With the manufactured fuel crisis looming this week, I feel it's a good time to have a debate about working from home.

My own opinion is that most people who commute to an office to push virtual paper about, send and receive emails and answer the phone could quite easily do their jobs at home via the interwebs. Obviously, some people do need to be in an office or place of work to do their jobs, but many really do not.

The benefits I can see from employers encouraging home workers are a better work/life balance, fewer people on the roads in rush hour, and savings in time and fuel. I think teleworking's time has come.

I'm sure there are disbenefits, so please outline them below.

Good idea, let's get all the bus and train drivers, surgeons and hospitality staff to work remotely.

Now, don't be silly.

I don't know about "most", but certainly a lot of people could benefit from working from home at least some of time.

There's nothing I can do in the office that I can't do better at home, except for physically maintaining the network by plugging things in. Unfortunately, the powers that be like to know where you are and what you're doing.

I get so much more work done at home where I'm not constantly being interrupted by various people bloody gossiping all the time...

Data security and the goalposts continually moving make it just a dream for me, so I voted cake...

I could work from home about 1/2 the time but my boss is old fashioned and wants to see "bums on seats"

The team opposit me have a more enlightened boss so they can work from home

I want work at home WITH cake.

One of the big benefits of work from home is good coffee and cake(for those still alive. \portal)

Less gossip, can concentrate better, so probably more productive. There has to be some trust that you will do the job.

In my current role I could easily work from home as all the work I do comes from an electronic work list and all the applications I require to do my job are web-based.

However, my current role changes as frequently as the wind blows so if I got moved onto another stream, such as letters & forms I would need to be in the office for data security reasons.

It's certainly very job specific. The stuff we do here isn't really feasible to do from home as it would require each agent to have a massive amount of storage space full of various laptops and in turn cost the company a hell of a lot more in terms of providing all of these laptops when at the moment we just have two large double cupboards.

I could certainly do a fair portion of my job from home, with a little bit of tinkering to set things up. I've actually asked in the past but been refused. If the petrol tanker driver strike does happen, I might use it as a test case to show it's perfectly feasible then push for it again. Petrol is actually my second largest household expense after my mortgage.

If they allowed her to work from home, my wife could do a lot more hours for her company than she is doing.
They won't allow it, even though there's no technical reason why they can't. They're just not forward thinking.

All of my office work I could do at home, but I can't service trains from home

I think working from home has a lot going for it, but here's some of the reasons Dad wasn't happy when the MOD tried to persuade a number of the people in his to work from home:
- Kids are distracting during holidays/mid afternoon
- It's too easy to keep working into the evening and not get paid for it
- It's also too easy to wander about the house and potter about doing other jobs
- No separation from work and home life
- There wasn't really enough room in the house
- Increased cost of bills (power & heating, phone calls, etc.)
- Increased security risk (contents insurance went up)

I always find my IT at home is a lot easier to work with, bigger/more screens, etc. but I generally find it hard to get motivated at home.

Also add - which is why I would not like to perminantly work from home
- Lack of interaction esp when I lived alone - without work I could easily have gone a couple of days without actually speaking to anyone (don't count e-mails / MSchat as speaking)
- Ideally I would like to work at home a couple of days a week and could easily organise meetings etc around that

Alas my job would be all but impossible to do from home, at least until I pull together the funding for the Evil Genius/Scientist Lair(TM) and I haven't even managed to find a suitable hollowed out volcano yet.

I like (for the most part) the interaction I have with people at work so working from home would be very insular in my view. Video conferencing and e-mail simply can't beat being in the same physical location as another human being. Plus, I'm sure I'd find too many other things that I 'could just do for a few minutes' that would probably end up taking up most of the work day. I also like the fact that when I leave work that it's done for the day and isn't generally something I could just nip upstairs to finish something.

Having said that, for the right person and the right job I can see the attraction. I'm just not wild about letting work through the front door of my home.

Yes, all of these plus - as hifidelity2 mentioned - the lack of social interaction. You have to be very disciplined to overcome all these obstacles. I've been working from home as a freelancer for a long time and I am going to try an get a job outside the home, like normal folk.