It may be national working from home day tomorrow, but some of us have been pacing the domestic tread mill for years. Like Salman Rushdie's midnight children, though, kindred voices seem few and far between.
Exact figures are hard to come by, but the very fact that Work Wise UK feels the need to press the issue suggests that the flexible working economy has not taken the giant strides so confidently predicted just a few years ago.
For once, technology is not the scapegoat. There is no shortage of broadband access or mobile Internet services available, providing the inevitable squabbling about who should fund them, the employer or the employee, can be resolved.
Running instant messaging (IM), web collaboration and other presence aware applications over these pipes means remote workers can stay in fairly constant touch with the office, providing they want to, so what is the problem?
According to experts, good, old fashioned human nature is the biggest spanner in the works – on the one side suspicious managers who do not like to relinquish absolute control over their staff; on the other, workers who baulk at the idea of being stuck at home with nothing but a computer for company all day.
Appeasing the clock watching Gauleiter is much easier when there is a clear way to measure actual output rather than the hours put in, not least because childcare commitments mean flexible workers often operate beyond the boundaries of the standard 9-5 working day.
Some contact centres, in the US at least, are even using technology to log every minute of their remote agent's activity (Please be aware that a manager may monitor this call for productivity purposes!). But for the rest of us it is a question of trust: the employer trusts the employee, definitely out of sight and usually out of mind, to get on with the job he or she is paid for and not spend their time sunning themselves in the garden, doing household chores or whooping it up in the nearest bar.
Making sure that the remote worker knows that so much work needs to be completed by such a date and time is the obvious way of putting less strain on that trust, but at the end of day it is still as much about the personal relationship between the remote worker and their immediate superior as anything else.
When employers approach flexible working with a mature attitude that is reciprocated by the employee, all the old lingering prejudices might finally be buried. Until then, the brave new remote working world that so many organisations are currently advocating may never emerge.
