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Working Hints for a New Telecommuter?
McPierce asks: "This week I accepted an offer to work for a company in a different state (I'm located in NC, USA, and the company's located in NY,USA). As part of my employment, the company's going to give me a laptop, a PDA (Blackberry 6510) for email/development and will fly me to NY every 6-8 weeks for meetings. My question is to those who telecommute for a living and who have families at home. How do you do your work at home? Do you go out (bookstore/library/coffee shop) to get things done, or do you have a home office and boundaries setup with your family to keep them from distracting your during working hours? How about accepting phone calls from your employer? In my case, I'm concerned about getting calls outside of the normal business hours (8am-6pm) since the philosophy might be 'we'll call when we need to since you're working remotely'? Any ideas or suggestions?"
Ok, a few pointers fro working at home, from my limited experience.
1.)Establish boundaries. If you set a place for work, use it for work only, and exclusively. This will help you to keep from getting distracted.
2.)Leave. I may be the only one, but it just drove me NUTS to have to work at home all day, then go outside my office and say, "Honey, I'm home!" I would reccomend, nutty as it sounds, gettingn in your car and driving to the 7-11 for a coffee in the morning, go to starbucks for a break in the afternoon. I would try and arrange errands to bracket my working day, so there would be a fixed beginning and end.
3.)Use a cell phone. Cheaper, faster, easier, to set up thana land line. Off hours just turn it off and say it was charging/batteries dead, whatever.
4.)Count your blessings. New York company willing to let you work from home in this market? You sir, are very good, or very lucky, or both. Kudos!
in all earnestness, you the telecommuting thing is pretty easy, just stay focused and have fun. Good luck.
www.avacal.com -- the home page of pete shaw
I worked for a company that supported telecommuters. The justified it on the grounds of office space savings. In order to qualify you had to have the following:
1. An area of your house dedicated exclusively to business-related work. It had to be one room with a closable door at a minimum. You had to buy a lockable file cabinet for confidential material and sign a document retention policy to insure that you knew what you were expected to back up (and where) and what you were expected to destroy.
2. An exclusive business phone line, which was patched into the company PBX and it effectively became just another extension, as if you were working at the company's office.
3. You were provided with a computer (usually a laptop) with dialup internet service. Some people negotiated various deals for broadband service. The computer was patched into the company's network using a VPN tunnel, and it effectively put you on the company's network just as if you were working at the company office.
4. You were provided with a peronal fax machine, a personal laser printer, an a cheap scanner.
5. Internal IM technology was used for normal chit-chat with people on the company's network to cut down on phone bills. Teleconferencing was used for meetings.
6. You had to be willing to be technically self-sufficent and do more self-tech-help than is normally expected.
7. You were expected to work regular business hours, the specifics of which were negotiable with your manager.
8. The telecommuter option was presented as a privilege that could be revoked at any time, and was automatically revoked if there were problems on your performance reviews.
--
In practice it worked out for about 2/3 of the people that tried it. Many people couldn't keep their equipment properly maintained and pissed off the IT group. When their equipment came back it would be full of porn, spyware, adware, and signs that their kids used it in a wrestling match.
Some other people got canned from the program because every time you called them for something they were either unavailable or trying to talk over their screaming children, which really got annoying.
Dialup was very painful for people who need to access large files. One marketing person (graphics intensive) person was taken off telecommuter status because they didn't have cable or DSL in their area, the company didn't want to spring for a dedicated line, and it was slowing everyone down waiting for them to download and process large images over a dialup line.
...and when you get tired of sitting in a boring, gloomy basement office, it's nice to have a secure WLAN so you can take the laptop upstairs to a sunny room or even out on the deck to work for a while.
Karma
If you have a significant other or not, results may vary but:
1. Seperate Everything - Seperate Room for the "home office" (don't chill the leather couch in the middle of your den)Seperate computers, DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT use the same computers for work/play/home and all that jazz. (UT2003 is probably one of those apps that someone at a real workplace wouldn't let you have.) Seperate Phone Line / Cell Phone / Paging / Wireless Devices. Don't use your home phone for business calls and vice-versa don't use your business phone for home calls. Do not answer business calls after hours or answer home calls when you are working your local phone service has this dope-ass feature called Voice Messaging, use it in both instances. Establish some ground rules so your colleauges/customers aren't calling you at 2 A.M.
2. Don't alienate your family (some people say "when this door is shut I am at work"). Don't pull that kind of crap, you have been given an opportunity to stay at home and accomplish your day job. Its not solitary. On the other hand: Don't have the kids on your lap during the 9:00am conference call while they are watching "Transformers - Armada". Give them the chance to have some lives too: take them to day care if you can afford it.
3.Take breaks, actually do what those instructional videos told you to do, stand up - take a breather, wander around a bit, say hi to the wife and kids. Get out of the house! If you can take a trip to your local Chevron/Texaco/7-11/Shell/whathaveyou. Drink some Mnt. Dew and have a snack, or if its time - take a lunch. This is the tip: Take lunch outside your house, if you can't go down to the local subway or mcdonalds then eat at your house and go for a drive or a walk or something.
4. Make sure to maintain good contact with your colleagues and your superiors. Ask for more reviews, or more office time if that is what you need. I know that I am always accused of "beating off" while I should be coding. Its probably because no one can actually verify that because I'm not at the local coffee pot talking about who you showed your "oh face" to that weekend. Make sure to set goals with your supervisors. Make sure that those goals are met and are visible to your colleagues.
5. Attend functions if you can. If you are close enough, or can work a deal in - go to the damn barbeque. Don't be a recluse. Definitely attend meetings if it is at all possible. Conference calls are great, but since you are working from home, a little "office time" can work wonders for people.
6. Don't forget that you are a living breathing person in the workforce. Just because you are currently banging away on the keys trying to get that new webapp up, doesn't mean that you can ignore the fact that you sure as f#ck better be looking for some upward movement in your company. Don't let yourself be labeled as worker ID# 100101, you should have some movement in your job functions / job titles every once in a while.
7. The most important tip I can give: Use your head, somehow you got a telecommuting job in this day and age, you probably aren't an idiot. Make sure you make some good decisions. Also give yourself some discipline (no UT2003) or Learning channel while you are on the job.