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Published on: 1/23/2001
Last Visited: 6/15/2001
If you work from home , the potential difficulty is that you keep working and working and working , says Carey Cooper , a professor of organizational psychology at Britain's Manchester Institute of Science and Technology.
Prof. Cooper , an American who has lived in Britain for 30 years , backs the idea of flexible working arrangements.But because the idea is new , he warns that there are potential pitfalls that employers and employees have to recognize and try to avoid.
The theory is simple.Instead of being bound to a desk at an office in a central location , technology now permits many service employees to work , at least part of the time , from home.
Flexible work arrangements mean that the employer trusts you and that you idiosyncratically put together the work arrangement that suits you , Prof. Cooper says.
That can mean reorganizing the work week to allow for four days on and three off.But more commonly , it means working part-time from home and part-time from a central location.
The positives are that you are working in a more human-friendly environment , Prof. Cooper says.It links you to the family more and may encourage men to take up more of their domestic responsibilities as new men.It makes you feel as if you're trusted and have more control over your work..
But there are difficulties , including overwork and isolation , if you work exclusively from home.
You have to be pretty disciplined to make sure you adhere to a particular exit time , to make sure you have an outside life.
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The problem is that when it breaks down , there's no infrastructure to help you , Prof. Cooper says.If you are in an office somewhere , you can use someone else's machine or there's an IT [ information technology ] person who will deal with it..
While working at may allow employees more time with their family , it can also create undue stress if the line between work and family time isn't drawn.
You have to learn how to manage private space and work space.In other words , that room over there is where I work.
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Prof. Cooper says that problem can be alleviated by encouraging home-based employees to come into the office occasionally and hot desk at temporary work stations , allowing them to meet and talk with fellow employees.
The issue of flexible working arrangements is particularly acute in Americanized cultures , such as Canada , Britain and Ireland , where jobs are no longer for life , where people work long hours and the work force feels as if it's disposable.
People feel that if they're working in cultures where the psychological contract no longer exists between employers and employees , at least what they should get are flexible working arrangements so people can use the new technology to work partly from home and partly from a central location.This is what people want..
Despite the problems , Prof. Cooper predicts that home working will continue to increase in popularity , but perhaps with some innovative approaches.
One of them could be a recreation of pre-Industrial Revolution cottage industries in the form of tele-cottages , where individuals working from home will get together with neighbours also working from home to socialize and provide mutual assistance.
What we need is not the 1970s , but what we don't need is the 1990s either.What we need is to restore the psychological contract to some extent . . . There needs to be a halfway house..
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