The Evolving Nature of Working at Home. More and more people are getting to work without going to work. Instead of commuting to a corporate workspace, they’re staying at home in their own space. Instead of separating their work lives from their home lives, they’re blending them, or trying to. Instead of thinking of work as a place where they go, they’re seeing it as something they do.

Working from home, once stigmatized as peripheral or reserved for the self-employed, is now a mainstream reality for many types of workers, including those whose employers, for a variety of reasons, are either encouraging or mandating it. As a new kind of work habitat, the home is the unexpected office of the future, increasingly accepted as a viable, even preferable, workplace alternative.

In addition to changing the meaning of the home office, this blending of work and home is also changing the meaning of work itself. With mobile technology readily available, “office” space is no longer relegated to a spare room or basement enclave, and “work” is no longer limited to employment-related tasks. All kinds of other work—from paying bills and tracking investments to scheduling appointments and doing homework—takes place in homes where computers are always nearby and family members have easy access to them.

A Blackburn Young Office Solutions research project involving 250 home-office workers from across the United States shows them, on average, working in 2.4 different locations around the home. Eighty-seven percent work in their home offices, 65 percent work in the living room/family room, and 48 percent work in the bedroom. Forty-three percent of women work from the kitchen counter; 33 percent of men do.1 In short, the home office, enabled and untethered by technology, has expanded its reach throughout the home, reflecting the ongoing blurring of the lines that separate home life from work life.

A Rising Tide of At-Home Office Workers

The numbers behind this back-to-the-home movement confirm its rising significance. According to national research firm IDC, there are more than 30 million home-based businesses in the United States², enterprises headed by independent contractors, entrepreneurs, salespeople, and others. Teleworkers—corporate personnel who work from home and elsewhere using remote-access technologies to stay connected—continue to increase in numbers.

In 2006, corporate teleworkers numbered 12.4 million in the U.S., an increase of 10 percent over 2005.³ Eighty-four of Fortune magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” provide telecommuting opportunities; in 1998, only 18 did.⁴ CoreNet Global estimates that by 2010, just 40 percent of all work will be done in corporate facilities. The remaining work will be done at home (40 percent) and outside the office or home (20 percent).⁵

The number of mobile workers, including home workers, also continues to grow internationally. IDC predicts that the number of worldwide mobile workers will reach 1 billion by 2011.⁶ Japan’s number will increase the most to nearly 80 percent of the workforce, up from 53 percent in 2006. The distribution of mobile workers across Europe varies according to region, with high levels in northern countries (e.g., the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Finland) and considerably lower levels in southern countries (e.g., Portugal, Greece, Italy.)⁷

Forty-six percent of British firms offer workers the opportunity of teleworking; in 2004, just 11 percent did.⁸ A 2008 IDC survey showed that 81 percent of the Asia Pacific executives believe that telecommuting improves productivity, up from 61 percent in 2005. The increase in a positive attitude toward telecommuting was also evident in Hong Kong, Australia, and India. Seventy-six percent of those surveyed in the People’s Republic of China saw telecommuting as a means of improving work/life balance; in Singapore, 78 percent did.

Telecommuting owes much of this ongoing rise in popularity to the continuing improvements in technology. Increasingly mobile and capable technology keeps at-home workers connected with the main office, colleagues, customers, and the world. The number of teleworkers using a broadband connection at home increased by more than 45 percent in 2006, following a 65 percent rise in 2005.⁹

Web 2.0, which shifts applications and data storage from the desktop to the Web, enhances information sharing and collaboration and minimizes the chance of data lost in a computer crash. Social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are also serving as business-networking sites. Virtual worlds like Second Life are bringing people, including business people, together in cyberspace. Wikis, blogs, open source databases, easier and cheaper forms of IP (Internet Protocol) telephony, more robust VPN (Virtual Private Network) software—all these and more can help make the home just as suited for work as most any office cubicle.