Let it Snow

Like most of the rest of Southern Britain, I woke up yesterday to the excitement of snow. Even as an aging adult, I still feel that frisson of excitement when I see snow falling and settling – and living in the woosey South of England, it’s the first proper snow I’ve seen for 10 years.

My kids were ecstatic, even before the news came through that their school was closed. We bundled on wellies & warm clothes and were out bundling snow at each other before breakfast. Happy days!

Now, I’d been due to be at our parent company’s Weybridge office for a series of meetings. All internal, but we were travelling because:
• We had staff from various parts of the country attending and it was reasonable central
• Sometimes it’s nice to see people face to face
• The Weybridge office has got a simply wonderful coffee machine.

With the snow, the prospect of the M25, A3, M3, ice, blizzards etc was not appealing so I did all four meetings as conference calls. My broadband line was working a treat (more that can be said for my mobile, which appeared not to enjoy the cold conditions), my VPN connected phone was working superbly, and from my desk in the study at home I could hear the sound of happy children playing and, in between the odd call, even sneaked into the garden to assist with snow man / woman / person of indeterminate gender building myself.

After a day of much documented happiness, I was left with two thoughts:
Firstly, curse this modern communication technology. 18 years ago (last time we had this much snow), I’d have been unable to get to work; conference bridges and VPNs didn’t exist and I’d have had a day of fun and a been a bit behind when the snow finally melted & I made it back to the office. Smash the spinning jenny!
My second, and perhaps less childish thought, was this: why has it taken an “extreme weather event” to make me leave the car on the drive and do the conference calls? I work from home a fair bit, usually if I have late or early meeting somewhere and it’s not worth coming into the office, but I came to thinking that I’m far too ready to get in the car. The advantages of my enforced day at home were:
• I had breakfast, lunch & supper with my family. Nice for them (I think...) and definitely nice for me.
• I got a shed-load done, without wasting time in a car
• I got to play in the snow
• I didn’t put my life at risk, unless you count receiving a volley of snowballs from a 5 year old
• I failed miserably to generate a load of CO2, particulates and other nasties into the atmosphere

The excellent Roger Jones of Avaya gave me some figures (he was presenting on Green IT at the launch of Azzurri’s Contact Centre Practice last week). The average car chucks out about 0.2kg of CO2 per kilometre. The seven people I was due to meet at Weybridge probably had average journeys of 50km each way. So that’s 700km all told – a whopping great 140 Kg of CO2.

It is important to travel to meet people from time to time. Just not every time.
Audio conferencing is pretty good – especially if you know the other people and (in the case of large meetings) have a strong chair. Tools like WebEx (we happen to use the excellent GoToMeeting from Citrix) mean that there’s something to focus on (my mind can wander – I am a man after all) – job done.

In the contact centre, the average commute is 8.7 miles (again, figures via Roger from the Call Centre Helper website) – even if 10% of us worked from home 1 day a week, it would make a terrific difference.

I’m back in the office now. It’s tipping it down with snow outside. My kids are still off school.

How I long for yesterday...