Home working is often seen as the panacea for business recovery. "All our staff can work from home" is a phrase often heard during the business impact or recovery requirements analysis.

But can they really? There’s a huge difference between sitting at your kitchen table for a few hours once every couple of months to write a report and actually working from home all day, every day, for any length of time. And if people don’t actually work from home now, how can you expect to implement what amounts to a significant change to their working environment and business processes at the time of a crisis and expect it to work seamlessly?

On top of the practical considerations, there are also likely to be health & safety, insurance and management implications, to name a few. Then there’s the small issue of facilities – the office and IT equipment, network links, paperwork, etc required to do the job. Let alone the impact on the family. All these things need to be thought about.

So a little bit of homework is required, in the form of a feasibility study, to determine whether home working really is a viable solution. And proper planning is needed to implement a proper solution. Oh, and it needs to be tested to confirm that it actually works.

All this means there are likely to be some costs involved. But if you get it right, there may also be significant business benefits aside from those related to business continuity management.