Slashdot Mirror
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."
... about me when I telecommute:
7. I have "Take This Job And Shove It" looping in iTunes.
6. Sometimes I follow links in Google that don't show up at the office when my "Safe Filer" is "On".
5. I work so hard at home that I need a break every hour.
4. Comedy Central replays the same stuff all day long.
3. My desk at home is very clean (in direct contrast to the pig sty in my office).
2. My cats are excellent proofreaders.
1. I'm naked.
I am able to telecommute two days a week right now. I enjoy this for several reasons:
1. I don't have someone stopping by my cube every 30 minutes interrupting my concentration for casual conversation. That is very annoying. At home I don't have this distraction and I'm able to get more work done.
2. Since I started working from home two days a week, I have save myself 2 hours of driving time a week. Less gas, less wear and tear on the car, and a lot less frustration dealing with traffic! That means a happier employee.
3. I can curse and scream as loudly as I please when somebody does something stupid. It's a great stress reliever. In the office, well. The HR department would have issues if they heard what I wanted to say half the time!
4. Comfort! Cube farms suck. If I'm comfortable you know I'll be more productive. I can sit out on my porch in the warm weather and enjoy FRESH AIR AND SUNLIGHT while I work with my laptop. It is a huge, HUGE plus over florescent lights and stale office air.
5. I save money on laundry. (o:
Overall, I'm a lot happier and more productive when I'm at home working.
On the flip side, it is useful to be in the office once in a while too. Meetings in face to face can be more productive and it can be easier to get things done. Other than meetings though, I really don't see the point. Offices are just too depressing and distracting.
Love sees no species.
Telecommuting supplements working at the office, not replaces it. People still want/need that face-to-face contact. There have been plenty of stories posted about how telecommuting can really put you on the slow-track for promotions and also reduces the opportunities when you accedentally come across a gold-mine of an idea thru means of mis-communication.
Currently I can swing one day a week from home, in the near future I am hoping to work exclusively from home.
The hardest thing about working from home is trying to explain to family and friends that you are trying to work. When they know you are at home, then tend to treat is as if your on vacation, and its ok to call and small talk or pop-in.
My tips
1. Background noise - Parents, shut your children up! Nothing sounds more unprofessional than hearing kids yelling in the background. This goes for barking dogs, parakeets, laundry room, the kitchen and taking a conference call from the local pub.
2. Get a dedicated phone line for office work with a vmail that has a professional greeting. No "Hi, Jim and Linda are unable to answer the phone right now..."
3. Don't milk the expenses. In fact you'd be better off not charging any expenses as it is a factor when it comes time for layoffs. Software licenses are a different matter, but you may want to consider your own license if you develop on the side.
4. Be available/no sneaking out.
5. There are no set hours. It's not 9 to 5, and being flexible for your customers across timezones puts you at an advantage over cube jockeys with a commute.
6. Avoid day trading.
7. Don't become a hermit. Meet up with the local coworkers for lunch at least once month.
Companies probably aren't primarily concerned with the social implications of work habits. To some extent, yes. But it's got to have a cost benefit attached to it or they simply cannot do it.
I think there is something to be said for this and many people that I work with do this to some extent but only on a very informal and infrequent basis.
I think it would be interesting to implement a rolling work schedule where you only come to work on one or two days a week and work the rest at home.
I personally find that when I do work from home my productivity is rather insane in comparison. I might only work 4 hours on some days, but I'll finish an entire week of work in that time and then spend the remaining 4 hours of the work-day observing the work in action (reading logs) while I watch a movie. A heck of a lot better than it might be at work.
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.
While you can do all this remotely via phone and video conferencing, it's nowhere near as effective as face to face, and raising the effort needed to communicate cuts out on a large amount of communication.
On top of just the job at hand, there's a whole lot of personal growth and exposure to new/different ideas/points of view that you just don't get when working from home or working solo.
My last job shut down their Sydney office and let everyone either work from home or from a serviced office. Within a month all the people I regarded as clued in had found other work, and the remainder reduced their quality to the point where I made a point of asking not to be put in teams with them.
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
It's not just social benefits, but the environmental benefits of massive telecommuting would be huge! I telecommute 4 days a week. I can tell you that I drive about 1/4 as much as I used to. That has to be better for the environment. I still think if our (California's) governor wants to hit a home run, he could appeal to individual residents, family groups, environmentalists, AND big business if he would get a tax break for businesses that have over a certain percentage of telecommuters. Family groups would love the extra time that parents get to spend with their kids. Individual residents would spend a smaller part of their day dedicated to work, as they wouldn't be commuting. Environmentalists would love to have the number of miles cars in the state drive cut in half, as well as not needing to expand roads, since having few cars on the road means our current roads would be big enough. And what business doesn't like to have a nice big tax break. This would also lead to expansion of our telecom business, as telecommuters would need, and be willing to pay for better internet access.
The only problems I see are those interests that want us consuming as much fuel as possible. Obviously oil companies wouldn't want a state like California to cut it's fuel consumption in half. That would be a huge revenue hit. The state might also dislike the reduced revenue from fuel taxes as well. I would think that the reduced cost of road infrastructure would off set that though.
Yeah I would not recommend doing this with younger children around that is for sure.
I'm reading the article (yeah I know) and I have to say that management is probably most resistant to telecommuting because of the fact that if they cant physically see the employee is only taking 20-25 minutes to complete a task they expect may take an hour that they cant see the employee sitting around doing nothing and pile yet more work onto them.
I read somewhere that employees now are doing 2-3x as much work as employees had to do 10, 20, 30 years ago... Its not exactly fair since workload goes up that much but the wages do not reflect that. We could have much less unemployment if instead of hiring people in high stress situations that they actually hire 2 people to do the work of 2 people. They'd get things done faster and presumably with less errors than the 1 person trying to do the work of 2 people.
Basically, resistance to telecommuteing is a result of not being able to unilaterally pile more work upon their employee which they could do if they were physically present in the office.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
If you can do the job from home, so can a guy in Bangalore who charges 1/5 of your salary.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Any number of open source projects would serve as excellent counterexamples of highly productive projects involving teams that collaborate closely across large distances. Most of my day job is Linux kernel development, and while I'm fortunate to have great kernel hackers in my office and in the neighborhood who I can go hang out with and ask questions, the nature of the project dictates that most of the people I work with are people I've never, or only occasionally, met face-to-face.
It certainly takes some getting used to. It's been a real test of my reading and writing skills--you need to be able to understand and explain complex technical ideas, and keep discussions going despite personality conflicts. And it'll help to have good local computer resources, a fast network connection, and a mail client that helps you handle massive mailing list traffic efficiently....
Ahh - you see, my definition of "career suicide" is - you lose your job and any chance of getting a similar one.
Yours is "you probably won't get into management".
I don't _want_ to get in to management. I've already advanced as far as I possibly can within my company - a senior R&D programmer (having advanced litterly from the bottom - doing casual handline envelope stuffing jobs). I don't see getting into senior management as "advancing my career", I define it as "Starting an entirely different career, and one I'm not suited to, telecomuting or no telecomuting".
But in anycase, I don't believe the telecomuting would necesarily stop that - I'm pretty heavily immersed in the culture of the company - I've been here ten years, and believe I have earnt the sort of level of respect and recognition required for a move into management if that were my goal (and if I had any actual talent for it).
Maybe five day a week telecomuting might put the breaks on advancement a little (I personally do two to three), but it's more about personality than face time. You just have to be the sort of person that people notice - and ensure that when they do notice you, that there's good things to see.
Advanced users are users too!