Working from Home

DRIVING through an older residential area situated near Tsumeb’s central business district one cannot help but notice the extraordinarily high number of enterprises operating from suburban homes.

These are not only businesses engaged in the trading of goods, but many are operating in the manufacturing and service-provision sectors.

One is inclined to wager a bet that Tsumeb, the commercial hub of the Oshikoto region, must fall in the top quartile of businesses in Namibia that operate from a suburban residential property.

Signage prominently displayed by the enterprises shows they are operating visibly, and without fear of retribution.

So, one assumes they are operating legally, with municipal approval.

What is the big deal?

Well, municipalities across Namibia are known to rigidly enforce rules and regulations that forbid, or at best, impose restrictions on entrepreneurs operating their enterprises from residential properties.

Tsumeb’s municipality deserves applause for adapting to changing times by easing controls and thereby allowing entrepreneurs to operate their businesses from home.

These entrepreneurs must be acting in a responsible manner by not causing any disturbance or inconvenience to their neighbours, or else there would have been a public outcry.

Out-of-touch municipal councillors and bureaucrats at towns who are resistant to change and are unwilling to support entrepreneurship had better learn from Tsumeb.

They should emulate solving the problem of access to affordable workspace by permitting entrepreneurs to work from home.

Interesting developments are afoot.

To speed up the creation of a business-friendly environment in which wealth and jobs are created, and the economy grows, the establishment of a Namibia Public-Private Forum (NPPF) is imminent.

Once it gets going, the NFFP should identify business-unfriendly and outdated laws, rules, and regulations to be scrapped or modified.

Many regulations serve little purpose other than to frustrate entrepreneurs and hamper the development of Namibia’s economy.

While on the topic of running a business from home, the past two years have shown that employees working from home is not a bad idea either.

Breaking the routine and monotony of going to the workplace every day required a mindset change, but employers and employees soon discovered it could work and holds numerous benefits.

Initially there was no choice, as working from home was forced upon us by the government. It was the government’s strategy to contain the spread of Covid-19 after the pandemic abruptly made an appearance in Namibia in March 2020.

One of the health and safety risk-management measures hastily imposed by the government was a lockdown, together with the enforcement of movement restrictions.

From news reports one learned that countries across the world adopted a copy-and-paste pandemic spread-curtailment strategy.

Among other shortcomings, this has exposed weaknesses, and for many years to come the rights, wrongs, and what could or should have been done differently will be hotly debated.

But in the quest to curtail the pandemic’s spread one of the lessons learnt sticks out like a sore thumb: that working from home is possible and benefits both employer and employee.

Financial benefits for the firm and for its staff, the more productive use of time, and thinking about it, so many other benefits too.

* Danny Meyer is reachable at danny@smecompete.com

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