Do you wanna build a snowman?!

For the majority of our clients and candidates Wednesday morning was just another cold winter’s day. However those of us in West Yorkshire were experiencing a somewhat less pleasant winter phenomenon – snow! Now ask any of us here what we think of our office and I think all of us would say that we love it – a large, bright mill conversion with views over the Pennines, for those of us who have worked in city centres it is a wonderful change. However, the perks of being in a lovely location and a stunning office soon become less positive as soon as the snow comes down. And believe me, on Wednesday morning it certainly came down! Within the space of an hour we were well and truly snowed in. The roads were blocked, buses had stopped running and schools were closed and still the snow came down heavily. It was at this point that we realised we needed to get home whilst we still could otherwise it would have been a case of camping in the office!

And this is where the point of my blog really begins…the decision to leave the office and work from home was easy. We are fully set up to work remotely from any computer, tablet or phone anywhere in world! We can access our emails, database, documents and desk tops with ease and with our work mobiles and office phones on divert we are able to work just as effectively from home as we are in the office. Within half an hour of leaving the office we were all logged in from the safety of home, able to fully concentrate on the afternoon ahead rather than sitting in the office panicking about how we were getting home. This is the beauty of modern technology, being able to work from the comfort of home whilst still having full access to everything that you would in the office. I have lost count of the number of times that I sat in an office in the centre of Leeds knowing that the snow was bad on the Pennines and praying that I would be allowed to leave early and work from home so as to avoid being snowed out! I also remember many hairy journeys after such days, desperately trying to get home from a relatively snow free city centre to find deep snow covering the roads near home leading to abandoning the car and walking home! Home working is an easy solution to this issue – once home you are set up just as you would be in the office and can work much more effectively knowing that you are safe and warm and don’t have a terrible journey home ahead of you!

In some fields there is still something of a stigma attached to home working, the idea that if you are not being supervised then you are going to work less effectively (or not at all!). However more and more of our clients are realising just how productive home working can be, indeed one such client practically encourages solicitors to work from home only going into the office when needed to see clients, attend meetings etc. I am not sure if working from home permanently is necessarily the answer but certainly having the option to work from home makes life so much easier and this is something that people are slowly coming round to. With our clients, flexibility regarding home working sometimes means the difference between using a good locum and a fantastic locum – allowing someone to work four days in the office and one from home where they are fully set up to access everything they need in order to work just as they would in the office.

With the technology that we have today a snow day shouldn’t bring things to a standstill. Home working is something that I think we need to embrace, and on a cold, snowy Wednesday it was the perfect solution for the Temporis Team!!