Flexible working as teleworking seems to be a temoprary solution to offsetting our carbon footprint – at a corporate and individual level.

But another form of flexible working, set up by http://www.sliversoftime.com enables students, part time workers, or anyone basically, to sell their time on the marketplace, and therefore create a new market for recruitment.

For example, if I have 2 hours of spare time on thursday night, next week, I could basically sell these hours to Comapny X, for £X/ hour, to do a specific task – usually a task which does not require a high level of skills (photocopying). This marketplace would be updated several times daily, and I can be cheaper or more expensive than someone else.

Some of the awaited results – Indeed, resource management is more efficient (though more erratic maybe?) ; indeed, the student will get pocket money to go out ; and a new niche is opened for recruitment agencies…

But when factoring the Green footprint of each of these initiative, I am convinced that we will end up with people travelling to get there, for a short amount of time.
several questions arise then, with some paradoxal dimensions:
- I still travel a certian distance for a relatively short amnount of time spent at this location
BUT
- as I am using “spare time” to work, I therefore am greener in the sense that my transport costs is used in an efficient way (instead of taking my car to go to the cinema, I create value added for the company)
AND
- as I am hired for a short period of time, to do a specific task, the company do not need to hire someone full time to do that, and only use me sporadically because of the costs

It seems that the key to such initiative should be to advertise the LOCAL dimension…if the “flexible workers” can be more efficient , then can also be greener if travelling shorter distances, on a smaller scale.
is anyone walking to the office these days ?

Cheers,

Olivier