Are Home Workers Out Of Their Tree?

By 2012 5.5 million people in the UK will be working from home, according to the latest research from the Future Laboratory, commissioned by Microsoft.   

A big number for sure, but only a relatively small proportion of the 91% interviewed who said they’d rather escape the office to work from home, or perhaps outdoors.

Outdoors working is one thing, but unless global warming takes a dramatic turn for the worse, you’d have to be out of your proverbial to set up office in an open plan tree house.  But that’s not stopped Microsoft from doing just that to show off the advantages of mobile working! 

If you want to find out more, then head over to their blog at http://moof.mobi/, which at time of writing seems to have fallen out of its tree with a server error, but will hopefully be back up by the time you read this.

Although treeworking is unlikely to catch on, this story does highlight a serious trend.  Only last week HSBC announced it expected half (4,000) of its Canary Wharf HQ staff to be working from home or on the road by 2014.

Alex is the founder and editor of SmallBizPod, the UK's first podcast dedicated to small business, start-ups and entrepreneurship. Alex writes about topical small business issues, entrepreneurs and anything else that catches his eye here on the small business blog. http://www.smallbizpod.co.uk