Flexible Working: more than home working

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I read an interesting supplement in The Sunday Times today entitled "Business Agility" that was sponsored by PC World. Quite a bit of the content concurred with (and used the same research) as a lof of our UK work on Flexible Working and the New World of Work (NWOW) with folks like Peter Thomson of The Future Work Forum quoted. One thing didn't sit too easy with me though and that was the over-riding notion that they positioned flexible working as working from home (WFH) is one part of the story - I had a pretty flexible working week last week that took in the following venues

  • Starbucks
  • A partner office in Chiswick
  • The London Tube
  • My brothers office in Manchester
  • oh, and my home

It does irk me a bit that this correlation often gets made - WFH is only part of the picture.
The NWOW is as much about what you do as where you do it though. Technology is going to have a profound impact on the way we get stuff done over the next few years and software thankfully will move away from being a long list of features that a user has to accommodate towards accommodating (and anticipating) they way they work. It needs to - according to IDC, a typical information worker in North America has seen the daily volume of business-related email increase by a factor of ten since 1997. I can vouch for that!

Anyway...I'll be back with more on the NWOW soon...off to do some more email for now :)