However, home-based working can result in potential problems for employers, two of which are explained below:
- Monitoring workflow becomes a problem as in essence, individuals become invisible to managers. This makes it difficult for managers to assess progress of individuals within the company.
- There are higher start up costs and a typical home-based worker would need special office furniture and equipment, which would need to be bought.
Working from home also has advantages for employees of companies for the following reasons:
- Increases free time - by working from home. Commuting time will disappear and their free time will increase. This gives workers more autonomy and allows them to spend more time with their families, which help to improve the quality of family life.
- Homeworking is the only way some workers with heavy domestic commitments can work at all.
- Freedom from the stress of commuting. This could help improve their concentration and hence their efficiency.
- Flexibility to cope and deal with sudden emergencies
- Facilitating work to occur in a more concentrated way, without the interruptions associated with office based working
The drawbacks for an employee of homeworking include the following:
- Social isolation and the sense of alienation. This can lead to stress and depression and it is therefore important for workers to visit the base office regularly for a meeting with other workers and make use of communication tolls such as the video phone and teleconference systems.
- Loss of face-to-face communication. Even if there is an effective organisational communication system in which everyone inside and outside the company is informed of the latest development, much of the informal information sharing is not included in e-mail, fax or telephone conversations. Even when colleagues are working together across distances and they know and trust each other, they rarely communicate with the same profoundness as they would in face-to-face communications.
- Distinction between work and private life - when working at home without enough space or telephone lines, there will be a difficulty in separating work life from home life. This could reduce the worker’s productivity and may also impact on other members of the family.
Having discussed the different impacts working from home has on employers and employees; I will now briefly explain a couple of further issues regarding the effects of homeworking on society.
Firstly, working from home on a reasonable scale results in an improvement of urban traffic congestion. Therefore, other workers who live far away from the city would be more flexible and this would help reduce their travelling times.
Secondly, it will help reduce environmental problems and reduce energy consumption. Working from home enables the information communications to replace some commuting and business trip. Therefore, it is likely that there will be a reduction in car trips, energy consumption and the emission of air pollutants that result in global warming.
However, in contrast to the above point, energy costs from working at home could actually rise with things like more heating, lighting and boiling the kettle triggering this. Companies would aim though to offset increased household energy consumption by reducing energy use where fewer workers are in the office or by encouraging employees to share space and resources and minimise wastage.
To conclude the issue of homeworking then, its development is technology driven and the different forms of technology make homeworking possible but the consequences and effects of homeworking depend only partly on technology and primarily on how we decide to apply and use the technology when contemplating whether to work from home. Ideally, potential pitfalls can be avoided if employers and employees carefully consider what they want from a homeworking arrangement and set it up effectively through compromising. A way to do this could be by the worker only going in to the office once or twice a week. This gives both sides the opportunity to communicate, evaluate progress and spend time developing working relationships.
A second new form of working is the Call Centre. They can be defined as physical locations where calls are placed or received, in high volume for sales, marketing, customer service, telemarketing, technical support or other specialised business activity. Call centres depend on highly sophisticated telephone systems for the automatic rerouting of calls, so that a customer’s call may be answered at a centre hundreds or thousands of miles away. Call centres have already played a considerable part in the restructuring of the bank and financial services sector and are also common in insurance companies.
There are 2 main types of call centre - help desks and interactive processing centres:
- Help desks provide general information, give technical advice and help with things like flight and train times
- Interactive processing provides a service and sells a product, but even though telephone transactions take place, no paperwork is done.
Call centres have 2 main organisational advantages:
- As location is not important, they are able to operate in parts of the country where property and wage costs are low and staff are easier to recruit.
- Call centre technology increases productivity in telephone call handling. Automated call distribution systems closely monitor call centre employees and pass incoming calls directly to centre staff without the need for a conventional switchboard. Computer telephony integration such as the screen popping of customer information to computer screens and the use of standard scripts by staff, mean that the time taken to deal with calls can be minimised. The use of software to dial outbound calls automatically, transferring calls when they are answered to available members of staff alone enables hours to be saved each day. (www.andrewbibby.com/docs/ofcc2.html)
Nevertheless, call centres do though have their drawbacks:
- Many multiskilled call centre employees are subject to tight management control and working conditions can often be very unpleasant.
- Working in a call centre means that the individual is unlikely to get many promotion opportunities. In the end, workers are likely to get fed up because they realise they are not going anywhere.
- Call centres tend to have higher levels of absenteeism and staff turnover. This is because the workers are less likely to enjoy their job and in general, are being treated like machines. This eventually will result in them having less commitment to their job hence the higher rates of absenteeism and staff turnover.
It is interesting to note that there are links between call centres and Taylorism in that some call centres do employ Tayloristic technologies of control by recruiting low skilled personnel with temporary contracts or as contingent workers.
So, in conclusion we see that although call centres are changing the nature of work, the quality of working life and performance of employees in these call centres is not only determined by technology but also influenced mainly by the way in which call centre jobs are organised and managed. The layout of facilities, the degree of variety and autonomy, the opportunities for job rotation and the nature of supervision are all matters of managerial choice that are not determined by the technology.
Word count = 1439
Bibliography and References
-
Organisational Behaviour 5th edition David Buchanan and Andrzej Huczynski (pages 74-81) Prentice Hall
-
Principles of Organisational Behaviour 3rd edition Robin Fincham and Peter Rhodes (page 465) Oxford University Press
- http://www.soumu.go.jp/joho tsusin/top/telework-apec/manual-e03.html(page1-3)
- http://www.callcenternews.com/specials/definitions.shtml (page1)
- http:www.unorg.com/teleworking.htm page3
- http://www.ivillage.co.uk/workcareer/workfile/flexwork/articles page1
- http://www.soumu.go.jp/joho tsusin/top/telework-apec/manual-e04.html (p1-5)
