Home on the range

08 Feb 2012

Unified Communications should ideally be about ergonomics and making life easier rather than working to suit the technology you have installed. Home offices can be a nightmare in this respect, our editor finds.

A visit to Plantronics’ headquarters in Royal Wootton Bassett – as the staff kept reminding us (a mention of the place name was liberally dotted around, presumably in case we thought we were still in nearby Swindon) – leads me to consider how I work and where I work best. You’ll see why in the first story of this issue; their set-up is really pretty admirable. And it led me to consider home offices.

As a home worker myself since 1993 I’ve pretty much gone through the whole gamut. My first desk was a door on its side on top of packing cases – my circumstances weren’t initially through choice and I hadn’t had the time to do much business planning around working in this way. This gave way to an actual desk eventually, although “nearest and the cheapest” wasn’t necessarily the best idea.

Nonetheless the idea of having somewhere that was a dedicated work area for me, somewhere there would be little throughput of other people, struck me as essential. It’s less so now, we’re in a house rather than a flat and my family is understandably reluctant to have one room out of three bedrooms effectively out of bounds. Nonetheless an area where you can be “on” and behind which you can close the door, signaling to yourself psychologically that you’re out of work mode, is important.

I use other psychological tricks too. We have a dog. I take her for walks and that’s my walk to work – by the time I’m back home in the morning I’m in business mode, to the irritation of anyone who was kind of hoping I’d see to the washing.  The walk gives me time to do some important thinking and assess – and talk to other dog walkers or else the isolation would drive me to distraction – and already it strikes me that I’m doing the same as the Plantronics staff are able to, but doing it informally and in isolation.

The technology helps as well. Unified Communications is of course a pushover on a small scale because there’s no big implementation; a widget like Plantronics’ Callisto that handles soft, landline and mobile phones, a client that handles all of my IM messages and an email program and that’s pretty much done for a singleton like me. Forwarding between points of course makes life easier when people need to get hold of me.

Handling such an idea with hundreds of people across different sites is of course a different matter. It’s worth reading what Plantronics has done to formalize what happens in many workplaces instinctively.

Guy Clapperton

Editor

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