I happened upon this UK-based site today…the National Pyjama Club. There are pictures on the ClickNwork site of the views from the workers’ office windows, but this reverses the perspective and shows pictures of the workers themselves, in their night attire, apparently working at their job, at home, clutching teddies or with their heads wreathed in still-damp towels.

No, I don’t have some sinister predilection for pyjama-clad home workers. I just like to keep abreast of developments in the home-working arena. Honest!

I thought this was an interesting idea. I think I mean “interesting”, but maybe I mean “inexplicable”.

I’m not sure whether most merely start the working day accoutred thus before changing in to something perhaps a little more in harmony with a professional environment - and I would like to state here and now that I really am not at all interested - but it does highlight one of the benefits of working from home: the freedom it gives you from some of the conventions of corporate life. Why don a suit, when the only sentient being you are impressing is the dog? He’d probably anyway be more impressed by a biscuit or a W-A-L-K.

I have to date tried to resist the temptation of letting sartorial standards slip too far when working at home, but I do have to confess to having periodically talked to clients in other time zones in a state of disarray one would find wholly unacceptable outside the home.  It’s not a regular occurrence, and I’m not proud if it (well, maybe a little bit), but “needs must” and all that.

Maybe we’ll have something similar on the ClickNwork website…but, then again, perhaps we won’t!

My last blog entry got me thinking about where people work. The ClickNwork site has profiles of a number of people that work with us, and some of them have added pictures of the view from their office window. You can see them by clicking the the profiles for the individuals at http://clicknwork.com/profiles.asp.

They are very different: from the busy Chennai street market scene seen by Ravi to the sort of vista you would design for yourself (if you had the opportunity) that is enjoyed by Dave in New Zealand.

They could be working on the same project, doing the same sort of work, while all around them their very different lives are carrying on. I find it fascinating - perhaps I need a hobby? - and it underlines how rapid  communications have brought the disparate parts of the world together, to some extent.

I thought I’d add a picture from my window - just to prove that the sun does shine in England. The outlook is a bit short-range when you compare it with my colleague John’s view from his 17th storey office window, overlooking Central Park in New York. But he doesn’t have a shed!

The point is, you can work pretty much anywhere, but I would have thought that there would need to be some fairly specific reasons for the working environment arrangements below to be appropriate!

I love working from home, but I have to confess that sometimes I wish the office was a little more difficult to get to, and with a slightly better vista.

My office is at the back of the house on the ground floor and I can’t resist checking emails if I’m anywhere on the ground floor of the house.

My view from the window isn’t horrible, but could be improved with slightly better positioning.

Having the office outside in the garden has been on my mind ever since I saw a friend of mine use a large wood cabin as his office in his garden.

I like the idea and the look of it. The company claims it’s environmentally-friendly, in reducing CO2 emissions, and provides an extra room (if you’re constrained for space in the house) away from any distractions in the house. It’s not as cheap as setting up a desk in the house, but if that’s not an option, then maybe this is.

The OfficePod

So, I started looking around for other similar products, such as the range of buildings from Kithaus.

And there’s the Qube too.

Actually, there are lots of “garden sheds” that I wouldn’t mind working in either!   

With swine flu, rising travel costs, higher unemployment, and the tougher challenges in just in making ends meet, many people are turning to work-at-home opportunities.  The upside can be great but please be very cautious about who you deal with. Too often work-from-home schemes turn out to be work-from-home scams.

Consumer Reports in the US recently ran an article about current scams being. The FBI also  recently gave guidance on what to look out for.

The Federal Trade Commission has since 2001 warned of the dangers of work-from-home scams and provides a categorization of work-at-home schemes (nicely using the term ‘flop-potunities’), but people are still being caught.

Two essential pieces of advice:

1.       Don’t pay upfront, whether it’s for inventory or “how to” information; most scams require you to pay for something that usually turns out to be worthless.

2.       Avoid network building and multilevel marketing schemes.

It’s so easy to be seduced by promises of a fast buck, pound, euro, or yen, especially when you need to earn money, so always have in mind the time-honored maxim: if it looks too good to be true, it is.

The only money we receive is from the clients whose work the ClickNworkers deliver, and also a little bit of advertising revenue, since we put Google Ads on the site.

If you know of a scam and want others to know, please contribute to the comments.

Oh, and don’t do this…

I heard an interview on WNYC yesterday with Dalton Conley, talking about his new book Elsewhere, U.S.A, or more precisely, Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety.

His basic idea is that technology and social change mean we have evolved from settled careers at one place of work to frenetic lives with no work-life boundaries. And in parallel, economic uncertainty has risen, increasing stress and the need to focus on work. At times he is pretty dour:

Leisure? The “good life”? What are those? Work is the central aspect of our lives. We are lucky that it is fulfilling work—work that we will probably continue to do until we are no longer capable—but it is, unlike that of my parents, all-consuming work.

He interviews well and his central observation about the disrupting impact of technology is solid but I think he is wrong about core elements. Yes, technology is allowing work to spread outside the workplace and this is causing some people to constantly check email and to be available 24/7. Part of that is personal style but as I look at it, the same technology has given great opportunities we otherwise wouldn’t have had. In my case, because I work from home I can be with my children and help them get to school every day, I’m around during the day if I need a distressing wrestle with my two year old (I have to wait until afterschool for the more challenging higher weight groups), I’m there to cook and eat with them and put them to bed. None of that would have been possible without the technology I rely on. But there’s more – I can go for rides in the park as time permits, do my shopping at off hours, and on and on. All of this means I am happy to let work intrude at other times and so I don’t begrudge talking to clients in London at 6:00am my time, or talking to a West Coast client at 10pm, it all comes with the territory and I want it like this – the thought of getting on a train and being out of town or at work from 7:00am to 8:00pm every day isn’t for me.

As I see it, if you can offer valuable services to companies that you can deliver from your home (which is what ClickNwork is about), then I think you can get the best of the work environment (intellectual stimulation, community, pay) with the benefits of home life (more leisure, better family interaction, less hassle).  Conley fails to bring out these positives and sold us short.

At one point in the interview, Leonard Lopate, the interviewer asked - ‘most of these developments have had a negative affect, is there a way to reverse any of it..? and Conely falters: “Well, if I communicated completely negative affects I want to correct that”. He then goes on to explain how some of the change is “demand driven”, how a lot of people, especially professionals love their work and so on – all good but a bit late for print!

I looked on the web and see he has many of positive reviews, but others aren’t so sure.  Janet Maslin in the New York Times (and International Herald Tribune) had some funny moments, saying that “Conley spends part of his time out on a limb, sawing”. She adds:

“But this book’s greater problem is the thin, iffy nature of its extended arguments. To back up the familiar claim that we have allowed merchandising to invade our private lives, he invokes (in no particular order) the selling of formerly free snacks on airplanes, slogans on T-shirts (with a thumbnail history of the T-shirt thrown in for filler) and the perils created by the bottling and marketing of water.

.. But Mr. Conley has no big new point to make. He awkwardly coins new locutions (“weisure” to conflate work and leisure, “convestment” to do the same with consumption and investment). He struggles with jargon while trying to interject the term “intravidual” into our collective conversation. Beware an “of course” when a point is anything but self-evident: “The irony, of course, is that the intravidual is just as much an ‘intervidual’ (inter meaning ‘between’), since it is the networked nature of our new, Elsewhere economy and the penetration of others into us that shatters the individual.

…He dutifully travels to Mountain View, California, to note the Orwellian nature of life at Googleplex, Google’s corporate headquarters. A pox on Mountain View: It is now the destination of choice for writers seeking to pad books with sci-fi visuals and newish-sounding but already conventional wisdom.”

Don’t get me wrong, the book is worth a read but I do think it needs better research and balance.

He’s done the rounds and in case you’re interested, here’s another interview with Neil Cohen on NPR.

I mentioned at the end of my previous post that in my next post I would, in the interest of fairness and balance, talk about some of the possible pitfalls and disadvantages of working from home, again from the worker’s perspective. There are a few, although I have counters to some of them – I’m an advocate of working from home, so what do you expect? – but I have to admit, not all of them.

• It’s sometimes difficult to concentrate on work at home. Some say that they couldn’t – or, in fact, can’t – work from home because they would be – or are – distracted by the TV, the kids, their partner, or even the washing up. It can be difficult to get in to work mode at home, but if you are easily distracted, then you have to think of ways of reducing or eliminating the distractions, or finding ways of enhancing your focus on the work. For example, make sure your friends and family know that just because you’re at home, it doesn’t mean that you’re always available for a coffee etc.  This brief article pinpoints a few of the issues here: http://www.freelanceuk.com/news/2305.shtml. My partner recently told me that her sister, who works from home for a local authority, puts a business suit on when she’s working, and dons a name badge. No-one sees her, but she feels it necessary to break the link with home life in this way.
• Some feel lonely at home.  People constantly insist that I must miss the camaraderie of the office environment. I do, a bit…but I don’t miss the office politicking. It’s good to assemble around the water cooler and talk for a while, but I can do that on the phone. If I ever want to annoy people about West Ham’s burgeoning chances of qualifying for a European competition next season, there are any number of people I can phone who would be only too happy to explain to me the extent of my delusion. If you feel lonely while working from home, make more of an effort to be sociable in your leisure time.
• A lack of feedback and support. It’s good to bounce ideas around with work colleagues, and to get some ideas and hints from other people. It’s possibly not as easy to do that at home, but it’s really not that difficult to develop a network of like-minded people that you can phone and discuss things with, and develop a set of contacts to confer with if necessary.  Maybe people also feel that they aren’t getting feedback when they work for themselves at home, but you can get round that by making sure your clients give you feedback, or send some of your work to your network to get them to comment on the work.
• A bit of disruption at home. Clearly, if you want to have a comfortable working environment, you’ll need to find some appropriate space in your home, and that’s not always easy. You might need to install a dedicated phone line, buy some additional hardware, and get a nice roomy desk and other office furniture. It costs money, and it takes up space. If your home is a bit “compact” already, this might not be easy. It might not also be easy to cover the set-up costs involved, but start cautiously, buying second-hand furniture if necessary. I bought a perfectly good three-drawer steel filing cabinet a few weeks ago from a charity shop for £38. It suits me fine and apparently the money I spent on it will feed several little rabbits (I bought it from Hoppy’s Haven, in Deal, England) for weeks. It does what it needs to do; and I get to feel self-righteous.
• Additional costs of utilities. I don’t think I have a counter-argument here. During the winter, I do use more gas (for central heating) and electricity (for lighting) than I would if I were working in a corporate office.
• Lack of career progression and development. Working in a normal corporate environment gives your career a certain amount of structure: for example, career progression, promotion, and measurable development against targets. It helps you to build a picture of how well you are doing. It’s not impossible to do that yourself, working from home. You can set targets for yourself – e.g. number of new clients, revenue targets, or an improvement in client feedback. Career development could be measured in terms of the type of work you do – you might start doing fairly low-value work, but as clients begin to trust you, you might end up doing increasingly complex and valuable work – possibly more valuable than your previous employers would allow you to do. Send yourself on training courses, and award yourself a bonus – if you deserve it and the cash flow allows it.

Companies debate the merits of telework, but what about the benefits to the workers, and particularly to those that have exited corporate life to start working from home for themselves either independently or in conjunction with organizations like ClickNwork?

Working from home gets easier and easier: technology advances rapidly, while its cost falls. My first laptop cost around £2000, but its spec was far inferior to the one I just bought for a few hundred pounds. Fast Internet connections are becoming increasingly available around the world, and their price has been falling too. Mobile technology allows even ever increasing mobility and location-freedom.

Not only is it relatively easy and cheap to acquire the technology to work from home, consider the benefits to you of setting up a business at home. Here is a far from exhaustive list:

• Work flexibility makes life easier, and potentially richer. Teleworking permits a better work/personal life balance, but perhaps most of all, it gives you control over your working day. Working from home doesn’t necessarily mean working fewer hours, but it can mean working when it best suits you (e.g. to fit in with looking after the kids or a education course you want to take), or when you feel most productive.
• Teleworking gives you mobility. It frees you up to live pretty much where you like, if there’s reasonable Internet connectivity. You no longer need to live within reach of the city.
• Working from home as just one work option. Some people like to use working-from-home as just one of several work outlets. They might work from home three days a week, and hold down a part-time job outside of the home during the rest of the week. Or some prefer to work the winters at home, and then get work outside in the summer. Of course, this isn’t always possible if it’s important to retain the same clients, but it might be worth considering.
• A greater sense of the link between effort and reward. This link is sometimes frustratingly and annoyingly absent in some work environments.
• Spend saved time doing something else. You can use the time you would otherwise spend travelling to work for other things. I’ve seen people working on trains, but it doesn’t look comfortable, and I know it doesn’t suit me, but now my trip to work entails descending two flights of stairs from the bedroom to the ground floor office. Not for me the drafty railway platforms and congested trains, or lengthy delays on the motorways. I’ve done it; I don’t miss it!
• Better control the work you do. Maybe you are frustrated at the lack of interesting work your employers give you, and you feel that you are capable of much more. If you work for yourself, you might find that over time your clients are happy to give you increasingly complex, interesting and lucrative work.
• Save the planet! Less commuting (by car or train) reduces your travel carbon footprint – although it will increase your home’s impact on the environment (more lighting and heating etc). If you want to read a little bit more on these issues, take a look at http://www.freelanceuk.com/news/2285.shtml.
• And, finally, the cost benefits. Possible cost savings include: fewer smart business clothes, no commuting costs (except for wear and tear on the slippers), and cheaper lunches. If you would like to get an idea of the relative benefits of working from home and working in a conventional corporate setting, take a look at the handy ClickNwork calculator at http://www.clicknwork.com/implications.asp.

I’m not the only one who thinks like this. Take a look at the stories of some of the people that have worked from home with ClickNwork (http://www.clicknwork.com/profiles.asp), and see why they have chosen to work from home, and the reasons why they probably won’t go back to the old way of working.

In the next blog post, for balance, I’ll talk about some of the possible downsides of working from home.

The ads? Well, after much debate we decided to adorn our site with them. Not that we like them especially, and we also know they sometimes lead on to some dubious sites (we can’t easily prevent Google from displaying ads we’d rather not have), but there is a purpose.

We’re in the process of making some major changes to ClickNwork and the money we make from the ads (and believe me, it wouldn’t go far in Starbucks!) will pay for some ongoing services we think will be useful for people seeking work at home opportunities, so on balance we think it worthwhile.

So please bear with us as go through our changes and, if you get a chance, click on some.

Thanks!