The biggest flexible working initiative of its kind says UK’s O2

As a work at home blogger I am kind of spoiled in that I only have to walk one room to the next in the morning in order to go to work and the coffee pot is always full but not everyone has that luxury when it comes to their work. While telecommuting is a growing phenomena in the work place it is still relegated to more forward thinking and smaller companies.

Employees at UK mobile operator O2 are going to be able to experience the ability to work from home, all 12,000 of them ans the company closes the doors to its 200,000 square foot headquarters in Slough for one day. For that day employees will be able to work from home, or some other suitable location (read coffee shop) as O2 tries to see how well the idea works out on a large scale.

While this is also a part of a larger plan by the company to reduce its carbon footprint and make its business more sustainable it is also, as pointed out by Paul Sawers at The Next Web, a way to see if these types of ‘flexible’ working arrangements will help the company make it through the upcoming Olympic Games set to hit England later this year.

However, it seems that it actually has at least one eye on the Olympic Games this year, with travel disruption a likely by-product of the swarm of tourists that will descend upon the city this summer. It’s thought that as many as one third of the UK’s businesses will encourage staff to work flexibly this summer, and O2 plans to share its findings from today’s pilot with other organisations in the build up to the sporting extravaganza this year.

It will be interesting to see just how well the experiment works out and if this is something that a large company would look at implementing on such a big scale even after the Olympics have come and gone.