Apparently not, according to recent research carried out on behalf of BT Business and Nortel. It found that nine out of 10 managers did not trust their staff to work from home.

The finding emerged from a YouGov survey of nearly 3,500 employees, almost two-fifths of whom said they were confident they could do a better job remotely. Yet across the UK just now there have been outbreaks of “busy office syndrome” as more people with the option to work where they choose have been drifting back to their offices during the recession.

Why this drift? The answer is very simple: fear. As job insecurity rises, so does what in the US is called “presenteeism,” where employees feel the need, often encouraged by managers, to be seen in the office. The phenomenon is manifest both in the insecurity of managers who may feel more comfortable with more of their team members around them and among employees who want their contribution to be visible, witnessed both by colleagues and supervisors.

The danger is that such regressive behaviour invites the wrong measures where work becomes assessed not by quality but by the width of a shift.

A feature of downturns is that they encourage people to withdraw in to behaviours and practices that have worked in the past. People shrink a little too. If you are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you will know that job security sits on his second tier, classed as a safety need and just a tier up from life’s most basic needs such as food and shelter.

Those who are confident in working from home sit higher in the needs triangle, one reason why they have been found to be more productive. They parcel the kind of work that might be strung out over a whole day in an office, in to focused, productive chunks, free from office distractions.

It would be naive to suggest that distractions do not exist in the home and not everyone can retain the self-discipline to maintain focus. But those same people usually struggle to focus in the office too. Ultimately they must be measured by their results.  

BT now has some 70,000 employees working either all of the time or some of the time from home. Its move to encourage such working has saved the company £500m in building costs. The move has led to a 30 per cent rise in productivity, it says.

Office occupation patterns have changed too in that may staff still come in to the office two or three days a week to ensure they maintain social contact with other colleagues and managers.

The danger is that such productive working developments are abandoned as workplaces become more fearful. The opposite should be happening and managers need to be leading the way since good working systems feed through to the bottom line.

But home-working in the 1990s, when it began to grow informally, was rarely a management led initiative. For much office work it spread through technologies allowing people to download their work from home. Today connections are instantaneous. In its early days people began doing chunks of work at home for their own convenience if they had hands-off managers who trusted them to deliver good work.

The problem is that too many managers, even now, view such work as a kind of privilege and surprisingly few seem trusting enough to allow it. While the YouGov research revealed a question of trust, I think that just as big an issue is the insecurity  among many managers. Experience is an issue too.

A recession demands that managers must learn to manage again and this sometimes means making tough or innovative decisions. Additionally managing people at arm’s length requires the kind of confidence that sits higher on Maslow’s pyramid and that is lacking just now. The last thing we need is a return to micro-management.

To learn more about Richard Donkin, please visit his bio

Working from home in the downturn is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment