Lancashire County Council adopted widespread flexible
working two years ago.
The council has 40,000 staff and 2,400 different premises and its
IT department has a budget of about £40m a year.
Rick Wood, Lancashire County Council ICT manager, said the council
introduced flexible working to increase productivity, retain staff,
reduce absenteeism, improve employee relations with managers and
boost staff self-esteem.
"Even within a single team staff can have quite different virtual
workplace requirements, so a range of flexible working products and
services were required," he said.
"For instance, in social services, some employees need immediate
GPRS access after assessments are made, but others can wait to make
changes to case files or send recommendations from home using
dial-up or from 'touch points' spread across council
buildings."
Wood said the council carried out its own research into the
technology required by staff working out of the office before they
became widely marketed and taken up elsewhere.
"Once staff start coming to you demanding new technologies, you are
in a difficult situation as they usually want them next
week."
One technology used to support flexible working is a data service
staff can access over a dial-up connection.
Four hundred staff use this system currently, but one department
has already asked how much it would cost to transfer another 600
staff to the system. "We worked out that it would cost about £1.8m
a year," Wood said,
"The department wants us to see if we can get this cost down, and
we will. But theoretically, it costs about £3.3m a year to keep 600
staff permanently in an office, so you can see the potential
advantages of flexible working."
Technology used at Lancashire
- Blackberry wireless e-mail devices
- Vodafone GPRS laptop data cards
- Multi-location dial-up
- Outlook e-mail web access from remote locations
- ISDN from home
- Fixed point-to-point wireless links between buildings
- Touch-point centres consisting of clusters of networked PCs for
mobile staff in council buildings
- ADSL broadband from home from Telewest.