There was a time when going to work meant arriving at a specified time. Employees would be given a morning and afternoon tea break and an hour for lunch sometime between 12pm and 2pm. At the end of the day, staff would leave around the same time, usually at 5pm or 5.30pm.

Times have changed. Work places have become more flexible, even the term child-friendly is bandied around most places of employment.

The shift to giving employees the freedom to work outside the office is mostly attributed to the transportable world that has been achieved through laptops, remote internet access and mobile phones.

At its core, mobile phones are relied upon for voice or SMS communication. Smartphones go that little bit further by offering access to the internet, email and GPS.

At first some believed that all this technology was going to dictate our lives as always being on demand and overly accessible.

A study into the mobile phone being indispensable was completed for the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association and involved researchers from three of Australia’s leading universities. It showed the majority of Australians believed their mobile phone helped to create balance between family and work.

Many of the survey respondents believed the mobile phone reduced their stress levels and over half the respondents during the three-year research project indicated that job-related mobile calls increased productivity.

The increased acceptance of always having a mobile phone on hand and using it for work purposes gives a new found sense of freedom.

Only 4 percent of respondents reported that the mobile reduces their leisure time quality.

During the same research, respondents were asked if carrying a mobile phone makes them feel more secure, which 75 percent said it did.

The time of employees being required to sit at a desk, clocking in and off at a certain time appears to be a thing of the past. Working from home has become more accepted and staying in touch while on-the-road or working from a remote/satellite office is easy – provided you have the network coverage available. Critical to quality network coverage is ensuring that base stations are located nearby. 

For working parents, this means less occasions of missing out on a child’s 15 minute assembly performance at 9am or asking the neighbour to pick up their school child who has just fallen off the monkey bars.

Whether your single, partnered or a parent when the office noise is too much to bear while preparing a report or tender, heading home to work in silence with the boss knowing they can be contacted is a win-win.

For all this work-life balance that has started to emerge over the past decade to continue, consistent upgrading of existing mobile towers and, in low coverage areas, building new or “infill” base stations is required to ensure reliable and consistent connections can be made.