7 Things the Boss Should Know About Telecommuting

Esther Schindler writes "An article on CIO.com presents input from several telecommuting IT professionals about the benefits that working from home brings to the enterprise. They suggest some processes that help remote workers interact with other team members, and discuss the irritations that twist telecommuters' shorts in a knot. In short, it's what employees truly want the boss to know about telecommuting. Two sidebars also discuss tips for telecommuters who don't want their careers to stall because they're 'out of sight, out of mind,' and the out of pocket expenses that the company and telecommuter need to divvy up."

Comments

Re:I would love having this option

[bberens]

Telecommuting does not work for programmers in any sort of team environment, which either is or should be most jobs.

Development is not a solo effort, you need to talk to the users, the analysts, the other coders, the testers, there's a whole design process.

getting back towards the topic, I think telecommuting very occasionally, like maybe one or two days a month is ok, it's like a bit of an extra holiday and can give people a bit of space when they feel their job has become a little stale.

Once you're doing it every week though you should really look at the reasons you don't like going to your work place and try to fix those problems rather than running away from them I think you vastly over-estimate the level of involvement required in most development jobs. Sure when the application is being designed and developed there needs to be a lot of face to face interaction. However, once the application is in maintenance mode there's little to no need for face time. I can read a bug out of bugzilla, look at the screenshots and fix the bug just as well from home as I do in the office. Secondly I can add another screen that looks similar to all the other screens and uses the same dao + a couple of columns without any real face time. I can also create a report that shows [whatever] without face time. The VAST majority of development is in maintenance mode or upgrades to software that already has a large foundation.

Re:Telecommuting = positive social change

[ishobo]

You are sadly mistaken if you think a full time caregiver has any time to do professional work. I was a stay at home father for the first three years of my daughter's life. I thought I could work around 20 hours a week. If you combine the hands-on time with my daughter, and the laundry, cleaning, cooking, and other housework, I was exhausted and had little time for anything else. My extra hours in the day were spent doing things for me, not my employer.