Latest Interviews
Tony Corbin – ‘Teleworking For The Future’.
Posted: Saturday 28th Jun 2008
Teleworking: the way of the future? Perhaps. After all, in ten years’ time, we might all be wearing silver tracksuits and flying to work on atomic mopeds, so not having to go to the office to work once in a while should be possible. Certainly, teleworking already has a large number of cheerleaders.
One such fan is eHampshire’s Tony Corbin, who sung its praises at our last Wired Wessex networking event on 27th June. But let him introduce himself to you. “I’m the project manager for MATiSSE (Mobile And Teleworking Initiative for a Smarter South East) which is a regional development agency backed initiative that encourages businesses – and employees – to reconsider the way they work. For sustainability, well-being and efficiency reasons we want to move businesses away from a rigid 9-5 office based regime to a much more flexible and environmentally sympathetic way of working and commuting.”
He certainly knows of what he speaks. “I’ve worked in the IT industry for more years than I care to mention, notably at what used to be called Digital Equipment, which has now been subsumed by first of all Compaq and then HP. My work was largely in the product and marketing operations area, but in the last few years in the Learning and Training side of the business.”
Care to run us through your presentation? “Well, the aim of my presentation to the Wired Wessex network was to raise some awareness, where it was necessary. And, I guess, to provoke some reaction by making one or two perhaps slightly provocative statements about some of the ways that businesses still go about things. They are precluding opportunities, such as a wider recruitment net, simply because they’re still using 20th century office practice models. I hope that I not only informed the audience but challenged their thinking and even entertained them in a small way too. It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening with an interesting variety of questions both during and after the session.”
Tony sees teleworking as part of major changes we now all face. “It will be very different to its very slow emergence in the past over the next ten years. What’s changed are headline statements such as oil prices at $140 a barrel, petrol at £1.20 a litre – and rising – and other factors where companies are recognising that they do have to put their socially responsible hat on, whether they are large or small. From the recruitment, retention and attraction perspective, a lot of people are relatively low paid. We’ve seen and heard recently in our work of people spending 20 or even 25% of their wage on the commute. Factors like this really are going to see a wholesale major step change in behaviour
Indeed, Tony feels bold about the future. “I will predict that by the year 2020, what has been a vision for smart working will have actually become the default behaviour. We will see the majority of companies working that way and offering those forms of contracts to their staff, and we all know that the skills shortage will become even greater within the next 10-20 years. Then , there’s the fact that coming into the workplace are Generation Y people, who’ve actually been brought up with the Internet. They are not going to choose to work for a company that doesn’t give them the freedom to use enabling technology. There’s no doubt in my mind that things have to change.”
But what would happen if oil goes down in price or hydrogen fuel cells – for example – lower the cost of travel again? “Smarter Working is not a fad or a fashion. I think it is something that is here to stay. Although This is a generational thing and we will see this as the 21st century way of working. I think we also have to look beyond the UK, because these are trends that are emerging in all of the major economies, not least those that are emerging in the Far East. Those organisations that don’t seize the opportunity are going to very much risk being left behind.”
Any last words? “My message to everybody is to just pause and think, from a common sense perspective about the traditional working model,. There’s no common sense in being stuck in a traffic queue when you could be productive, or at home with the family, or using PDA technology or any other forms of web or video conferencing technology. There are also things like work-life balance and well-being and although the stress factors of the modern commute are well known, they are not always acted upon. With a better work-life balance you’ll end up with both employee and employer benefiting from the increased productivity, less absence at work and a much better lifestyle.”
And we’d all be much happier as a result.