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.