Lakshan Perera

Home Office, anyone?

The life in this island is getting too difficult. The rising flames of the war and ever increasing oil charges are screwing the people. Today, coming to Colombo has become the worst nightmare to anyone. The number of checkpoints and barriers has doubled the traffic jam and roughly it takes two hours to travel 20kms. Even if you could afford this journey by paying 100 bucks for 1 ltr of petrol, what is the use when you have to park your vehicle 10 kms away from your office due to security reasons? (guys at WTC should know this better) Public transport was always a chaos from the past and today people who opt to travel in a bus or in a train should have real guts. Every little noise excites the passengers and if you are to carry big baggage you are always under suspicion (not only that, today pregnant mothers are also under suspicion.)

With the current situation I don't think many employees who work in the capital have the peace of mind to concentrate purely on their work. They always have to work under doubt and extra pressure. This situation will decrease the efficiency and cut the room for any innovation. Our trained and qualified workforce is not that plenty and if we are to loose a single life, it's a major lost to the whole country. That's why terrorists keep attacking on civilian workforce, thus break the backbone of country's economy.

In this situation I personally think home office concept should be put into practice. Currently I think we have enough infrastructures to do so. Home PC with necessary software and ADSL line would be adequate for most of the service based work and also we could get the best use of free online tools such as Basecamp, Skype, Google Calendar, etc.

Hope our CEOs will have a consideration on this and move the country forward tactfully in this gloomy period.