On average, UK citizens spend an hour a day commuting to and from work. Over and above the actual time involved, there is also a significant number of other downsides: the high cost of public transport, escalating fuel costs, traffic jams, bad weather, packed commuter trains, personal risks related to late night commuting (visibility and safety), transport delays and cancellations, leaves on the line… I could go on.

You may have assumed that I don’t like commuting. And you’d be right - I don’t! But it’s not my dislike of commuting that that’s important or relevant during National Commute Week, it’s how companies can support Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) goals by implementing flexible – and smarter – ways of working that also happen not to involve commuting.

"People, planet and profit", also known as the ‘triple bottom line’, is a term used to describe CSR which was coined by John Elkington in 1994, and I’d like to explore briefly the relevance of those terms in the context of the daily commute.

I am really pleased to have been asked to write a blog post for Work Wise UK, especially for Commute Smart Week, about what Vrumi, the company I founded two years ago, can do to help the age-old home/commute/office/commute/home cycle.

What’s changed in the way we work, in the last five years?  Really, the cloud; the ubiquity of all our work being available where we are all the time, not just email.  So workplaces are not factories you go to where the tools sit, the only places the work can be done, but rather places of collaboration, of combinations, of thought, of social and collegiate interaction, of creation.