Earlier this month, Philippine’s president Rodrigo R. Duterte signed legislation providing a legal framework for working-from-home (WFH) for private enterprise.
Earlier this month, Philippine’s president Rodrigo R. Duterte signed legislation providing a legal framework for working-from-home (WFH) for private enterprise.
Partially the initiative is a recognition of the long commute times due to Metro Manila traffic congestion.
The Department of Labour and Employment (DOLE) is tasked to run a pilot program, in reality the more progressive outsourcing companies (BPOs) are already offering working from home as part of employment benefits, while some are more resistant to the concept.
My opinion? It’s intellectually lazy to dismiss remote working. Working-from-home increases organisational agility and resilience…but you have to design for it. At Bricoleur we’ve adopted a distributed model yet have the flexibility to provide office space where this is important to our managed service/outsourcing clients in the Philippines.
Working from home has been the normal way of working for thousands of years, while the modern office is less than 100 years old. It may turn out that the modern open plan office is the fad, and that WFH is the sustainable model (i.e. the Lindy Effect in action). Time will tell.
Certainly a long commute in any country diminishes quality of life on a whole range of levels.
