While spending time convalescing at home from my recent accident, I have spent a lot of time thinking about working at home and how to optimize the experience. Fortunately, my firm has great IT services and I am able to work at home almost seamlessly with my office by using scanners and email. I have found that (other than the pain from my current injuries) I enjoy working some at home. The key, of course, is having good administrative help.
There has been a lot of talk lately about the concept of “homesourcing,” the migration of workers from expensive centralized coastal cities to a distribution of small towns and cities throughout the US (instead of overseas). This was recently discussed by Instapundit and the migration of computer jobs from Silicon Valley to rural towns.
On one hand, this movement of workers is a huge benefit to the employee. As a result of “homesourcing”, employees are often allowed to take their existing salaries and home equity to other parts of the country where they can have a far greater quality of life at no increase in cost to the company, the ultimate win-win for employer and employee. The employer gets a happy employee, and the employee gets a huge increase in real income. One other benefit which is important is that there is no better gas saving device than a high-speed modem. Workers who are homesourced need very little gas on which to get to work, and as a result, their personal “cost of working” also goes down dramatically.
Homesourcing, of course, needn’t be across the country. Just working from home wherever one lives has quite a few benefits in terms of cost savings and productivity. This can also have a dramatic effect on gaining a healthy lifestyle if one spends an hour each day at the gym instead of stuck in maddening traffic congestion. This is not just all about the employee, though. Employers stand to gain from more work-at-home through happier and healthier employees.
And giving employees a healthier lifestyle is important for both employee and employer. Leah Maclean, a professional coach and mentor, writes on Working Solo that a healthy lifestyle is critical to your business success. In asking other bloggers, guest blogger Andrea Lee writes that, though counterintuitive, “To the degree that I become a more physically active person, my businesses will take great leaps forward to seven figures and more.”
Lifestyle is not just important to your business success, it’s a path to it. Matthew Homann, of the nonbillable hour, believes that he must constantly remind himself that time with his family must be first on his ‘to-do’ list and not last. He even goes to the extent of making a list of the things he did each day that bettered his family life, improved his health, and built his business to build a report card of efforts to keep balance in his life. This is where working at home can come into play. Imagine not having to fight traffic all morning just so you can sit in a little office without natural lighting. Almost like a day at the beach.
Law firms tend to lag the curve on changes in the marketplace but it is inevitable the more firms will look to homesource lawyers to save on costs, especially if you set up office sharing so that the amount of expensive real estate and equipment is reduced. What can be better than reduced costs and increased productivity?
