missing? And if we did back up using a hosted service, how could we be sure the data was secure?”

Her early attempts at getting the technology right weren’t great. For files larger than, say, 5MB, employees still had to pop into the office to pick up print-outs.

Handley moved the entire firm to a hosted service and became evangelical about the system. “Workers download an application to their desktop or laptop and can log in from there. Extrasys uses a keyfob for added security,” she explains. “You input a number and it provides you with a new, unique number. This prevents anyone from stealing your password. Best of all, the system is backed up four times a day.”

Suresh Punjabi, founder of Corporate Communications, advises: “With the right software, you’ll be secure. You’ll need a virtual private network (VPN) that can’t be hacked, strong firewalls and software that encrypts the hard drive. There’s no need to be vulnerable.”

Your people want the flexibility
People have complex lives, juggling family, work and other commitments. By enabling them to set up a home business, you could be securing loyalty and productivity for years to come.

All industries could benefit from homeworking, even more traditional firms. In a major report with Brother a couple of years back, Tom Gorman, founder of print management firm TDG confessed that he’d been sceptical at first. “If I had my way, everyone would be in the office at nine o’clock and they’d leave at five. But that isn’t realistic.”

So he moved cautiously to allow homeworking. Hey presto, productivity increased. Many workers, particularly his female employees with children, appreciated the flexibility. “Just because homeworking isn’t for me doesn’t mean that other people can’t cope with it,” Gorman explained. 

Can my home really be an office?
Yes, it can. Ann and David Cordner started hotel reservation service Infotel in 1989. Today, they have 90,000 hotels on their books and a six to one female to male employee ratio.

And they have a purpose-built office for 50 workers round the back of their house in Spalding. Daughter Kimberly:“The only downside is that there aren’t many cafes. We all used to take an hour for lunch. Now we all take half an hour as there’s nothing to do.” Firms blighted with boozy sales folk, take note!

And they’re not alone in running their business from home.

Which lines of business are most suited to homeworking?

• If your job involves lots of repeat telephone work, then you can probably do much of that work from home. Many travel agents, for example, rely on home workers to fulfil high levels of phone enquiries.
• Service businesses such as PR agents also seem to fare well by relying on home-based workers, often women. The nature of the work (ongoing client maintenance followed by peak bursts of activity) seems to suit a home-based approach.
• Online services. More more online businesses rely on a home-based, virtual model. This keeps head-office costs down and suits workers who like to work irregular hours. A good example is TheCareerBreakSite.co.uk