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Hello, and welcome to the second of three Sustain IT Podcasts brought to you by The Independent, in association with BT. I'm Roger Trapp, and I write about management issues for The Independent, and with me is my colleague, Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor for The Independent on Sunday. This time we're going to talk about flexible working; to what extent technology has led to a change in work patterns, and how much this has benefitted business and the economy.

One of the things I think is interesting is the way that technology has advanced so quickly, and the flexibility it provides; alongside that, is the fact that managers have to become much more flexible in what they expect from workers and to acknowledge that people perhaps might work at different times, and there are also concerns, of course, about people worrying about the fact that the technology means that you're always available and as a result the day is lengthened. I think that there is a lot of evidence to say that that is down to people being able to control it themselves and that they just need to learn to manage their time in the same way that they do anything else.

I think it depends what you do, if you're self-employed like me, you work all the hours God sends, but yes, I'm sure managements will always think people can be skiving by staying at home. I've been a home worker myself now for sixteen years, and there's pros and cons.

Yes, but the technology in that time has developed quite a lot.

Oh, quite extraordinarily. I mean, I remember when the fax machine came in, and I first used it in 1986 to send something to the states and someone was absolutely bewildered at the other end by this new piece of technology, and that's only what, little more than twenty years ago, and already it's startlingly obsolete. It does make it much easier to work from home in a way, particularly the Internet, to research from home makes it much more possible than it ever used to be; you don't have to rely on an old newspaper cuttings library, although in some ways those were easier to work with! But, it's much more possible to research things wherever you are, thanks to these new technologies.

And what about with your area of expertise, what's the effect on the environment?

Well obviously you know, I'm saving X commutes a week, and so is everybody else that stays at home. Presumably, also the savings on heating and things the more people live at home because it takes less to heat a house than it does to heat a huge whacking great office.

Yes. Well there is this statistic out that says that the average cost of an office is £7,000 per desk, per year, so.

So why don't managements just give their workers £3,500 a year each, to work at home, and save themselves £3,500, and then everybody's happy?

Yes. But the other aspect I think of the commute, and working from home is that around the big cities there are all these commuter towns that have grown up which are sort of emptied during the day, and commuting is quite a recent phenomenon, made possible by the railways really, so maybe it's not impossible to think that we might go back to more people working from home.

It's quite easy to see how a sort of de-centralizing philosophy is moving back into public life. I mean, the conservatives for example, I was quite surprised, it's really the root of their being at the centre of the new conservative party, they're very strong on it. They're very keen on generating energy at home, through solar panels and the like, but it fits into this sort of small-scale view they have of a much more de-centralised society than the one we've got, and that's interesting. I hadn't expected that.

Well that's it for this time, I'm Roger Trapp, and with me was Geoffrey Lean. Join us again next time, when we shall be talking about technology and the future.

That was a download from The Independent, in association with BT. A video of this presentation can be seen here: http://youtube.com/watch...