You Say You Want A Revolution?

Well you know, we all want to change the world.

Writing about urban trends in 1997, Frances Cairncross commented :  "half a century's time it may well seem extraordinary that millions of people once trooped from one building (their home) to another (their office) each morning, only to reverse the procedure each evening ... Commuting wastes time and building capacity. One building - the home - stands empty all day; another - the office – stands empty all night. All this might strike our grandchildren as bizarre."



 Well now that you mention it , Frances, … yes, it might. Anyone who has lived in Auckland, Wellington, or any other large city, can't help but be struck by the pointless chaos of the morning commute – and for what?  If I was a steel worker, I couldn't very well have my own little furnace at home, but as a knowledge worker, I could certainly work at home. And of those commuters, how many are knowledge workers? Yep, just about every last one of 'em.

Once we start thinking about that observation of Ms Cairncross, we realise that we are at a point where given the will to make it so, huge changes could take place. Imagine the whole centre of Auckland vacated overnight. Knowledge workers would fire documents around the place from their spare bedroom/office, cars would almost become obsolete, as we find that our humble bicycles are sufficient for local travel, and healthier too. (yes we'd still need some transport, can't really envisage a pedal-powered Kenworth ).

It is clearly a growing trend - in the US the figure for people working at least 1 day a week from home has reached 18.5%, according to recently published statistics .  According to the same report, that is up 60% between 2005 and 2009. However, still only 2% of the workforce state that home is their primary place of work, and an inability of middle management to get to grips with adequate performance metrics has been cited as the reason for the growth lagging earlier forecasts.
  
There are  certainly plenty of challenges; just how do you measure the productivity of your telecommuting staff? but the estimates in support of the idea seem compelling.

We just need politicians who can't be corrupted by the chairman of XX motor company, or YY, the downtown real-estate mogul.  Want to run for office?