collision detection: Stigma of the home office vanishing

September 27, 2007

Stigma of the home office vanishing

Do you work from home? When you answer the phone, do you try to pretend you're at an "office" -- or do you let your colleagues know where you are? Marci Alboher wrote an interesting trend story in today's New York Times claiming that work-from-home entrepreneurs are increasingly candid about the fact that they work from home. If noise leaks in from the dog or kids in the background, it's not longer a big deal, according to the enterpreneurs that Alboher interviews, as well as this pundit:

"It is no longer a faux pas to have a life at the other end of the telephone line." Ms. Jackson said. "It can make you feel like you're dealing with a holistic person. And it is just another sign that we are moving away from the industrial age in that we no longer have two totally separate spheres called work and home."

This trend is certainly true for me. When I first started working from home in 1994, I'd go to considerable pains to disguise the fact that I was working from my crummy bedroom, because a lot of interviewees were uncomfortable with it. It didn't seem professional to them; they expected reporters to be working in some 1940s-style office tower that looked like The Daily Planet or something. But in the last few years, this bias has dropped entirely. Nobody could really care less where I am, so long as I'm on the phone.

The article offers a few reasons explaining this shift, but neglects one that I think is the most powerful: The mobile phone.

In the last five years, mobile phones have transformed the acoustic and geographic environments in which people conduct business. They, almost more than the Internet, decoupled the relationship between "work" and an "office." These days, my interviewees are half the time talking to me while they walk down the street or hang out in hotel conference hallways or ride in their diamond/titanium UFOs to their secret Arctic lairs -- so why would they care, or even notice, that I'm not working from an office too?

(The picture above is from the article -- the home-office of some Brooklyn dance company.)

Posted by Clive Thompson at September 27, 2007 02:07 PM

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Comments

I feel that the trend is almost reversing - we are now feeling a stigma for NOT working at home. Case in point: your interviewees are working from everywhere. Now that everything is digital and wireless, we work wherever and whenever we need to. To show our employers and clients that we are worth keeping around, we are pressured to make ourselves more accessible. Not that I don't love my PDA phone, but sometimes I just want to ignore it!

Posted by: s-bomb at September 27, 2007 3:34 PM

Heh -- yes! I'm trying hard to stop checking email on the weekend ...

Posted by: Clive at September 28, 2007 12:18 PM

I want a diamond/titanium UFO and a secret arctic lair.

Posted by: Bram at September 28, 2007 1:10 PM

I never realized there was any stigma with working from home. I have worked from home since 1995 and never even consider hiding the fact. And I have never noticed anyone considering it odd that I have worked from home.

Perhaps it is just the industries I work in, software development & graphic design.

Posted by: ifhere at September 28, 2007 4:00 PM

I'm a mercenary designer (and the like) since 1989 and mostly work through intermediaries, like agencies, which knew from the beginning I wasn't in some fancy cool office, if they ever cared. As you said, what they do care is I'm on the damn phone (and I never had a mobile). Tho it's in France, it may be different or, as mentioned by ifhere, it's just the culture of those kind of jobs.

The only problem I ever had with it is never getting large projects due to the fact that, even if I work with other freelances, my "structure" isn't considered reliable enough.

Posted by: gemp at September 29, 2007 12:12 PM