The economics of working from home – a proletariat perspective

Over the weekend my buddy and I were chatting about the impacts of working from home and thought I should look at it a little more deeply and paint it from my perspective. Obviously more and more companies are buying in to the “Work @ Home” concept to essentially cut costs and get more productivity.

I started working from home more often than not over the last 6 months when I don’t travel and it has been a revelation. For many years I believed that the notion of working at home was one of the biggest scams perpetuated by the proletariat in corporate America. So much so that I discouraged my team from working from home and those that had to on occasion, I tolerated with a lot of effort. All this has changed for me now that I seem to have begun to enjoy working at home and believe I have become a lot more productive. That said I do want to look at it broadly and objectively from an employee perspective and see what’s in it, if at all for us.

Lets start by looking at the tangible aspects of working from home. At a minimum, the costs of going to a work place every day of the week; Monday to Friday is;

Lunch	$ 40.00
Transportation (Gas, Tolls, Parking, Metro)	$ 50.00
Dry Cleaning/Laundry	$ 10.00
Total	$100.00

Now I am sure different folks have different spending pattern’s such as Starbucks, cigarettes etc etc but this to me captures the basics of a weeks expenditures.

Calculating the costs of working from home, I come up with the following;

Incremental Electricity	$ 15.00
Incremental Heating/Cooling	$ 15.00
Lunch	$ 20.00
Total	$ 50.00

So clearly the cost of working from home is half that of working from home.

Lets look at the intangibles of working from home as often these could lead us one way or the other;

Upsides -

1. More time to exercise
   
2. More time to spend with the kids and families
   
3. Less pollution of the environment
   
4. Less stress of driving through rush hour traffic
5. Getting to eat more healthy since you have control of what's in your pantry
   
6. Lesser work politics….so I hope :~)

Downsides -

1. If there is a non-working spouse at home with kids…forget it
2. No excuse to not exercise
3. Potential to oversleep in; i.e. waking 2 mins before a meeting and pretending to be tired due to being overworked
4. Lower propensity to make friends at the work place

Now some of the pre-requisites for working from home in my opinion are;

• Tremendous discipline to getting your work done; forget about trying to work on your couch or in your pajama’s….wont work long term.
  
• Your work ethic has to be crisp and above any level of debate.
  
• Differentiate work time from home time.

If you can not manage that, working from home is not something you should be attempting since you will get in to trouble….guaranteed!

So what next you ask? My foggy crystal indicates that;

• More and more people will start working from home at the pleasure of their employers. One of those few win wins for employee and employers. It will never be 100% since some people are more productive in a business environment; they require the daily live/non phone interactions with their colleagues or require more supervision.
• Work at home in the right context will work for all levels of people up and down the corporate ladder.
• There will be new legal issues that will be dealt with, for instance, if I trip and fall @ home while working, who is liable?
• With more and more work from home scenario’s and a growing imbalance of businesses to real estate ratio’s we are definitely on the cusp of a commercial real estate bubble ready to pop.

So those of you who work from home….I am happy to be part of this new virtual neighborhood…lets catch up for coffee sometime :~)

Green Planet....who are we kidding?

I stopped by at the local Harris Teeter to pick up some milk this morning and noticed for the 1st time they have parking spaces reserved for “Green” cars….those new fangled low emission, high priced, partial non fossil fueled vehicles. The spots are marked by a green squares on the 1st parking spots across the parking lot, save a few for the handicap, which are required by law. So at 1st I was very amused…amused by the Harris Teeter’s contribution to greening the planet by this gesture. Then I started getting pissed because now I felt discriminated. All of a sudden my 2003 BMW is not good enough to be parked in the 1st spot though it is empty….that if you have a green car, you deserve to walk less? & what if I park in the green spot…can my car be towed away?....just too many questions 1st thing in the morning is not quite the way I like to start. Nevertheless, I got to ponder about it some more and realized that this quest of trying to “green” the planet is fundamentally flawed and will not really get us anywhere

No not cynicism, but a carefully thought through (all of 10 mins in the quiet of my car as I drove home) logic supports my argument;

1. The worlds population is growing at about 1.8%, so we are 6.8B today and clearly growing. More people means more production of goods, products, food grains and so on. More of this needs more energy and despite all hullabaloo, we are not getting away from fossil fuels….simply because there is no viable alternative (Viable = cost effective, mass produced, politically supported etc). More use of fossil fuels means more pollution.

2. Cows emit a massive amount of methane through belching, with a lesser amount through flatulence. Statistics vary regarding how much methane the average dairy cow expels. Some experts say 100 liters to 200 liters a day (or about 26 gallons to about 53 gallons), while others say it's up to 500 liters (about 132 gallons) a day. In any case, that's a lot of methane, an amount comparable to the pollution produced by a car in a day.With growing populations, we will need more meat to feed all these people, which means more belching cows. Here is a statistic; for 6Billion people we have 1.5 Billion cows in the world.

3. We are unable to grow organic food for the growing masses, which takes us on the path of all the hybrids that come with their own set of challenges including fertilizer poisoning, land unfit for cultivation after a few cycles and so on.

4. People in fast growing economies like India, China, Mexico, Brazil with teeming populations have no “real” plans to contract and reduce pollutions while the western 1st world has lost the moral high ground to advise others on reducing their carbon foot print…why most of our states will not even reward folks for wanting to go down the righteous path of solar, wind energy paths. I did a check on getting my house total energized by solar. The cost of that and the savings I would get by weaning myself of the traditional energy source would take me about 35 years to pay off…..i may be dead by then!

There is not a critical mass around the world that I can perceive now or peering in to the future, where by people are making the effort to reduce their carbon foot print. What all this is doing is creating another opportunity for those big bankers to sell and buy carbon options….boy think about buying selling hot air and making money…with no value being created.

So while I can rant some more I feel ridiculed by Harris Teeter’s idea of a green parking spot….what the hell are they thinking about. If they truly want to make a mark, how about a new non fossil fueled energy source to power their operations. Yes make a statement that really matters, not paint a stupid green box.