A hands-free world for workers on the road – The Globe and Mail.
So the guys whose cars are their offices are frustrated because of the new rules. What’s interesting in this article in the Globe and Mail, is that some businesses have put stringent rules in place to prevent employees from working en route. Productivity is rising, and employees have reduced the time spent on electronic devices while in the car on their personal time.
When did the car become an office? Was it the invention of the Blackberry, or the first “car phone” wired in, and connected to a mobile operator sometime in the seventies. And what were all these people doing while hurtling along at 100km plus – sending e-mails, faxing, consulting with clients? Take a person who manages other people’s money. Out of the office, travelling to meet one client, talking to three or four others on the way, faxing off documents on his way home, he seems not to need an office or an assistant with all the attendant costs. But how secure are you in the advice you’re getting from someone who can’t even take the hour he’s in the car to listen to music, or the news, or just to think. I hope its my account he’s remembering, not someone else’s.
Or the real estate broker, making the big deals by the side of the road-itinerant, ungrounded and insecure.
Or, and I’ve been here, answering a call from the hospital and trying to sort out complex medical data and give advice, all while controlling a dangerous machine in the midst of other dangerous machines.
I think we need to return to a more civil way of life, with business conducted in offices, giving the man in the story in the Globe, and the rest of us, a few minutes to think and reflect on our way to appointments, and perhaps arrive alive.