Working from Home....the reality!


I set up Perfect Marketing People (PMP) 11 years ago - hard to believe it's that long but the anniversary was last week and Mr PMP reminded me and I had a nice card from the lovely people at  Funding Circle.  Completely irrelevant to me but hey, at least they remembered. (Ha).

Anyway, I'm also observing the news on a daily basis and one of the ramifications of the COVID-19 virus seems to be that an increasing number of businesses are recommending that people work from home wherever possible. 

Now I'm certain that for a lot of people, this will be like Christmas coming early.  Big whoop, no need to get on the train, working in your pyjamas, no-one peering over your shoulder to see what you're bidding for on E-bay etc.   And I think for a short period, working from home is absolutely brilliant so if your employer is one of the few who is happy to allow you to work remotely for the foreseeable, then go for it.

However, longer term I'd suggest caution.  I think the ideal is probably 2 days a week working from home.  There are clearly many advantages of not heading to an office on a daily basis, not least, the reduced chances of picking up germs.

I'd say my own productivity in the last 11 years has been far higher than when I've been in an office. Possibly because I've chosen not to expand and therefore don't have to manage people and have meetings all day long. But equally, it's because I do 'power-working' - I have very intense phases of work, usually between 6am and 10am where I get a huge amount done.  Then I can take a bit of time off to walk the imaginary dog (Thomas), do exercise, read a book, have a bath.   As a recruiter, there are lots of calls over lunchtime and then I do another intense session in the afternoon, usually 2pm to 6.30pm before switching off.  It works for me. I'm very disciplined. I take what I do pretty seriously and the bottom line is that if I'm not working, I'm not making any money.  My chimp makes sure I put the hours in.

An ex-colleague, let's call her Sarah.  She couldn't make it work for her.   The pull of household chores, the procrastination, the lure of Twitter.  After a year, she went back into full time employment in an office.  So if you're thinking about working remotely as a 'thing', you need to be sure you have the right character for it.

Of course, there is a difference between working remotely as an 'employee' of a business and being self-employed but the principles of being disciplined still apply and in fact, video conferences become a daily part of life so you can't really get away with the pyjamas.

I do know a large number of big corporates who are making remote working work for their (marketing) employees.  They are trusting and seeing for themselves that a happy worker is a productive worker.  If productivity falls or if you're not meeting your targets you'll be pulled up on it but I've not seen many cases of that. It seems that the trust that an employer gives an employee is returned with an increased level of effective and efficient work production. In agencies, remote working is seen on a much lesser scale, due in part to the need for a creative buzz and culture required for successful advertising and creative ideas to come to fruition.  Also the constant client servicing requirements make it pretty difficult for someone to be working remotely all of the time.     But a day a week or fortnight seems to be reasonably accessible and is becoming increasingly so.

Working remotely all the time can make you go mad.  So you do need to leave the house at least once a day.  Don't end up working too hard.  Don't just talk to yourself (or the imaginary dog), remember to get dressed.   Office banter, teamwork and socialising is under-rated so the remote worker needs to make up for this in other ways.  As ever, balance in all things so be careful what you wish for.  A couple of days working from home is ideal, any more than that and you need to ensure you have strong boundaries and rules in place to ensure that your mental health doesn't suffer and you become a workaholic.    I make sure I have a couple of days a week in Manchester or Leeds and it's nice to see that so many agencies actually have real dogs.  Maybe one day I'll bite that particular bullet.