Naps and working in pyjamas: Bring it on

was still working in London and managing a team of eight journalists, my then employer deliberately moved to an office that had fewer desks than it had employees.

This forced us to adopt a system where several members of the team were always working from home. It was a shrewd business move as the company saved vast amounts on its city centre rent.

Fortunately, my employer made another shrewd business move the previous year by introducing the excellent communication tool, Slack.

Slack (think of it as a professional version of Whatsapp) was the place where everyone said ‘‘morning’’ to their colleagues. It was also the place where files were shared, video meetings where held, and importantly, office gossip was spread. And finally, at the end of the day, it was the place where everyone said: ‘‘that’s me for the day, speak to you tomorrow’’.

Without this one piece of software I’m not sure we could have made it work.

For the benefit for anyone reading this who hasn’t experienced working from home before, let me tell you one thing: it’s wonderful.

From an employee’s perspective, there are obvious perks. There’s no commute. You get to wear comfy pants, or even your pyjamas, for the entire day. You suddenly have all the time in the world to do your laundry. And your lunches improve tenfold.

Best of all, if you’re anything like me, you’ll accidentally fall asleep at least once during the afternoon too. Bliss.

What’s even more surprising: you become more productive than ever. That job that you used to stretch out for an entire morning will take only an hour at home.

Better still, the quality of your work won’t suffer. The opposite. The lack of office distractions (you simply mute Slack when you’re busy) means you’re able to dedicate your full attention to the task in hand.

Surprisingly, it works from a management perspective too. You continue to give your team their daily and weekly tasks, as usual. And your team continues to get them done, as usual. Overall productivity, rightly, becomes the thing that matters most.

All of the above, I imagine, is what Microsoft, Google, IBM and Twitter (and maybe your company too) will be experiencing in the next couple of weeks.

The only difference will be whether they’re using Slack, or Google Hangouts, or Microsoft Teams to chat, share files and have video meetings and spread gossip. And to be honest, it doesn’t matter which one they choose, they all do the same thing.

So why isn’t working from home more widespread? Surely, companies would jump at the chance to save on city centre office real estate?

I don’t know.

Perhaps it is because of something Steve Jobs once said: ‘‘There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions.’’

It’s hard to argue with that. I agree that creativity and business need to be face-to-face (at least to some degree).

However, I’d also wager that if companies up and down New Zealand are forced to implement remote working strategies in the coming weeks, they’ll soon find out that remote working (to some degree) is very doable.

They’ll also see an improvement in employee morale, productivity and they might even be able to save some money on office space too.

You get to wear comfy pants, or even your pyjamas, for the entire day.