Small Business Labs

Good Advice on Working From Home

I saw two good articles on working from home yesterday. Is Working at Home Right for You does a nice job outlining the key issues one should consider prior to deciding to work from home.  

The one item they left out is loneliness, which is interesting because it's the single biggest complaint about working from home we hear in our research. People miss the human interaction and social aspects of work.

There's also a professional aspect to this. They miss the business networking opportunities that come from being in an office environment.  

People planning to work from home should think through how they are going to deal with both social and business isolation. Working at a coworking space is one approach.  

The Five Biggest Distractions When Working From Home covers the results of a Regus survey on this topic. It covers the key distractions quite nicely.

I work from home and would write more about distractions, but I have to walk the dog and then watch a re-run of Get Smart on TV.

The State of Telework in the U.S.

One of our main "go to" sources for insights and information on distributed work is the Telework Research Network, run by Kate Lister and Tom Hamish.  In addition to deep knowledge on the topic, they are also data intensive - much appreciated here at Small Business Labs. 

So we were very excited to read through their latest research report -  The State of Telework in the U.S.  It describes who's teleworking and why they are teleworking.  In addition to insights and analysis, the report is full of interesting data.

The key finding is surprisingly few people consider their home their primary workplace.  Only 2.9 million employees (2.3% of the workforce) consider their home their primary place of work. 

Because a study objective was to understand employer and employee telework patterns, self-employed are excluded from this data. 

A much larger group - 24% of employed Americans - do some work from home.  But I think this is also surprisingly low. 

Given the clear benefits of telework (outlined in the report), these numbers are disappointing in addition to being surprising.  So get out there and tell your bosses and employees to telework more:)!

About.com's Reasons Why Teleworking Belongs in Your Future is an excellent summary of the report and the Telework Research Network blog is a must read for those interested in this topic.

Inc. on Home-Based Businesses

Inc. Magazine has a special section on home-based businesses.  Several articles and lots of good stuff on the topic:

1.  9 Businesses You Can Start in Your Pajamas profiles 9 different home-based businesses.

2.  How to Make a Million in Your Pajamas covers the growing ranks of home-based entrepreneurs and discusses two very interesting home businesses.  One is a clothing company that has over 50 part-time and contract employees, the other creates digital maps. 

3.  Essential Tools for Every Home Office is a slide show of cool tools and equipment that make home offices more productive.  I'm definitely looking into Idea Paint (pictured below).  It turns walls into white boards.  

 
 
For more on home-based businesses, see our research report Homepreneurs:  A Vital Economic Force, which is referenced in the Inc. articles.

Home Businesses and Their Employees

Based on questions and feedback we are getting on the homepreneur study, the finding that roughly half of homepreneurs have employees seems to be the most surprising result.

We weren't surprised by these results, mainly because we were surprised by this years ago when we first started researching home-based businesses.  Over the years our conversations, interviews and surveys of home-based business owners have consistently shown that a high percentage are employers. 

While there haven't been a lot of recent studies on home-based businesses, others have shown similar results.  The Council of Smaller Enterprises (COSE), a Cleveland-based small business support organization, released an excellent study on home-based businesses about a year ago.  They surveyed their home-based business members.  We posted on the study when it was released. 

The most interesting overlap across the two studies was the number of home-based businesses with employees.  The COSE survey (mostly northern Ohio COSE members ) and the SBSI survey (national) both found that about half of home-based businesses have employees. 

The SBA study referenced in the homepreneur report - Startup Business Characteristics - also supports the data on employer home-based businesses. 

The trends driving the growth of homepreneurs are strong.  We expect to see their numbers and the number of people they employ to outgrow the overall economy in the coming years.