While much of business has moved into the twenty-first century, one thing that continues to demonstrate a profound stuck-in-the-80’s mentality is the demand for on-site work. To be sure, there are some levels of work that have to be conducted on-site. It’s somewhat challenging to do hardware work remotely, for instance, unless you have a protein based robot at your beck and call on-site, in which case you may as well be there yourself in many instances.<\/p>\n
Software work? Consulting? Let’s start being smarter about that. Let’s consider the following impasse:<\/p>\n
This is the 21st century. We can get around these problems and help the environment by not requiring people to travel everywhere to do some work. (Red tape and bureaucracy alone should never<\/em> be a reason to deny remote work \u2013 honestly, if it is used as a reason with a straight face, there’s something seriously wrong with a company.)<\/p>\n Despite what some would have you believe, I’d estimate that in 90% or more of the cases where security is cited as a reason to prevent remote access, security is not a sufficient reason<\/em>. Let’s consider options here:<\/p>\n All of these and more will resolve all security issues in (again, I’d estimate) more than 90% of cases, and the remaining cases are as much as anything based on legal or military obligations. (Any case where it doesn’t resolve it due to red tape or bureaucracy is shameful.)<\/p>\n Let’s be frank<\/a>:<\/p>\n Sure, we have to acknowledge that when we use computers and network\/internet infrastructure, we’re using power which in turn may be coming from fossil fuel power stations as well. But even a quick search<\/a> reveals a plethora of studies<\/a> that show telecommuting uses<\/a> significantly less<\/a> power\/fossil fuel resources<\/a> than regular commuting<\/a>. Telecommuting doesn’t, of course, have to only be about employees, but it can be with contractors and other “on-hire” staff too. Not only that, companies that are reluctant to try telecommuting with their own<\/em> employees can dip their toes into the water by making provisions for remote work from contractors, support suppliers, etc.<\/p>\n Now I’ll mention my biases here:<\/p>\n But let’s also be honest \u2013 IT consulting is not a family-friendly environment. Long hours of both travel and on-site work can at times actually detract from the experience both for the person doing the consulting and the company engaging the consultants. Particularly when the work is running late, or out of hours, happy people work better than unhappy people.<\/p>\n Bottom-line\/numbers person? Then let’s think about project costs. If you think that any company doesn’t build staff travel and accommodation costs into their prices, think again. (Actually, depressingly I do have personal experience in one major PC company that continually demands such stupidity from companies which they buy contracting services from \u2013 and they continue to leave a string of collapsed contractor companies and dejected, failed ex-company owners behind them who thought they could manage or hide those costs.)<\/p>\n In all honesty, continuing to insist on local site attendance for activities that can be done cheaper, more immediately and more comfortably for all involved is just ongoing collective business insanity.<\/p>\n If you want to do something for the environment in 2010 \u2013 and make business cheaper without losing profitability, how about you:<\/p>\n Of course, there’s always going to be situations where on-site work is required, but let’s start bringing consulting into the 21st century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While much of business has moved into the twenty-first century, one thing that continues to demonstrate a profound stuck-in-the-80’s mentality…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12,13],"tags":[249,411,811,816,992],"class_list":["post-1481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-technology","category-general-thoughts","tag-consulting","tag-green","tag-remote-access","tag-remote-support","tag-telecommuting"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-nT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1481\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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