The expert view Jon Honeyball

Who wants to commute into an overcrowded city centre every day? That’s still the nightmare scenario for many people, who spend thousands of pounds each year, along with weeks of their life and unknown toll on their blood pressure, to reach an inner-city office. Going to London even for a single occasional meeting brings me out in a sweat, and was one reason we decided to relocate to the market town of Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire.

With the rise of fast, affordable and reliable IP connections, both fixed and via 4G mobile, the biggest technical barrier to remote working has been swept away. What’s left is the inability of an organisation to accept and embrace remote working. Clearly it doesn’t work all the time for all organisations – you can’t build Jaguar cars from the comfort of your home. But even those jobs that are intensively onsite can have occasional days where the worker can operate from home, or from a remote site.

And that’s the win. Happier employees make for better workers. It’s the natural extension of the progress from enforced hours of work through to flexitime through to job sharing. And the final bastion to fall, the suit for work every day.

As we approach the third decade of the 21st century, remote diverse working should be the norm wherever possible and practicable. Of course, this must be balanced against home time, intrusion into the family space, and that creeping worry that you ought to check your phone for work emails, even at 2am. Much of the proper management of remote working can help with this – don’t route emails to the client app if it’s out of working hours, for example.

So remember to be careful. Organisations can be very good at taking without giving back, and a ratchet effect into 24-hour working isn’t a good move for anyone. A sensible organisation tries to get the best from its employees, allowing them to be maximally efficient and effective, but a truly wise one lays down hard rules about personal time, too.