I don’t discuss work on this blog very often. My company’s clients are very secretive and don’t like their projects being mentioned in public. But this post isn’t about clients – it’s about my own role and a difficult choice I’ve recently had to make.

For the last four and a half years I’ve been working at interactive agency Tobias & Tobias. In the time I’ve been there a lot’s changed: the company has grown, we’ve taken on many new clients, and I’ve had a number of different roles, most recently as head of the combined strategy & user experience teams.

Screenshot of Tobias & Tobias website

I’ve really enjoyed working at T&T. I’d never stayed in the same company for more than three years until this job, which is a testament to the people and the culture.

But all good things must come to an end, and it’s with great reluctance that I’ve decided to move on to another role, as an associate creative director at SapientNitro.

In terms of size, the two companies are poles apart. SapientNitro is part of a group that employs 7,000 people in 30 offices worldwide, while Tobias & Tobias has 30 people in one office. But in other ways I think the companies are quite similar.

Specifically, I think that both companies have a similar approach to quality in the user experience and information architecture work that they do. I feel qualified to say this because I’ve interviewed a lot of UX practitioners, and most of the best portfolios I’ve seen have been presented by people with long stints at SapientNitro. This is a big part of the reason why I chose to join SapientNitro. The last thing I’d want to do is move to a company that didn’t take user experience seriously.

Obviously it’s going to be a big change for me – I’ve worked in large organisations before, but it’s been a while since I was in an office so big it was a challenge to remember everyone’s name. But I’m looking forward to having the resources of a large company to draw upon, and a large pool of new colleagues & clients to work with, learn from, and – hopefully – help out in some way.

The current plan is that I’ll start at SapientNitro from November 1st and will be working at their office in Spitalfields, a much more convenient location than Kensington Olympia! But while I won’t miss the extended Overground journeys and the constant roadworks outside our office, I will miss working at Tobias & Tobias, and plan to stay in touch (which means that, yes, I will be gatecrashing the Christmas party!)…

I’m lucky to have an employer with a sensible telecommuting policy – all of our staff are entitled to spend one day per week working from home.

If this isn’t something your company does, this column from the Economist provides a useful summary of the reasons why they should.

The benefits of telecommuting are realised in the following areas:

• Personal productivity – the telecommuter gains on average two hours of time normally lost to the commute
• Environmental impact – avoiding the commute means a drop in personal CO₂ emissions; if enough people did this, the global drop in energy consumption could be huge
• Business benefits – it’s increasingly recognised that working from home can lead to productivity gains and cost reductions for the business; see the link above for a discussion of these.

However, it’s going to take some time for working from home to break into the mainstream. Working practises will need to change quite fundamentally in order for less technology-centric workplaces to move to a telecommuting model. But companies should start to move in this direction sooner rather than later.