If you’re self-employed and work from home you might well be able to get away without an office by logging onto your laptop at the kitchen table, or in my case my bedroom or small studio I rent. But what about if you have a company of 20 employees? Is it always possible and efficient to work without an office?
Just heard BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour asking this very question and while I don’t have 20 employees, I’ve just helped arrange my group show with nine other photographers – it’s currently showing at the Elephant & Castle shopping centre – and this way of working independently at home is completely normal for everyone who took part. We organised the show together through email, our Google-group, phone calls, texts, Skype, and meetings in the space. We’re all used to working alone, most of us do freelance work, and we like to stay in touch with each other digitally. We often look at each others’ blogs to to see where we’re all at with our work. It’s proved a very efficient and flexible way of working. The exhibition was a great success and I’m on Radio Resonance FM, London, talking about my work soon.
As I mentioned, I also rent a small space in a studio and with 20 other artists and photographers based in the same building, I’m in the process of organising our next Open Studio weekend, for the first weekend in July. Our Open Studio is a chance to open our doors to the public and show the work we’re currently making. Again, we’re organising it via email, we’ve done it this way before and the show’s always been a success. The one downside is, there’s a lot of emails shuttling back and forth and a lot of needless prattle.
I work freelance for a large publisher based in New York, and last week found myself hesitating whether to take a call at 11pm on Saturday night, which was only 6pm in New York. Would you have taken it? Or perhaps, like me, you would have waited till Monday. The downside to working at home, often alone, is that pressure is not dispersed equally among a group or a team – it’s all falls on your own shoulders. Often that pressure comes out in other ways though: in this case late night emails and irate calls on Monday.
Another downside I’ve discovered working at home is this: if I’d taken that call at 11pm, an important division between work and home would have dissolved. I spoke to my editor about it just now. He also works at home in isolation, hence the 11pm call. Thankfully we both agreed 11pm was too late and the weekend’s sacrosant. But that’s just me and him, and I get the feeling the boundaries are also slipping for a lot of people.
Posted 9 months ago with 0 notesTags: My writing
