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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.
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.
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.
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