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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. :)
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.
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.
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
"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 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.
I've worked in the (same) office since 1997 and I don't get lunch, beers, or t-shirts either.
I do, however, get to sit in traffic for 40 to 60 minutes a day.
Not just government, any job which consists of a lot of overseas work (anything in HW engineering, unfortunately). Trying to make times work between US east/west and central time zones, India, china and/or malaysia means telecommuting.
I couldn't pick half my coworkers out of a lineup. I also don't have this "credit" problem, I know who did what based on long chains of emails. My boss knows the same.
I can't say now that I have kids, that I like telecommuting as much as I did before then (or may like once the kids are in school all day), but most of the arguments I hear against it always have the smell of bullshit.
This has to be reverse psychology.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
If you can telecommute to work, so can someone else in another country who will do your job for cheaper.
There is a reason that the expression 'out of sight, out of mind' came about. And it says it all. In general... in the greatest general terms, it holds true. And in the current context this generality is what applies. People won't think about you if you aren't there... unless of course you don't do your work. And even that isn't a guarantee these days. It is like IT, no one cares if you are there unless something goes wrong. And at those times, if the powers that be can't get to you in a way that is convenient to them, they will find someone who is better able to accommodate them.
We're talking real life real people here, not computer code. The answer here has to appeal to the greatest common denominator, not the least (we don't need to always satisfy the edge case). Just the same as crossing the street. You look both ways because most people won't be able to stop in time if you step right in front of their car [obligatory car analogy satisfied]. So the answer is yes, you are more invisible if you aren't there. You won't be included in quick meetings to solve problems that pop up, you won't get credit for helping get over many critical issues that require personal attention. You will be an invisible work horse. Yes there are exceptions, but not everyone is or can be an exception; just like not everyone can be above average.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
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.
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.
I think it still takes a company with a culture of telecommuting, or even outsourcing, for that to work. If you're the only one telecommuting on your team, and the company doesn't have operations overseas, or outsource anything, then it's much different.
Yup, you're only as invisible as you want to be. I'm in a mid-sized IT company (~1100 employees) and spent the first half of my career (now coming up on 20 years) in tech support as the only remote employee in the department and one of only five remotes at the company. I took calls from customers and colleagues, had weekly meetings with my boss by phone, and made extensive use of email and IM to keep myself in the thick of activities 1000 miles away. Come performance review time, I brought forth evidence from my "fan mail" folder showing how much the customers loved me.
Now I'm on a development team that includes a group working from India. We have Live Meeting conferences twice a week (at 9AM our time, 8PM theirs) and I'm in constant communication with my supervisor via IM and the rest of the group via email. When they took a group photo last week to show the rest of the company at a management meeting, I GIMP'ed myself into the group.
I couldn't even stay invisible if I wanted to. A few years ago when I was making the transition from support to development, I went to our Dallas office to shop around for a new position (my support for the legacy products was no longer needed) and got dragged into a management meeting. I ended up the center of attention as a parade of colleagues came in and described how I had pulled their fat out of the fire over the past 15 years. All this took place with me sitting right next to the CEO, who was always one of the most vocal opponents to telecommuting. So afterwards I told him I had been trying to stay under his radar, and he said he has always known about me because whenever a crisis arose involving our legacy products, someone would say "No problem, DeepEsophagus is on it" or "DeepEsophagus already took care of that."
The important thing is to make sure the impression you leave is a GOOD one.