What job roles are more inherently or structurally inflexible?
I recently attended a symposium on flexible working which really explored how many different ways one can make a job more flexible in terms of either times of day/week worked or location worked (http://blogs.technet.com/brucelynn/archive/2009/05/21/who-benefits.aspx). The discussion begged the question posted here. For starters, we came up with job tighly linked to large capital equipment (eg. airline pilots, developers on CAD/CAM). I am working extensively in the area of helping companies become more flexible in their workforce and workplace practices and I am keen to look at the toughest roles to make flexible to test the principles and capabilities of many of the approaches and tools.
Answers (1)
In addtion to your capital equipment concept there's lots of other infexible job categories e.g:-
Blue Collar Jobs - Making Products, Fixing Products e.g. constuction, car repair,
Retail - the store is open from 08:00 - 18:00 in location x, and whilst individuals will be on a rota they still need to be there on that time.
Hospitality - bars, restaurants, coffe shops, similar to retail really
Basically any organisation where customers come to them is always going to be more constrained depending on the level of the employee. Clearly an area manager supervising 15 coffee shops is going to have much more diary and location flexibility than the barrista working in the store at the end of the road.
If we turn our attention to jobs that I categorise as "pushing buttons and talking to customers" and yes I happily put most high-tech business into that segment ;-) then I think the opportunities for location independent working are that much greater especially perhaps in the SME segment with the right tools, such as VoIP & IM and mobile devices / mobile broadband.
Call Centres are the classic exception to the 'pushing buttons and talking to customers' rule - yes there are some great companies that have diversified call centres into virtual call centres, but that's usually where the agent is on a commission / self-employed so they are monetarily rewarded by taking the call (tech support / adult services are a couple of std. examples). The classic factory farm (sorry call centre) for a Bank or Insurance agent still needs agents to turn up on site at the rota'd time to do their shift, and I'd be surprised to see if much changes in that segment over the next 5 years.
It's funny though how the 'presenteeism' still applies in some hi-tech businesses, and if you're not in the office, nor known to be a customer x then "what are you doing / where are you" can be a commonly asked question. I think you might be surprised about how much some of those concepts are still held dear by managers outside companies on the bleeding edge such as yourselves, RIM etc.
Putting yourself in an environment where you're away from the day to day for an hour or two, to either work on a specific project/report etc or just some time to think strategically about the business can work wonders.
