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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.
As a telecommuter that lives in Oregon and works for a company in California full time I telecommute from my home office. Taking aside the needed disciplines of staying focused, you need some office protocol disciplines too. For one, we do weekly department head meetings and weekly staff meetings with a video conference set up or at minimum audio conference, and we all talk about what we are working on and what our goals are. This helps everyone know what everyone else is doing. I also send at least one week each email to all the people I've been doing projects that effect them, or need to stay on top and just ask if I've been able to make things work as they expect and if there are any other items they need or would like. This keeps them in contact with me. I also do a weekly meeting with my director and we discuss projects and goals. And finally I try to take at least 6 trips a year to the actual office staying through a week on each of those trips. I usually do more like 9 to 10 trips and sometimes stay a week and a half. I actually hate that part, living out of a hotel room sucks, but it's a small price to pay for having no commute time and being able to work in my pajamas. And you have to sometimes keep pushing for all those meetings and trips as the office will tend to let them slip otherwise. :)
As someone who just made several hundred dollars while lounging around in key west, I can safely say that the trade off is well worth it.
At the company I work at we don't have much of the software necessary to track the performance of employees. When I got promoted I got a nice big cube in a corner, away from everyone else. Very soon after getting moved I started getting accused of not being on the phones, not doing my work, blah blah blah. It aggravated me to no end, I was screaming mad about it, but that didn't help.
I did eventually solve my visibility issue.
The solution was chocolate.
I now keep a candy jar in my cube and have let everyone know they can come by my cube at anytime and help themselves. All complaints have ceased.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
It depends.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Credit is very nice, but at the end of the day it is getting the job done that matters. If you are good at what you do then that will usually be recognised. You will be a valued team member. If for some reason though a company fails to appreciate your efforts and you feel hard done by, then it is time to move elsewhere. They will suffer the consequences in due course, but that is their problem.
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.
Invisibility is great when you can telecommute to two or more different jobs where you are invisible, yet still paid. It's important to find inefficient large companies where managers are more interested in having headcount than great productivity. Then you can just invisible along at your multiple jobs.
I used to drive 3+ hours a day to 'be in the office' with my peers. I'd work extra to bring improvements for the team to fruition, since we weren't allowed to do them as part of 'work'. I didn't get credit then, so I couldn't get less credit from home. After I told them I'd be in the office one day a week, I still only had interaction with my peers one out of three days in the office. My employer has a terrible track record for recognition. My congratulations on 10 years of employment: was an email sent almost a year late.
If you like having no creative input, if you enjoy toiling in obscurity, if you enjoy petty bosses who poo-poo your ideas only to bring them up as their own 6 months later, work for the government.
--
Don't get me wrong: I know interaction is a two way street. I used to put in the effort to be TEAM oriented. Unfortunately, the team doesn't actually work together (we each get our own projects) so the effort was unrecognized and wasted.
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.
Yeah, you won't get credit for good work, but you would get more than the fair share of the blame when things go wrong, and in the end it will average out. Wait. There seems to be catch here somewhere.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I honestly think "visibility" becomes a moot point when you work from home. If you have the good fortune to be able to work from home, I think you are doing it precisely because invisibility from the office scene is what you seek. I wouldn't really care about promotion or getting all the credit if I had that wonderful perk available to me. I have a friend that works from home and he continues to get recognition for what he does but he doesn't care. The reward is in the ability to work from home.
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.
If you are trying to climb the corporate ladder, the more "visible" you are the better. You want management to think of you -- and often. Get up and walk around, up and down the hall, make smalltalk (this is crucial), and try to make yourself a permanent icon. Your work performance, dare I say, isn't nearly as important as your social skills.
On the other hand, if you are destined to be stuck in dead-end job for the rest of your life (like me) -- for whatever reason -- then it would be pointless to burden yourself with all of the above. Do the exact opposite. Avoid social contact. Make sure they know you did the job, and then disappear. (The ladder-climbing types will love you for this -- they don't like competition.) Consider your work nothing but a paycheck, and subtract every minute you spend on it from your real life.
Sounds negative, doesn't it? Welcome to the real world.
In addition to a good office protocol to include phone conferences and the like having a good personality helps in having people remember you. If your friendly in nature people will remember that and it helps keep you in contact as your more likely to be called/call or communicate in mail or IM.
There are many cues people pick up from even the simplest of communication, it does not hurt to ask people why they don't acknowledge your items if it corrects a problem.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
If you can telecommute to work, so can someone else in another country who will do your job for cheaper.
It was urban legend and featured on the Discovery Channel's Urban Legend show.
Seriously, the solution seems obvious. Telecommute some days (if you're allowed to), but make an appearance at least once a week, have lunch and/or meetings with with people (especially your boss) to keep you in the loop, and keep you and your work visible to them.
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.
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.
Does anyone else find the two listed "perks" of telecommuting extremely unappealing?
In my experience, if you show up on e-mail lists and teleconferences, you are considered active, but "inhuman" in the sense that people no longer have idea on what *exactly* are you doing, what's your supposed workload, and so on. So instead of human resource, you become just a resource, a gray eminence that lives only in electronic form.
I have been at a new job, primarily doing it remotely when possible for half a year now, and typically my only on-site jaunts will be to customer premises. As such, I'm not too often at the office.
Solution: HD-level videoconferencing. Since I can partake in meetings with 50" screens at the office end, my presence is not only felt, but it's rather imposing :). (My home has smaller, desktop videophone). The HD quality *is* necessary - if you appear as bunch of DCT blocks used by older systems, the effect is not much beyond normal (voice) teleconference.
Anyway, consider possibilities of video for remote participation.
You can be forgotton in the office as well! Wasn't there a news article a while back where an office worked died in the office , and wasn't noticed for several days.
When i worked for an Italian company (olivetti) they forgot about a whole development team. They spend six months programming a computer range that had been cancelled.
A buddy of mine has been "invisible" for 5 years and skipped all the downsizing. His direct report was let go and he still get's a check every 2 weeks. he has no idea who he is supposed to report to for the past 18 months, and had heard NOTHING from the main office, so he simply does his job and collects the checks. the company cellphone and VPN accounts still work, and HR still is paying him and covering insurance.
Being invisible is a good thing at times.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm a software developer working remotely from home for many years now. About a year ago, between 2 and 4pm, I received several "congratulations" by e-mail. I was confused. Turns out they had a special lunch meeting in the board room where I was awarded a prize for some work I'd completed earlier in the year. Problem is, no-one remembered to invite me to the meeting, and while several people were on the conference line, no-one thought to ask if I was on the line.
I'd still rather work from home versus commuting to a cube farm, but note it does present some challenges since people can easily forget to include you in meetings, decisions, conversations, etc.
Routine hygiene goes completely out the door as does the need to wear clothes.
True Story: Office cabin in the garden; hot summers day; house on the market. Sitting naked working away, the real estate agent turns up with a bunch of people looking to buy the house. After that I always kept an emergency pair of shorts in the cabin. :)
But I think it has more to do with the way I work.
I'm a "productive burst" kind of developer. I can't just sit and develop all day long. My productivity goes in bursts. And because telecommuting allows me to get rid of the "chaff" that builds up in my life (like laundry, for example, why, yes, I can design software while sorting my whites from my colors, thank you very much), freeing me up to really make good use of my time when I'm in front of the computer (i.e., I'm not mentally churning on some stupid personal task). So when telecommuting, I'm very very productive and that is demonstrated in the level of work I am able to get done as a result.
Some of the commenters do have a point, though, that if you're mediocre, you're perceived as a goofball. If you're good, you're perceived as mediocre, etc. You get a sort of "telecommute bump-down" in perceived competence. That may be partly the managers' fault (as has been pointed out). But I think as a teleworker, you have a responsibility to make sure the work you do is visible. If you're not able to demonstrate that, maybe you're not as good as you think (sorry to break it to you).
But all in all, my work speaks for itself. And yours should too. If you can't demonstrate productivity when telecommuting, you shouldn't do it. Go on into the office, huddle around the water cooler and talk smack about the boss like all the other sheep. Go on, now. Get! :-)
... they can forget you exist - which means you don't get credit for your work as you deserve.
They can, sure, but they're going to have to go out of their way to do it with me. email to manager & team lead: "Yo boss. I found and fixed another massive bug in $yada. All the logging the thing's been doing for the last decade is worthless. Oh, and it'll now work seamlessly with all our data centres anywhere in the world." It can also help a lot if $yada is something that everybody else is afraid to touch for fear of breaking it.
Communication is key.
To be able to avoid all the BS team meetings, interruptions from colleagues and managers, United Way recruiting drives, the waste of gas while marooned in parking lots on commuter routes twice daily, ... Priceless!
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I am impressed by the lack of comments about cats. So, here we go!
Since I do extra shifts at home after dinner, I get the chance to have one or more cats on my lap while I work. It's awesome in the winter!
The joy of being a business owner!!
I telecommute 50% of my time. This gives me enough physical presence at my work office to be "hands on" with my coworkers and attend meetings that are difficult to teleconference in.
I agree that by telecommuting you do run the risk of missing promotion opportunities since you won't be within the "whisper net" that's in place in all office environments.
Also people who telecommute at 100% regardless of the consequences don't have much weight with management. Their inflexibility makes them less than ideal for most promotions and they run the risk of being too expensive to keep at their current position. Supervisors do take willingness to make the effort to drive to work as a factor in deciding promotions; Not to mention most opportunities for promotion requires a physical presence at the office.
I have notice a trend in the employers around me (most of my coworkers are subcontractors) that telecommuting is losing much of its luster. Telecommuting used to be encouraged as a method to reduce office space requirements and resources but now it's being discouraged and only granted for special circumstances.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
It can absolutely be a problem and I think this has been demonstrated many times in the past.
However, the problem I've encountered over the years isn't from your average employee telecommuting, it's management telecommuting. Your average designer or programmer can happily sit at home and still get their job done, all they need is a good understanding of what has to be done. But managers need to be available and closely involved in the process, because if they're not, what's really the point of even keeping them employed?
And yet, it's everyone from project managers all the way on up to high level directors who most consistently partake in telecommuting. I've worked with countless project managers who come in to the office for a few hours, spend the entire time catching up because they have to rush back home. In quite a few cases I've found myself managing my own project, dealing with clients directly, rendering that manager redundant. But even worse are the higher ups. I've come across numerous clients who've got people who make themselves essential to the process but work from home a couple of days a week. I use the term "work" loosely as it's apparent they're just dicking around all day. And yet the company is stuck accommodating these jerks suffering stalled processes because they're not available to make decisions. And when they do decide to turn up at the office suddenly they're big saviors.
It's a huge peeve of mine. Especially since everyone else is basically stuck doing their jobs for them. It's at a point where I sometimes feel like corporate America is welfare for the upper middle class.
Never seemed to affect Charlie, at least as far as his Angels were concerned!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I am sorry but my last job that was not true.
In fact the telecommuters were more visible because they were uninvolved in the corporate politics.
So they were never precieved as a threat, and when the layoffs started they all kept their jobs.
TeTalon
You are either a part of the problem, or a part of the solution, which are you.
I have telecommuted 3/5 days each week for almost 6 years at the same company, here are a few observations:
- be in the office the same days each week so that people know where/when to find your face
- make your work visible, send status reports in even if they are not asked for
- speak up on a call, if you have nothing to contribute then make jokes, use humor but make sure your voice is heard
- when you are in the office, work hard
- make sure folks see you online in instant messenger when your are at home
KK4SFV