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SMEs snubbing homeworking
'If you're not in the office, you're not working'

By Gemma Simpson

Published: Tuesday 03 July 2007

SMEs are lagging behind larger companies when it comes to embracing flexible working practices such as working from home.

Only 43 per cent of SMEs have the technology in place to support homeworking, compared to 76 per cent of large companies, research reveals.

Only one-fifth of SMEs - those companies with no more than 500 employees - said they are likely to introduce technologies over the next three years to facilitate remote or homeworking, compared with more than half of large companies, according to the study commissioned by Citrix Online.

Caroline Jones, an analyst for Gartner, told silicon.com: "The trend started in large enterprises and to some extent that's where it has stayed."

Jones said while larger companies benefit from economies of scale when setting up work-from-home practices, SMEs do not.

She added SMEs also have the flexibility to set up shop in less congested regions where the daily commute takes less time and therefore working from home is less essential, when compared with larger companies.

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But the type of work an SME undertakes may also not be suitable for homeworking.

Mark Beattie, head of IT for waste management company LondonWaste, told silicon.com: "LondonWaste is a pretty old fashioned business in that we handle waste and this type of activity does not lend itself to typical homeworking solutions."

LondonWaste has provided less than half-a-dozen of its managers within its 450-strong workforce with laptops and a further 25 PDAs have been dished out to employees.

Beattie said: "I still feel that many SMEs look at someone not in the office as not really working. Remote solutions make it much harder to measure productivity."

Jones added an SME employee's job spec can be less well defined when compared with staff from a larger company and it can therefore be difficult to measure productivity.