Snow for a better Britain

I’ve just walked down to our local shops and the first thing I noticed was fewer cars on the roads and in the normally packed car park. The school is closed, but the kids are still around, it’s just that they’re sledging down the adjacent hill rather than in the classrooms, and why not, the problem is that the teachers can’t get here!

It’s a funny thing, but I found myself interacting with the people around me, you know, greeting other walkers as we passed and generally talking about whatever comes to mind. It’s probably one of those adversity effects, bringing us closer together by sharing a problem, but it also seemed that everyone was in less of a hurry, kind of resigned to a slower pace of life.

Something about the snow deadening the sound, and it’s effect on the speed of any remaining traffic, made everything appear more peaceful, a strange sensation considering the underlying chaos being reported in the news.

But much of the chaos is associated with the working lives of the Nation. Both my partner and I used to commute over 50 miles a day. I can still remember saving holiday, snow days, for when the weather sprung nasty surprised like this, and although Clare was lucky with snow, she fell foul of flooding and spend a whole day getting home one Easter.

But now I work from home and she works at a local company only a 12 minute walk away. This took a radical reshaping of our lifestyle, but we’re in the position of being able to save a lot of money and view the weather with ambivalence.

This lead me to question whether more people could work in a remote distributed manner, at least part of the time, developing this practice so that when events made travel dangerous they could continue with their routine, not having to worry about childcare for example.

I’ve had colleagues that viewed working from home with the same enthusiasm as they would a prison sentence, and for those maybe local satellite offices, or shared work spaces would be a better option.

More work can be done remotely than most companies care to admit, but that still leaves those not employed in offices.

Would more people be willing to move closer to their workplace if relocating weren’t so expensive? I’m not sure, but it seems logical to me that those being relocated would have more incentive if their expenses were dependent on their proximity to work, companies do pay relocation don’t they?

This is my view of the future of work in Britain, obviously coloured by all my commuting prejudices, but it’ll need better digital connectivity and a rise in fuel costs to be realised. Clearly I think it’d be a change for the better… I’m not sure everyone would agree.