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Promoting Telecommuting During the Gas Dearth?
Oren F. asks: "The President of AeroAstro, Inc., a small aerospace company, has begun promoting his employees to conserve gasoline during these times of high prices by telecommuting to work each day from their homes at least once a week. How is your company responding to the current situation?"
..this neat conversion company!
Let's hope there will be more of them soon..
I'll never do it.
The highway, while straight, level, and well paved, is heavily travelled (to the point of congestion) by annoying suburbanites driving their SUVs and talking on their cell phones instead of paying attention to the road.
At speed lane changes with no turn signals used, no checks in the mirrors, no looking out the side windows. Stopping short at lights, making right (or left) turns from the wrong lane because they forgot to get into the turn lane, etc... I've seen it all on my daily commute.
It's dangerous enough in a car. I'd be nuts to try it on a bicycle.
I work at a university which is pretty liberal about this sort of thing, but I can make a recommendation to any private companies that want to encourage it.
Assign a work-at-home day. If everyone picks their own day then you'll never have a day where everyone is at work.
Make the work-at-home day Thursday. My experience suggests this is the day that you'll get the most productivity at home. Definitely don't do it on Monday or Friday or work-at-home day will just be a 3-day weekend! (what do you think this is, France?)
Have an online meeting at about 10:30. Set everyone up with cheap web cams and just spend 30 minutes to an hour on an informal, "here's what we did this week" meeting. Those kinds of informal meetings are good for small groups anyway.
Use an IM client. It's much better than email or phone calls for quickie questions: "hey bob, tell me again what the param list is."
Require a followup email at 5:00. Even if it's just to say, "I've been working on this all day but I'm not done yet."
On the technical side, obviously you're going to need to let employees set up a secure tunnel into a VPN - not the main company network. They need to be able to get to shares on file servers for example, and to hit their machines via remote desktop, but they shouldn't be able to hit shares on their local machines.
All of that said, I really prefer to be at work. My chair and desk here are more comfortable. I'm also one of the lucky ones who lives close to work and I try to ride my bike at least once a week.