Who says homework doesn't pay?

All businesses are under pressure from staff, unions, the government and the European Union to offer more flexible working options. But for smaller businesses, addressing the work-life balance can be a very expensive headache.

Job sharing, flexible hours and home working have usually been too costly and too difficult to implement for smaller businesses with limited resources.

However, according to research carried out for the GMB trade union, in some parts of the UK one-parent families made up nearly 40 per cent of households, making flexibility essential for parents juggling a career and childcare.

"These figures show the necessity for employers to adopt family-friendly policies such as job sharing, flexible working and help with childcare costs, to help these lone parents participate fully in the workforce," says Paul Kenny, London regional organiser at the GMB.

Can high-tech options such as broadband open up remote and home working to small businesses?

"Technology can help meet the needs for greater workplace flexibility, boosting productivity and employee satisfaction," says Francesco Caio, chief executive of networking provider Netscalibur.

"What was once the preserve of large corporations has been democratised by the rise of technologies such as a virtual private network (VPN) over the internet. This has opened up teleworking to large and small companies."

"Being able to work quietly and industriously at home, with the aid of a VPN, can help employees avoid the distractions posed by today's open-plan office culture."

Occasional teleworking has increased by 82 per cent in the last five years. According to the spring 2000 Government Labour Force Survey, the most recent government data on the issue, about 1.5 million people - 5.5 per cent of the UK workforce - already work from home at least one day a week. More recent studies by the Social Market Foundation put the figure at 2.2 million.

However, few employers extend this option to all employees, reserving teleworking as a management perk. This is despite changes to the Employment Act in April, under which employers have a legal duty to consider reasonable requests for flexible working from parents of young or disabled children.

How to implement a flexible policy
Implementing a flexible policy is not as difficult as you might think. In the case of home working, investment in a broadband line or unmetered dial-up internet access will provide the necessary online services. A VPN can be used if you need a secure connection into the office network.

Or, if resources such as email mailboxes are externally provided or outsourced already, it is a simple case of configuring the employee's computer or providing a pre-configured one. The best option is usually a laptop, which is portable enough to take into the field or the office as needed.

For calls, you could simply pay an employee's phone bill or provide them with a mobile. If you have provided them with broadband, and particularly if they are more than a local call away, this could be used for calls at reduced cost.

At TV Travel Shop, a small digital television channel that sells package holidays, there was a need to keep the sales force on hand to cover the high demand for its offers. But the fickle holiday market made it almost impossible to judge which holidays would result in a swamped switchboard.

Instead of investing in a larger call centre and paying for staff to be on-site waiting for calls, the company now allows a large proportion of its staff to work on call from home.

"Voice-over IP (VoIP) means these people can work from home on a full-time, part-time or as-needed basis," says Graham Bevington, managing director for Europe at telecoms manufacturer Mitel.

The company can meet any spike in demand by calling on up to 200 extra call centre reps, who are paid on commission rather than hourly.

Using VoIP technology from Mitel, and either DSL or ISDN, calls can be forwarded over the internet, cutting call costs and removing geographical barriers.It costs the same to forward a call to Glasgow as it does to Bracknell.

Mobile phones are also playing a big part in freeing up the workforce. Staff at Direction Fire, a small specialist business in the fire detection and gaseous fire extinguishant market, use Equisys' Zetalink mobile fax system to access and relay emails and faxes to remote workers.

Staff receive alerts to their mobile phone when an important email or fax comes in, and can divert the message to any fax machine, on site or at home.

While SMEs make up 99 per cent of the UK's total businesses, according to the Office of National Statistics, they remain at a significant disadvantage because of economies of scale.

One way to offset this is to reduce the cost of the physical infrastructure by paying only for essential premises, staff, transport and equipment.

Wage bills can also be controlled by flexible working practices. Many staff are happy to accept flexible work patterns and a better environment over and above pay rises.

"The business case for flexible working is beginning to prove itself, and the technology can deliver," says Beth Egan, deputy director of the Social Market Foundation.

"But employers must trust employees to work as productively from home or on the road as in the office, before we see the next upsurge in flexible working."

Outsourcing email
Widespread adoption of broadband, and the fact that more businesses are turning to external hosting companies for web sites and other internet services, has led to renewed interest in hosted applications. And lower-impact services such as email, with a fully-featured client delivered via the web, are thriving.

"This is far more than simply offering a Hotmail style of web mail," says Julian Dyer, technical director of ISP and hosting provider Cobweb Solutions.

"Hosted email is about providing the full desktop email experience and the full power of a desktop client through a web-based interface, so users can access their mail in full wherever they are."

Cobweb is one of a growing number of providers offering hosted email to smaller businesses - companies that might want the full power and flexibility of Microsoft Exchange-based email - but do not have the finances, time or expertise to install and maintain an Exchange Server themselves.

The hosting approach gives them access to the same facilities, but with a flat per-user rate of about £12 a month.

Via their web browser, users are presented with what looks like a standard Microsoft Outlook interface, with full access to email, shared calendar services, notes and address book.

Case study - IP Integration
Broadband has had a profound effect on the way people access the internet. It also ensures that teleworking can now be achieved in large parts of the UK, as high-speed, fixed-cost access makes remote working financially viable, as well as manageable, for many smaller firms.

But broadband alone is not the only catalyst. More productive remote and field working has been achieved through falling mobile costs and charges, coupled with the growth of mobile data services (GPRS and HSCSD), and mobile data devices such as smartphones, PDAs, and email pagers such as RIM's BlackBerry.

Companies are already turning to these services to help staff work away from the office, on either a temporary or permanent basis, to reduce office space requirements and costs, and improve the staff's standard of living and their overall wellbeing.

It can also boost productivity. For example, companies with staff who need to remain on-call to fix problems don't need their employees to be sitting in an office to monitor systems and take calls.

The system can be re-routed to home or another location easily and cheaply, using forwarding and secure remote access or even voice-over IP technology.

One company already working this way is IP Integration, a medium-sized business consultancy practice formed in the mid-1990s following the management buyout of a consulting arm of Cable & Wireless.

IP Integration advises clients - from blue-chip companies such as Halifax and successful startups such as online and telephone stockbroking service Stocktrade, to local government bodies and NHS Trusts - how best to set up and install systems such as telecoms, data and call centre networks.

In 2001, IP Integration had a turnover of £5m, and it now relies heavily on remote access technology to allow most of its 65 staff to work from the field or from home.

IP Integration has offices in Edinburgh and Reading, with about 35 project managers, software associates and consulting engineers working from disparate locations nationwide, plus an itinerant sales force of 18.

Having access to business email and important files from home, while on the move or when working from different office locations, is vital to the way the company's staff work.

This is particularly important because for some of the key systems IP Integration provides to its clients, such as call centre technology, its project managers need to be on call for clients 24/7.

And they need comprehensive access to information held on IP Integration's servers for as long as they are on-call. By using IP-based virtual private network (IP-VPN) technology from networking provider Netscalibur, the company has been able to accommodate these flexible ways of working in an affordable and hassle-free way.

Rather than having to build expensive proprietary networks, VPNs allow secure access to company networks securely over the public internet at a fraction of the cost - from £130 a month, in the case of the system bought by IP Integration.

At the same time, these networks are flexible and scalable, allowing even new users to access company networks securely with a minimum of fuss.

And outsourcing the management of these systems means network performance and security can be monitored constantly by skilled internet services professionals, freeing up companies such as IP Integration to concentrate on their core business.

"While we could manage an IP-VPN ourselves, what our software engineers want to concentrate on is consulting and delivering value to our clients," says Dave Glasgow, managing director of IP Integration. "A managed IP-VPN service frees up their time to do this.

"When our engineers work at a client's office and need to obtain a software patch we use in the office to make system repairs, they want to know that they can get it quickly and securely, using a VPN that operates over the public internet.

"This not only makes us more responsive, but also gives our sales teams and engineers wider reach, and makes them more productive."

FURTHER READING:

www.gmb.org.uk

www.smf.co.uk

Flexible hours don't have to mean trouble