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Updated: 2007-06-25 11:20

Sandy Liang is the mother of a four-year-old girl living in Guangzhou. Like many others in the city, she gets up at seven in the morning and drives her daughter to her kindergarten before she gets to work. But that's where the similarity ends.

Unlike others, who sweat through hours of traffic jams from the school to work, Sandy enters her "private office" by eight, takes a quick shower, fixes herself a coffee, snuggles into a plush settee and starts working at home.

"Before I chose to work from home, I would usually have to spend two hours on traffic every day," Liang says. "But now, I can freely arrange my own work schedule and work for hours without disruption."

As the diversity leader of the human resources department of IBM's Greater China Group, Liang's job is to promote the development of IBM's female employees, create equal opportunities for all kinds of talent, and further IBM's flexible work programs.

Every day, Liang makes calls to IBM's departmental bosses and other employees across the Asia-Pacific region to liaise with them on her work and reports the progress to her boss, who is located in Beijing.

"I go back to office about once every month because I don't want to lose touch with my colleagues in Guangzhou, although my work is not directly related to them," Liang says.

In IBM's Chinese arm, Liang's experience is shared by many through the flexible work program, which includes working at home, working part-time, a mobile work program, leave of absence program and an individualized work schedule program.

Since it was first introduced in China in 2001, two-thirds of IBM's 9,000 employees in the country have joined the flexible work program, eliminating from their lives the strict restrictions of time and location that comes with conventional jobs.

Through these flexible programs, IBM wants to encourage its employees to find a schedule and atmosphere that best fit the nature of their work and personal needs, thus increasing their productivity and earning their loyalty.

"Flexible work programs enable us to pay more attention to individual needs of IBM employees and help us attract and retain more talents" Liang says.

Quiet revolution

Since the mid '90s, working from home has become an everyday part of modern employment practices in all major industrial countries. There's increasing evidence that a similar revolution is underway in China.

Horizon Research Consultancy Group, a Beijing-based research company, released a SOHO (small office-home office) report in 2004, saying the number of people who work from home in Beijing has reached 188,000. Others have reported that the number has crossed 1 million in the capital and 700,000 in Shanghai.

"Few figures are available from government or other researchers that could give us a comprehensive picture of just how many Chinese people are working from home," says Shen Min, an analyst from Horizon Research Consultancy Group, who is responsible for the SOHO report. "But as an emerging trend, it's gaining enough momentum to make it difficult to ignore its impact."

Most Chinese people actually got their first taste of working from home in 2003, when SARS struck, forcing office-goers to lock themselves up at home and connect with colleagues through the phone and Internet. The increasing mass application of new technologies such as VoIP and WiFi in recent years has only reinforced the status of remote working as a real alternative.

"Advances in information technology have made it possible to work remotely from a central office while staying in touch with colleagues, lowering costs and increasing efficiency," says Liu Bin, chief analyst of research house BDA China.

Cost-cutting

Although the trend toward home working is undeniably fueled by technology and employee demand, proactive employer initiative driven by business needs is equally important.

Brian Prentice, research director of Gartner who is responsible for emerging trends and technologies research, said the cost of real estate and growing traffic worries are the main driving forces behind the trend of more people opting to work from home, and more companies obliging them.

"If you can reduce the size of your office space through things like 'hoteling', it's a direct cost saving," he says. "And if you can expand into new geographies without incurring excessive facilities cost, that's also a great opportunity."

In fact, as a new way of cost-cutting, many companies have begun to see the work-from-home model as a secret weapon in the fierce labor market competition. Hewlett-Packard, for example, plans to shut down nine local offices in China by the end of this year. All employees of these offices will be ordered to work at home full-time, with necessary equipment such as laptops and printers provided by the company."

"Although we will eliminate nine offices in China, we plan to penetrate into 50 to 100 new cities in the country this year," says Maggie Gu, Senior PR manager of China HP Corporate Communications. "The success of the plan relies heavily on our ability to encourage local employees to work at home. The money saved on office maintenance will be invested in marketing campaigns."

With similar cost-cutting practices around the world, HP has saved some $200 million from its office operation, or 0.2 percent of the company's annual revenue in 2006. Its target is to cut costs by another $200 million each year until 2008.

A long way to go

Although working from home is a clear future trend, the fact is, it does have its pros and cons. Those who take this route do gain some freedom in terms of work time make certain sacrifices such as potential promotion opportunities, and run the risk of an estrangement that comes with the physical distance between them and their bosses.

Tim Dwelly and Yvonne Bennion from Work Foundation, a not-for-profit organization, said in a report titled "Time to go home" in 2003 that effective home working requires a true partnership between the employer and the employee.

"Home working requires employees' contributions to be measured by their output rather than by the number of hours they spend at work," the report said. "But most companies have not started to review attitudes to output versus hours ... The assumption is that if the work is completed before time, there must be another task to be done."

Gartner's Prentice also says the "supervisor" mindset of many managers could be a real hurdle to future home working. "A major issue is that managements need to learn how to manage people without physical proximity."

Yvonne Wang, senior human resources manager of Microsoft China, contends that working from home has a greater symbolic meaning than its real impact. "Our employees feel more comfortable in the knowledge that they have the right to work at home if there is a need," she says. "But that won't see an instant flood of people wanting to work from home."

Although it's happening, working from home is far from becoming an established model in China. But experts say that as competition in cost saving and staffing gets stiffer, more major companies will begin to take home working more seriously.

"Our office in Shanghai will move away from the city center later this month. I think it could be a good chance to further promote our flexible work program," says IBM's Liang.