Remote control over working conditions

Recruitment Specialist Alistair Watson meets clients in cafes and coffee bars around the Auckland CBD. Picture / Paul Estcourt

You see them all the time - small groups, heads together over coffee, laptops and cellphones, hard at work.

Take the first floor of the PricewaterhouseCoopers Building on Quay Street in downtown Auckland. On the right there's the cafe, with its tables and nests of sofas where people eat their smoked chicken wraps.

On the other side of this airy space with its glass walls and harbour views is a row of cream leather chairs and sofas, arranged in widely spaced groups.

It is at places like this - far enough from other people to be private, close enough for the buzz - that Auckland's remote workers conduct their business.

Alistair Watson, a specialist in insurance recruitment, arrived at 11am and has interviewed two recruits and downed four coffees.

He works on a Harrier, a pocket PC that looks more like a mobile phone than a laptop yet offers internet access, a slide-out keyboard for emailing, plus the power to take photos and videos, download files and send attachments.

With the recruitment market so tight, Watson spends three days at his home in Waiheke researching and setting up appointments and two meeting clients at the cafe of their choice.

"It's important that they feel comfortable," he explains. Some people want to keep away from their regular haunts and workmates. Others prefer the more downmarket atmosphere of Starbucks. Some nominate Columbus Cafe or the Vero Building in Shortland Street, which has a similar feel to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

"It's a low-overhead business," says Watson, who left his last office in the Dilworth Building two years ago. The overheads, at between $450-$500 a week, were high and he was not using it enough.

His Harrier and laptop at home in Palm Beach are synchronised, even for billing. He has just moved from $800 dial-up internet access to broadband, which Telecom assures him will cost around $550 a month.

On the other hand, remote working is not for the faint-hearted.

"If you're going to walk away from an office, you've got to have self-confidence and belief in what you're doing. If you like the safety of going into work, the routine and putting in the hours, remote working is not for you.

"I don't work the hours, I work the tasks. It's about what you achieve in a day."

Watson sees three or four men like himself around all the time "obviously doing the same type of thing as me".

As he says, "Why wouldn't someone want to come here for an interview? ... The only bummer is they stopped serving beer."

Steve Macmillan, 32, adds a Canon digital camera to the technology package, giving him the freedom to mix photography, journalism and corporate PR clients.

"My Nokia mobile phone is my office," he says. "Press releases and files are all on the laptop."

Macmillan meets clients at Landreth & Co cafe in Ponsonby. When he has an urgent assignment, he visits his Media Station business partner on the North Shore and hooks into broadband.

"With Photoshop it's all done in no time," he says. "I've got a deadline now, and I don't have to drive that hour to get home to Pukekohe.

"There's a lot of freedom. It's a great lifestyle."

Another face of the remote worker belongs to Nicholas Bull, an exporter of luxury European cars from Japan. Bull, 24, spreads his work between Japan, his home in West Auckland and the car yards of Auckland.

Mostly he operates by combining a high-powered laptop with a Vodafone 3G data card and a top-of-the range 3D mobile videophone.

"I use the computer as my finding tool, my staff as my eyes and ears on the ground in Japan to inspect quality and condition, and my videophone so I can talk to them actually at the car. That way I can check details that I can't see on the auctioneer's website."

His New Zealand clients often also look at the car via videophone themselves before they commit, given that Bull specialises in Porches, BMWs and Mercedes that range in price from $15,000 to $300,000 for an SL500 Mercedes.

Technology at this level is expensive. Bull's Vodafone bill is $2000 a month, sometimes $2500.

But, says Bull, who spends much of his time in his WiFi home in West Auckland, often attending Japanese car auctions via his elaborate technology through the night: "It's seamless for customers. They call the same number, talk to the same person. They don't know where I am."

Remote offices

Wheeler-dealer hangouts that are private, discreet

* PricewaterhouseCoopers first floor, Quay Street

* Vero in Shortland Street

Comfy, casual plus internet: (1 hour Telecom card, $10)

* Starbucks

Smart, cool but quiet

* Columbus, High Street

* Columbard, Wyndham Street

* Landreth & Co, 272 Ponsonby Road

* Mecca

* Sierra