A recent study shows that employees working from home are likely to be more productive

ONE IN five Irish workers feels the responsibility of caring for a pet impacts on their working hours.

Whether it’s a morning out of the office taking the hamster to the vet, 30 minutes walking Lassie instead of finishing that presentation or getting kitty to a cattery while you attend a conference, 20 per cent of us class a pet as a “caring responsibility” that interferes with our work.

Throw in children and elderly relatives and it’s a wonder we get a tap done. In fact some 50 per cent of us say that the responsibility of caring for pooches, the chislers and Nana clashes with our working hours.

Responsible for these factoids is Microsoft. Completing a pan-European survey on flexible working, the company says its findings show that Irish workers would be less conflicted about work-life balance and Irish businesses more competitive if we all just worked a bit differently.

While Microsoft’s survey sample for Ireland is undeniably small (100 office workers from various sectors), and the study was no doubt commissioned as a hook for it to talk about its flexible working software, the findings will certainly ring a bell.

How many of us have come under pressure from a partner, friend or relative not to work late?

About half of us according to the survey, and with 80 per cent of people surveyed working some overtime every week; it’s no surprise that working hours can be a flashpoint for many households.

Despite such caring responsibilities, almost 40 per cent of Irish employees surveyed felt they would be more productive working from home – and when you look at how distracting a day in the office can be, it’s no surprise.

When you cut out the time it takes to get ready to go there (shirt ironing, hair-drying, make-up), the commute, the morning canteen coffee with your favourite office gossip, attending meetings you don’t need to be at, answering e-mails from the person sitting next to you and the return commute, it seems with the advent of technology that enables us to work from anywhere, the office, where we used to have to go to plug in, is no longer fit for purpose.

“Work is what you do and not a place you go,” says Jeremy Showalter, information worker business manager at Microsoft Ireland. “You could be at home, in a coffee shop or at a customer site and that’s an equal kind of place to be in terms of work. Work from there has to be accepted as an equal contribution.”

Launching its white paper, the New World of Work last week, Microsoft says our future won’t be based around “desks and old-fashioned landline phones” but around “workers who are contactable by voice, e-mail, instant messenger or video conference from a smart phone, tablet, laptop or the nearest available PC.”

“I would hate to limit the thought process that it’s about facilitating working from home because it’s much bigger than that,” says Martin Cullen, sales director at Microsoft Ireland.

“The ability to be connected wherever you are is really what it’s all about.”

But while the technology that enables us to work more flexibly from home, a client site, an airport lounge or even during the interval at the kids’ school play has never been better, HR departments and our colleagues are still stuck in the old world of work.

According to Microsoft’s survey, only half of Irish office workers trust their colleagues to be productive when working flexibly or away from the office.

It’s no wonder then that many working away feel compelled to shoot out a showy opening salvo team e-mail at 8am and a parting shot at 6pm to defend against suspicions of slacking off.

With the advent of cloud computing, where applications and data are hosted centrally and are available to workers from anywhere and on any device, the shiny buildings to which we drive every day to earn a crust may just become obsolete.

We no longer need to be in the same place to talk, meet or collaborate on documents. In fact, by equipping sales and marketing employees at its Sandyford campus to work more flexibly, Microsoft Ireland says it has made savings.

“We’ve been able to consolidate about 35 per cent of the physical space that we occupy,” says Martin Cullen. “That’s a direct saving back to the PL of the business and it effectively funded the cost of our re-fit.”

But Microsoft says that in this new world of work, both managers and staff will need to adapt. In an environment where constant contact in the office is no longer the norm, the key skill for managers is not supervision but the “setting of goals and expectations”.

For Derek Mizak, head of IT at Irish engineering company Mercury Engineering whose engineers work from multiple locations, a deadline is a deadline and you don’t have to work from the office to reach it.

“In our organisation, discipline is assumed. Everybody has things to do and they need to be done on time. There is no need for close supervision, you have either completed what you are meant to do or not. There’s no excuse.”

But IT policies will need to change too. With almost half of those surveyed using a personally owned laptop or mobile device for e-mail access and almost one in three using a personal laptop at work, the IT crowd have some catching up to do.

Viewing and sharing work documents on personal devices, those same devices that come to the pub with us for after work drinks, means that salary spreadsheets or customer data can easily fall into the wrong hands.

But while an ESRI survey of 5,000 workers published last month concurs with Microsoft that those working from home are likely to be more productive – the ESRI found that more than a quarter of employees working from home worked 45 hours a week compared to just 15 per cent of all employees – it also found that working from home increased rather than appeased work-life conflict and pressure.

Overall, working from home reduced employee wellbeing with higher work-life conflict and pressure. It “may be seen more as a form of work intensification than as an arrangement for promoting work-life balance”, the report said.

“Spillover” may be the reason working from home has a negative impact on work-life balance.

“The technology which allows you to work from home allows you to work in the evenings and people don’t have space between work and home,” the report’s author Dr Frances McGinnity has said.

So next time you think someone working from home is on the doss, think again – and if you’ve asked your boss to do likewise, be careful what you wish for.