Who Works at Home, Why, and How You Can Join Them How ...

Homeward
Bound
Lonely
Hearts
For some years, the miracle of the modem has led
pundits to predict that in the near future vast numbers
of citizens would work at home, entering their mental
efforts into a computer and, only now and then,
sending it electronically to the core office downtown.
Such a phenomenon is clearly possible today, yet it
hasn't materialized. Why not? Well, though working
at home may seem to glisten with overwhelming
appeal, many of its boons have an irksome flip side.
The most common complaint is lack of social
contact. Though at home you no longer endure the
social distractions of the office, you no longer savor
them either. In hindsight, the impromptu chats that
devoured so much of your time may seem delightful
interludes, refreshing to the spirit. Most people miss
the social interplay of the office.
In addition, even if you work at home only parttime,
you can start to feel that you're only an onlook
er. You may miss events, find the talk of these events
remote, and come to sense that you're no longer
sharing common experiences.
The office is also the main forum for politicking.
You simply cannot establish the same influence at
home that you can on the job. That's why many
individuals who might otherwise enjoy working at
home shun it, feeling it will hinder their rise to the top.
Finally, office conversation is not just jabber. It
provides an avenue for exchanging informal infor
mation, which can sometimes be very important.
"Working at home, you can spend a lot of time re
inventing the wheel," says Alan Cooper, president of
Cooper Software Development. You can also miss
insights into the power structure of the firm, the
individuals above you, and imminent or tentative
changes in procedure.
Working at home entails other pitfalls:
■ Need for self-discipline. The very freedom of work
ing at home can become a curse. If you work at
home only occasionally, the structure of external
control remains intact and you probably need not
worry about it. But if you work full-time at home, you
quickly discover the need to carefully order your
time and thoughts. Working at home is really only
for the self-disciplined.
■ Family distractions. The office isn't the sole source
of interruptions. The family can provide them as
well. "If the kids are on vacation, they can raise hell
with you," says Gene Beisman, president of Beisman
Associates, a construction consulting firm.
■ Altered sense of home. Working at home can
change the havenlike atmosphere of the hearth.
"You lose a sense of your home as a place where
you don't ever have to worry about work," says
Rosalind Gold, policy planner at a nonprofit
organization.
■ Loss of transition time. The near-instant commute
has at least one drawback. "It can be more difficult
to leave the work behind you," says Beisman. "You
come downstairs when the day is done, and you've
been off work for two minutes."
■ Temptations of the larder. The very comforts of
home can become too enticing, and some people
find themselves eating or drinking to excess, un
able to resist the call of the refrigerator.
Few of these problems will afflict everyone, but
they exist, and anyone contemplating the sparkling
cove of work-at-home should be aware of the
riptides.
— DM & PF
cant'iHUttlfront pagt 19
Who Are These People?
The number of people who work at home on
computers is still relatively small, but it's
growing rapidly.
Tom Miller of Link Resources, which
recently surveyed 850 randomly chosen
home-worker households throughout the
U.S.. estimates that as many as 5 million
corporate individuals work at home at
leasi part of the time. About 20 percent
of them, or I million, do so full-time.
Some 536,000 of the latter use
computers.
"They could all use them." he says.
"It's a $67 billion market."
So who arc these people?
The most obvious distinction lies between parttimers
and full-timers. However, there are signifi
cant differences between men and women, and
22 COMPUTE!