While some managers may be reluctant to let their staff work from home, the number of companies offering Home Computing Initiatives (HCI) schemes to employees has more than tripled in the past year (says a Silicon.com article). More than 1,250 organisations have implemented schemes, up from 380 at the same time last year, with increasing numbers of small and medium-sized businesses now beginning to participate.
I didn’t think 1,250 was particularly impressive – until I read that: "nearly half a million employees have acquired home computing equipment through HCI schemes so far". That’s pretty good going by anybody’s estimation.
A Royal Mail spokesman says the scheme has been tremendously successful in his organisation, "so much so that we believe there would be an outcry from our employees if we thought about stopping it."
The only reason I quote this remark is to say that we often hear similar things about adoption of construction collaboration technologies – usually something along the lines of "I would never want to go back to the old way of managing documents and drawings on a project". Contrary to the view sometimes expressed that people are happy working the way they are, it shows technologies can get an overwhelmingly enthusiastic reception from end-users.
