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Does Telecommuting Make You Invisible?
jfruhlinger writes "Telecommuting provides many joys, including the ability to stay in your pajamas all day and the chance to work with a cat on your lap. But it does have some major drawbacks, perhaps none so serious as the fact that, if your co-workers are for the most part in an office, they can forget you exist — which means you don't get credit for your work as you deserve."
But in a word: yes.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
The question is, does the benefit of working from home offset that? Visibility is important to some, not so much to others. It all depends on your plan or lack of it.
Personally, I think a lack of visibility can only help me!
are inconsequential (pretty much moots) or your managers are incompetent.
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
It depends.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
I am a telecommuter. I negotiated 80%/20%, i.e. I come into the office 150 miles away once a week. The purpose is to schedule meetings on projects, attend a weekly team meeting, and it gives the opportunity to mingle and see my coworkers.
That arrangement really helps. In addition, I use software that routes my phone extension to my home office (so people don't have to keep my phone# on a post it), I use Yahoo IM for chats, and of course email.
The point is, if you are a telecommuter, make yourself accessible at any time that you would be if you were in the office. If things are quiet for an extended period, make an effort to touch base with your immediate team (speaking from the perspective of a software developer here). Does anyone need me to pitch in on anything? Send a link to a funny or interesting article.
Generally my work is so busy and requires so much collaboration that it creates the necessary visibility, but just be sure you aren't making it difficult to be contacted and embrace the discussions, even mundane ones unless it gets out of hand.
In software dev, also have your screen ready to share for discussion (myriad of choices). I find that helps to collaborate and be more visible to my colleagues.
I work from home every now and then (more often, recently). Last year, I wrote my own rules for working from home. Are there any other solid ones I should include?
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
If telecommuting means you're not interacting with co-workers and being 'seen', then yes, you might become invisible and/or deemed irrelevant. It also might mean you are.
Both my wife and I work from home lately, as the contract I work on is across country and her job went to telecommute-only a couple of years ago. I'm in conference calls, email threads, planning meetings, and all sorts of things all the time. My wife is on the phone a good chunk of the day as well as countless emails and IMs with people.
If you are doing your job in a corner, never interacting with people, and it becomes possible that people forget you exist ... well, maybe that's not the fault of telecommuting. I've worked in offices where there are people who nobody really knows what they do, who they report to, or what their role is -- it's possible to be invisible in the office too, and in my experience if nobody knows who you are and what you do then maybe you're just putting in time and waiting until someone realizes they don't know what they pay you for.
Not saying telecommuting is for everyone, or that it fixes everything ... but I've been doing it for over a year, and it's not like anybody on the project I'm working on doesn't know who I am. They may have only met me face to face a handful of times ... but between email and phone calls, I'm hardly invisible. Quite the opposite, in fact since I was kind of the technical lead.
What kind of job can you even be doing that doesn't call for interaction with your co-workers? If you're regularly doing the kinds of things that normal people do, there's no reason for you to disappear as a teleworker.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Ive been working remotely most of the time since 1998.
When does the boss take me out to lunch with the team? Never.
A beer after work on Fridays? Nope.
Project tshirts? Nada.
Don't think telecommuting is paradise. It's not.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
"Credit is very nice, at the end of the day it is getting the job done that matters"
Maybe to the owners and shareholders but not for anyone else. Having worked under both good and bad managers, and now in a position of leading my own team, I have to say you'd be crazy to ignore this. The worst case is not people leaving your company. The worst case is turning great employees into average employees.
If one is able to bribe people using a chocolate bars, perhaps his misdemeanour's aren't so serious...
If you can telecommute to work, so can someone else in another country who will do your job for cheaper.
I've telecommuted before, one day a week, and I found that my presence as a valuable employee was diminished. Things would happen at the office that I couldn't be a part of. My contributions to the team were less evident - especially that immeasurable contribution you make when you participate in discussions and help your peers. If you are competing with your peers for advancement (or simply to keep your job) then you shouldn't be working from home. If you are satisfied with your current role and pay rate, then it's a good deal.
I call my "credit for my work" my "paycheck", perhaps they're expecting too much from their jobs?
Sig withheld to protect the innocent.