‘Homeworking’ just hit a bit of a benchmark throughout the region.
Britain doesn’t do extreme weather very well and, unless you really like risk, using a car wasn’t a great choice in the worst snow the North West has seen for decades. First thing this morning, public transport websites were crashing faster than a philandering golfer.
Like many Manchester PR agencies, Citypress employs a number of people who live in the city centre. Without the need to consult confusing fake social media sites for travel information, the biggest barrier to those commuting on foot was trying to avoid dozens of people shuffling through the slippery conditions, looking at their feet while shouting ‘Yeah, it’s really snowing!’ into a ‘phone.
In the suburbs it’s safe to say that the email subject line ‘working from home’ was quite popular. A high percentage of employees in the region put the kettle on and took their technological connectivity for granted, answering emails with one thumb while stirring their tea.
At the beginning of the last decade, not being at your desk meant more disruption. Putting in calls to clients, ‘getting stuff in your book’ and writing press releases – on a PC if you were one of the 30 per cent of households sporting a home computer 10 years ago (compared to almost 80 per cent at the end of the ‘noughties’).*
You would even have been able to email your work to the office via dial-up if you were among the 10 per cent of early adopters who had an internet connection. Even then, sending anything larger than a web document took hours, a stark contrast to this morning when everyone on Twitter had posted a picture of their road/car/balcony/driveway by 8am.
None of these things are a modern concern for the snowed in PR person. ‘Working from home’ is such a seamless transition that we barely think about what impact, if any, it will have on our ability to do our jobs or for clients to contact us. Direct telephone lines re-routed, smartphones in hand, you don’t really even need a desk.
Of course this is all totally relevant if you work for a PR agency in Manchester and absolutely no use at all if you’re a bus driver.
*Office for National Statistics
Dial up connectivity was just downright unpleasant.
Then again, I remember posting press releases and using fax machines.