Working from home

Working from home has been a topic of discussion from quite sometime specially when Yahoo decided to refrain their employees from working from home. Many companies took that opportunity to apply same kind of policies even though they didn’t had issues Yahoo had.

After the news that Yahoo has refrained their employees from working from home, many companies took the opportunity to tell their employees the same. There were certain specific problems which Yahoo was facing which weren’t the same with these companies yet, they took this opportunity to put bounds on their employees as they had such a good example to refer to.

During a conversation with Christian Heilman from Mozilla in a conference i came to know that most of the employee including him works remotely which gives them flexibility in terms of workspace, priorities etc. This also gives Mozilla, an opportunity to have employees all around the globe. And as soon as they have enough employees in a city and if all of them feels that they certainly need a place to hangout(work), they get a office space and set it up accordingly. I am sure there are many more companies who are in this kind of practice. On the top of my mind i can think of 37signals as well who, has over 70% employees working remotely. They in fact love so much working remotely that they have published a book about it. This is what they have to say about it

Over 70% of our employees work remotely. They work out of homes, coffee shops, and co-working spaces. They play music, garden, and spend time with their families.

Now on the other side, i am really appalled by most of the IT companies, specially in India where “you have to be in office by this time”(everyday mind it) behavior is quite common. I live in Bangalore and go to office everyday(due to obvious reasons), which wash out at least 3+ hours, plus amount of pollution intake, tiredness(frustration) i get etc. This and all of it, when my office is around 10 km and my route doesn’t have much heavy traffic. Its not reasonable at all that, this takes so much of time out of your life which, could have been invested more creatively.

How good it could be if we sometimes can work from our native(which is 2000 km far from here), for which every year we have to exhaust all our leaves, which instead could be used to travel somewhere else ? Or how good it could be if sometimes i can go and sit around a cafe at some nice random location and work from there ?

One of the reason modern day companies who are working in an Agile environment give is, Agile requires daily standup, pair programming etc. I don’t think that could be more valuable then the benefits companies will get by giving the freedom to an employee to choose how, when and where they want to work. 37signals is the company who created top software BaseCamp used in Agile world and they themselves are proposer of Agile. There is this great article describing the mindset shift which these companies should take in order to be more flexible and being Agile at the same time.

Combining working remotely with Agile can create a so much better environment for everyone to be creative, effective and potentially much better employee/employer relationship. I just wish all of these companies, their HR’s instead of bringing in more processes could learn something and be more employee friendly to achieve the productivity they are looking for.