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Home workers are just one segment of the growing number of employees who spend some or all of their day away from their main office. Sales teams and field engineers have, by the nature of their jobs, always spent a large part of their time away from their desks. But now they are being joined by a far broader range of staff and executives, who have adopted the maxim that work is not where you go, it is what you do.

Fans of flexible working, of which remote working is just one element, have been trying to communicate the benefits for some time, and that message is starting to get through. More and more UK companies are putting policies in place to ensure that their employees have more flexibility over their location.

As a society, we increasingly recognise the negative personal impacts of stress, as well as the wider social concerns about excess travel. Research has shown that remote working can lead to increased productivity through reduced stress and improving employees’ work-life balance. And of course, the topic du jour, employees travelling less can significantly help reduce companies’ carbon footprint.

This is combined with the fact that demographics and social infrastructure in the UK make home working an increasingly attractive option. Not only do adequate remote working options encourage parents or other employees with external commitments to remain in the workplace, they give employers a much more geographically spread, and thus competitive, pool from which to hire the necessary talent.

It is hard to accurately measure the extent to which the UK workforce is working remotely, and actual figures are difficult to come by. This is largely because a precise definition of what constitutes remote remains elusive. Do we, for example, include ambulance drivers responding to calls, or electricians making house calls? They certainly work away from a central location. But then, they always have. Or do we simply count workers who, before the advent of enabling technology and widespread broadband adoption would have been confined to a desk.

For example, a recent British Chamber of Commerce report showed that 89 per cent of the 408 companies surveyed offered flexible working to employees, with 38 per cent enabling them to work from home. A study commissioned by Microsoft went into even more detail, and showed that in a notable north-south divide, 50 per cent of employees in London work remotely at some time compared to the north east of England where the figure is just 29 per cent.

What is clear from the research is that the idea of remote working is proving popular, even if it is not yet available. A survey of 1200 managers and employees conducted in January 2007 by Continental Research and YouGov found that 18 per cent of employees would like the opportunity to work from home two days a week, and just over 40 per cent believe that working from home would enable them to be more productive. This compares to the 29 per cent who believed they would end up working longer hours.

However, more than a third (37 per cent) of managers feel home workers will use working hours to carry out personal activities such as arranging their social life or taking a longer lunch, according to the research.

Introducing remote working across an organisation can be complex, with significant input needed from the HR department to ensure that both employees and employers will see the benefits. However, it also demands the right technology. Because although flexible working – and the legislation that supports it – is largely driven by social and cultural factors, it is technology that enables it.

It’s also important to remember that technology keeps evolving. Laptops and PDAs are now a familiar part of our landscape. But if remote working is to be as efficient as possible, and really deliver productivity gains, it is essential that these are supplemented with the latest communications developments so that remote users have real-time access to all the data and systems they would have if they were in the office.

Business today is conducted in real time - emailing critical documents backwards and forwards, or constant phone calls to request vital reports are not an option. It is essential that remote colleagues can remain constantly in touch, using secure, real-time communications systems, such as unified messaging platforms.

If real-time data exchange is relatively straightforward, it is harder, but absolutely crucial, to ensure that only authorised users can access that data. In other words, security is a key consideration – particularly as remote working opens up a new range of potential hazards and security risks.

We are all very used to working with laptops and PDAs, but unfortunately this familiarity means that we can forget that these innocent-looking devices can have a much darker side to them.
A sales person out visiting clients, for example, may decide to keep a copy of the customer database on his laptop, along with price lists, confidential internal business documents, contract details and financial information for his clients. It all helps him to be as effective as possible when doing his job. However, as soon as this kind of information is removed from the office the company is vulnerable if that equipment is lost or stolen.

Even companies that think their information isn’t really that sensitive should consider what would happen if their biggest competitors obtained price lists or R&D information from a lost device. So valuable is data in the information age that it is often the information stored on the laptop rather than the equipment itself which makes it attractive to thieves.

The solution, therefore, is for remote workers to access office-based PCs from mobile equipment, rather than storing any information on the device itself. Remote administration or remote control technology that system administrators use to manage and monitor 1000s of networked PCs, has become massively popular among remote workers who need access to corporate systems.

When this kind of remote access technology is used, the company is no longer vulnerable to industrial espionage, brand diminishment or expensive law suits should the device fall into the wrong hands.

Not only does this protect data if the device is misplaced, it also means that only one port needs to be opened up in the corporate firewall. This means all traffic is going through the one, secure port, making the company less vulnerable. Add in advanced encryption and detailed permission levels for access to data, and remote control software becomes an attractive option for remote working.

Where the ‘grabbing’ of screen data in traditional remote control software means there is latency between command and action, the newest versions effectively clone it. As a result, remote workers get the information they need easily and quickly.

Flexible working, working from home, business trips – these are all driving the demand for access to corporate systems while users are out of the office. It is now just down to the organisation to ensure they are working in the most effective and secure way.