Home working

Managing Home Workers – Manage by Output

We are living through an extraordinary period, having to find our way in uncharted waters. This is particularly true for managers who have suddenly found their employees are now all based at home and they themselves are also working from home. Fortunately some help is at hand. Here at Wisework we have been helping organisations to implement home working for the last 20 years. We have encouraged organisations to implement their flexible working in a planned way and not force…

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Share your experience here and pick up ideas from other managers

This is a resource open to any manager who is faced with managing people now working at home. Whether you have managed home workers for some time or you have suddenly found your employees sent home, we welcome your contribution. Tell us about your experiences, good and bad, pose questions and share ideas about how to cope in the current climate. Peter Thomson and the Wisework Partners will also be sharing their experience of working with many flexible working organisations.

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Homeworking challenges for managers

There’s quite a bit of advice going around for people working from home for the first time. They need to learn how to manage their time, motivate themselves, avoid boredom and get away from the interruptions. Managers also need to learn all this and more. They now have to work out how you communicate with people working at home. This is not just a temporary situation for a week or so and then it’s all back to normal. This is…

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The virus that did us a favour

We were all happily enjoying life, going to work, going on holiday, visiting friends, when all of a sudden the Coronavirus came along. Now we are ‘self isolating’ going into ‘lock-down’ and washing our hands ten times a day. We’ve stopped shaking hands,  we can’t go anywhere in crowds and the supermarkets have run out of loo roll. Stockmarkets are crashing on the assumption that economies are going to grind to a halt. If nobody can go to work any…

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Fathers struggling to work flexibly

A survey of 2,000 working fathers aged between 24 and 40 found that two thirds had asked for a change in their working pattern since the birth of their child. 56% of those that asked to adjust their hours were allowed to do so which means that almost half were refused.  45% of millennial fathers said they had experienced tension from their employers over their wish to balance their work and home priorities. Only 19% of the fathers who requested…

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Are home workers over working?

A recent survey from health insurance company BHSF adds to the concerns about people’s ability to turn off when working at home. 92 percent of the 897 survey respondents said they reply to emails outside of their normal working hours. Of these, 44 percent respond to emails out of hours every day, and 82 percent responded to out of hours emails at least once a week. But it can’t automatically be assumed that this is a bad thing. The act…

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Where are we more productive – Office or Home?

Almost every day we hear of yet another survey that ‘proves’ people are more productive when they are working from home, only to see other surveys that favour the office. It’s worth looking a bit closer at who is sponsoring or running the ‘research’ and how objective it really is. Recently, a survey of 5,500 ‘respondents’ concluded that 66% of professionals think they would be more productive working remotely rather than in a traditional office. Just 7% chose ‘The office…

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Blurring boundaries between home and work

A detailed report, “Working anytime, anywhere: The effects on the world of work” has recently been published jointly by Eurofound and the ILO. It studies home-based and mobile workers in ten European countries and five others. The researchers concluded that the incidence of home/mobile working varies substantially, from 2% to 40% of employees, depending on the country, occupation and sector. They point out the advantages of mobile working, both for individuals and organisations, such as improved productivity and better work-life…

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