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Building a Case For Telecommuting
Esther Schindler writes "Many of us geeks prefer to work at home without distractions, but a lot of bosses still believe that if they don't see you, you must be lolling about, eating bon-bons and playing Angry Birds. 'There may be many reasons a manager is distrustful of telecommuting but the phenomenon of what Albiero calls "presentism"—that is, only trusting and rewarding the folks you see at their computer is a major factor.' So it may be of some use to read through the research compiled by Diann Daniel that says telecommuting creates happier and more productive employees (which naturally include fewer distractions and better work-life balance), and an accompanying infographic showing the environmental benefits from reduced commuting. She follows it up with suggestions on how managers can mentor and support teleworkers. Some of this is general advice, but some of the tips are more specific: 'It may seem like a lot more work—all this up-front addressing of communication issues that happen far more naturally in the office—but the upside is increased efficiency. Albiero sees this especially in the area of meetings. He speaks of one client who has now instituted a meeting format that is structured to allow for the first five minutes of all meetings to be "small-talk minutes." Thus, everyone knows they needn't call in for those minutes unless they want to join."
Going to work creates a balance by segregating time between work and pleasure. I work at home and the only thing that happens 18 hour days.
All the iron I work on I never get to see anymore, which is fine by me. At least from home I'm not trying to shout over all the fans while either freezing or burning. - HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
I got lucky and found a job where I can telecommute from Seattle to San Francisco. I go to SF about once a quarter just to get some face time, but I spend my working time here at home. I put very few miles on my car now and I feel great about that. I don't take up office space there in SF and I feel good about that. I'm productive and my bosses are happy about that.
I fully realize this can't work for everybody, but it sure works for me. My superviser and I communicate through Skype and GotoMeeting at least a couple times a day, once for SCRUM and every so often to get some information across to each other. It would be a boost to the economy, I would think, if more places would do this.
..you must be lolling about, eating bon-bons and playing Angry Birds.
No, they think your posting to slashdot.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Being in a 6 by 6 foot cube surrounded by co-workers who have annoying habits or have extended conversations.
and an accompanying infographic
When this word plateaus, I will bring back synergy.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
this is acutally the only way forward for alot of bussiness models.. it will only take 10-20 years before this becomes the norm in alot of fields think of it this way :
Reduced Costs (office space)
More of a Blurr between work/home life (woudl generally mean benefits for both) ie Flexible working times, equals greater coverage for support type roles.
Less distractions
As technologies overcome the issues for telecommuters (not being in same room for meetings etc) this will become the norm.
I am more likely to make diversions to snack on bon-bons, play whatever, and jerk off to porn. Sometimes, the structure of actually "going to work" is needed sometimes. Probably depends on the person -- just my two cents.
I'm going to make a sweeping generalization and say that in an office environment, people only talk when they're on the phone, in a meeting, or goofing off. So I don't really think communications is the biggest problem with WFH.
Ironically the best reason I have for being in an office is to be free from the distractions of home. Also, having other people working around me helps me focus and maybe keeps me sane. People pace each other through the day; you can witness this collapsing on a hot Friday afternoon.
But... offer me a well-paying job where I can work remotely from an affordable house in a beautiful environment, with a sound-insulated home office and a lock on the door, and I'm there in a flash.
OK, I AM the boss, and the problem is not that my telecommuting people aren't being productive, but rather that when you need them to do something or provide information that they uniquely possess, you can't get it from them on short notice, thus preventing other people from getting their jobs done.
The fact that we are all on the road a lot (spread overy 4 continents) doesn't help either.
For most with a little care we are just as likely to get away with wasting our employers time and money on slashdot all day from our offices as we are from the comfort of our own homes.
Posted as AC for obvious reasons.
to say "hey bob" rather than text him and hope I can get a response in a reasonable amount of time. We "telecommute" when people have to be on the road, like today where one of the engineers sent me an email at 1P.M., though I had zero reason to even be near my computer until I left at 6 ...yea, that was efficient
I did part time telecommuting for a few years. It saved my an hour a day in commute time and reduce my gas purchases by half. There is one downside to telecommuting that wasn't mention in the article. At times, it can be difficult to separate work and personal time. If the work is engaging, it is easy to lose track of time and work many more hours. When working on tasks that are boring and monotonous, it can become impossible to focus. It is much easier to get into work mode when the environment changes.
Of course they're wrong if they think those are the only things I'm doing to avoid work.
I salute anyone who figured out how to stay productive while working from home.
Angry Birds?!
Try Battlefield 3 man...
...you enjoy your job and what you're currently doing. I've telecommuted with a team of 18+ other software engineers for the last 5+ years, and did a stint a while back. When you're engaged in what your doing, and believe in it, working at home is awesome. You focus, you maximize your efficiency by finding the optimal interlacing with the rest of your life. But when the company is jerking you around, or dumps crap work on you, working at home is really hard.
So my word to employers is if you believe in your product and your people, then this really is the best arrangement for you. Otherwise, get our the whips and put 'em in them thar cubies.
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
Mod parent up.
I telecommute two days a week to take care of my wife. I find it much easier to focus when I'm in the office.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I am dreaming about working at home. Just a few days ago, one of my client asked me that whether I was willing to work for them as fulltime employee. I am a part time freelancer and worked for her on her web site. It is always acceptable for bosses to have their freelancers work at home, but not so for their fulltime employees. So she asked me to move to either SF or Hongkong office while I have my family here in Hangzhou, China. So I guss I couldn't move there and lost this opportunity.
life is short, learn more.
I telecommute sometimes. They can tell I'm working by whether or not I meet my milestones. This is not difficult.
After reading all the relevant sources from the article, there is on peer reviewed research that shows improved productivity when telecommuting.
In fact there is no research at all.
There are opinions from people, but no actual evidence. And most of the opinions could be considered bias because the source is from those already pro-telecommuting.
I think that lack of evidence is telling.
I work for a megacorporation. I can go to any nearby office and get a desk for the day (or a conference room for my team), but I can mostly work from home. I tend to go in and meet my team about once a month for collaboration and socialization. My company was able to close 10 pretty large office buildings in my region, at pretty substantial savings. I am pretty sure they get tax breaks for "green" business practices.
It's a pretty big company and we have a 20% telecommute goal, but it is mostly IT who are eligible, so nearly all of us in software telecommute now.
Everyone I know complains that "you never really leave work" when telecommuting, and most of the people I work with don't even stop for lunch any more. I try to have boundaries, but honestly as a developer you never really leave work anyway... but I can take a shower and eat dinner at home, which is great.
Mostly what they got from me though is loyalty. I have worked there for 8 years, only 2 of them telecommute, and no bonus, raise, or corporate title bought them the loyalty that telecommuting bought them. With this sweet setup, I will never quit... It would have to get pretty bad for me to want to... I am hoping that by the time I have to move on Telecommute will be the norm.
The office has a better desk and chair than I have at home, a bigger monitor, etc. Work has faster internet access and better backups. People who will solder boards for me and people to get equipment from. Then the office has a nicely stocked refrigerator unlike my empty one at home, free lunch, and a much better cleaning staff. There are people there to have lunch with, some who will willingly talk to you even if they don't have to. Fewer distractions at work too.
Seriously, I was letting my mind wander the other day thinking about winning the lottery. Besides the usual fantasies of figuring out where to live honestly wondered about somewhere to work part time...
Public speaking classes tell you that over 1/2 of the communication between you and an audience is through non verbal cues including tone and body language, mostly body language. Even regular conversations are better in person because your meeting is better conveyed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_language
If you're job can be done without communication then I can send that job to the cheapest place that can read the directions.
Techie's can probably do fine without face-to-face communication in most cases. However, that's not the case for non-techies. Thus, if you interact with non-techies in your job, it's best to be "available".
And if you telecommute, managers may indeed start thinking that offshoring will be a cheaper version of the same thing. Don't put ideas in their heads. Globalization is a real threat to IT careers.
Table-ized A.I.
Often telecommuters work for a manager who still works in an office. When this occurs, the #1 thing all involved can do? Make the manager work from home for two weeks straight!
I've seen managers do all sorts of dumb things with telecommuters, from making them do things that made no sense to ignoring their requests for simple changes that make working from home much easier. 80-90% of these were simple ignorance. I had one manager who totally blew off my requests for video conferencing for some of our group meetings, after all we had the telephone. Two weeks of them from home and he told me he never realized how much you lose from not seeing faces for some of the meetings!
Which brings up the other half, you have to have some minimal training/awareness for the still in the office folks. Things like setting your IM status become more critical when folks are in other time zones, or can't walk by your cube or hear you coming and going. Making everyone work from home for 2 weeks a year can go a long way to helping.
It doesn't fix all the problems, but it provides a solid foundation for all of the other advice you see in the managing people remotely books.
A 3rd of Telecommuters can't even dress themselves in the morning as it's too strenuous.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/20/pjs_every_day/
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
It's always been about employer risk. Certainly, many telecommuters do good work and do work well. That's not the point. For every ten good ones, there's at least one bad one. That bad one is really bad. And the problem is that it takes a long time, and a lot of effort and money to discover and deal with that one bad one. It's just not worth the risk.
I, as an employer, far prefer the costs associated with the office setup to have ten office employees who are each at 50%, than to have ten telecommuters, save the office expenses, have 9 at 100% and 1 at 20%. That one guys can take down my entire business. I've worked far too hard and risked far too much to let that happen.
And the article is correct. It takes longer to train a telecommuter -- who may not stick around longer enough to matter.
Telecommuting is for already-proven and trusted employees, who want a break and a better life. It's something to be earned.
I did part time telecommuting for a few years. It saved my an hour a day in commute time and reduce my gas purchases by half. There is one downside to telecommuting that wasn't mention in the article. At times, it can be difficult to separate work and personal time. If the work is engaging, it is easy to lose track of time and work many more hours. When working on tasks that are boring and monotonous, it can become impossible to focus. It is much easier to get into work mode when the environment changes.
Different people are different; I don't think one size fits all. For me, I found it much easier to balance work and home life while telecommuting, because of the flexibility it gave me -- not to mention the hours saved in commute time. I telecommuted nearly full time for 10 years, and then a year ago got a new job that requires me to be in the office most of the time, and it's been hard adjusting. I appreciated the ability to easily leave "work" for an hour or two to go to a kid's school production, or to go out for a run, or whatever. I shifted some of my "work" time late into the evening when my family was in bed. All in all, I really preferred it. I love my new job, but I'd love it even more if I could work from home.
I found that it is useful to maintain some separation, though, even when working from home, mainly so that your family can distinguish between your work and non-work time. I did it by designating my home office as my workspace. My kids knew that when Dad was in his office, he was working and not to be disturbed if possible. Though my wife never did grasp the concept, somehow...
That doesn't mean I only worked in my office. Geek that I am, I packed my laptop everywhere, and I didn't see anything wrong with answering a few e-mails while watching a movie with the kids or something. On the other hand, I also didn't see anything wrong with ignoring the e-mail when it wasn't convenient.
Company culture (this was at IBM) had quickly developed some rules of etiquette that really helped. For example, one rule is that you don't call anyone on the phone without first instant messaging them to ask if you can call. So when people aren't working, they shut off their IM client, and that's a signal to everyone else that they aren't to be bothered. Some other rules were that e-mail was not used when quick replies were expected and that background noise (kids, dogs, whatever) was normal and not unprofessional during conference calls.
One thing that really makes a huge difference in your ability to successfully telecommute is the number of your colleagues who telecommute. At IBM it quickly became everyone, so it worked very well. At Google, where I am now, most everyone is in the office and while we have great tools for remote communication (Google+ Hangouts, basically, integrated into calendaring and with high-end audio/video equipment in the conference rooms), if you're not around for the water cooler conversation you miss a lot, and it would be hard to be productive.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Just tell the boss that you spend all day lolling about, eating bon-bons and playing Angry Birds at the office, so you might as well work from home.
I'll bet he'll send you home in no time.
Have gnu, will travel.
Agreed.
I'm a 'techie' (software engineer) and effective collaboration is much easier and more productive face to face.
I work for a global company and I won't say that I can't communicate effectively with people I don't share a room with (or haven't even met), because I can. But I wouldn't want to be part of a team that didn't spend a good part of the week together.
Telecommuting is useful for those times when flexibility is required - someone lives remotely and would like not to commute a couple of times a week, the guy is coming to fix the dishwasher and you need to be home... but all the time? Hell no.
Mod parent up.
I telecommute two days a week to take care of my wife. I find it much easier to focus when I'm in the office.
And, I have 2 young boys who get home from school at 2pm, they're a little distracting too.
The beauty of it is, if you can telecommute to do your job, then some dude in India can do it too for half the price!
The best way to build a case for telecommuting is to find a boss who likes the idea.
Then when they ask you why be truthful and tell them you wanted to telecommute and when you were turned down you decided to look for other opportunities.
Nothing beats negotiating like 2 weeks notice.
And never take the counter-offer.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
So how does that work when you are employed by a large corporation that has multiple locations, where the majority of the people in meetings are on the phone from different locations? How does it matter if I'm at one of the other corporate offices rather than my home office?
No co-workers coming up behind me and bothering me.
In my experience telecommuting, I traded that for people who live with me coming up behind me and bothering me, forgetting that I'm on the clock.
"Infographic" is not going to plateau while Cracked.com is still up.
The answer is that those meetings don't work very well. You get people not paying attention, people answering their email, people who are hard to understand over the phone, etc etc etc. Such meetings are very rarely productive. If you are having a lot of them, time to starting looking for another job, because your company is in trouble.
You're right - I work at a very large company with half a dozen locations in the US spread across 3 timezones, plus a major presence in Europe and India.
Face to face meetings aren't possible in a lot of cases, but my company has actually made an effort to consolidate the majority of people on a particular project team into one or two sites, and encourages managers to rotate "off-site" people through by bringing them to the project's main site for a couple weeks at a time. It works well.
Our schedules tend to be very flexible, but we're all encourage to set (and keep!) "office hours" a couple times a week, where we'll commit to being available for in-person meetings at the office, as well as using instant messaging, screen sharing, and voice chat to keep in touch as-needed.
It's not as good and convenient as being able to pop your head over the cubicle wall and ask the guy next door a question, but it is possible to be fairly effective while working "virtually." But it's definitely more effort.
The answer is that those meetings don't work very well
And the ones that do work well happen at companies that have spent a lot of money on technology to get themselves there - Good HD videoconferencing systems with good audio, allowing for the non-verbal cues and other components for good communication.
I agree that the meetings don't always work well, I think you're 100% right on that. However, we're talking about Fortune 100 companies that aren't necessarily in any financial trouble, it's just difficult to manage that many employees. It's not physically possible for all of the employees to be in one location.
My premise is, given meetings of that nature, why not telecommute?
I telecommuted for a Fortune 500 company for over 2 years, only occasionally coming into the closest office (actually the one I originally worked out of before we were acquired by the F500 company that had a telecommuting policy). There was a lot to like and some to dislike. My commute was relatively tame - an hour a day, total, at most, but it was nice to just roll out of bed and go to work (yes frequently I didn't even bother to shower or shave, much to my wife's chagrin). And, after I had done up to 3.5-4 hour daily commutes at one point in my career, telecommuting was like realizing a dream.
There are a number of specific downsides if, like me, you have small children at home. I carved out a corner of our very messy garage for my "home office" which was separate from the house. When I started telecommuting it took them a while to get the whole "Daddy's at work NOT at home (even though I'm AT home)" thing down and not come out to the garage every 5 minutes to bug me. Once that was done the biggest downside it was, about 70% of the time, either too hot or too cold. I lived in a place where it was frequently very cool / cold in the winter (not like the Midwest or Great White North obviously, but still pretty cold) and 100+ in the summer so frequently by 1 or 2 it was so hot I just had to go into the house.
I also am not sure I was entirely built to telecommute. The first month I really diddled around a lot and didn't feel very productive at all. I had started growing my own little business about a year into telecommuting and would frequently just leave my regular job to take care of little business things and split for the rest of the day. My boss wasn't looking over my shoulder so I didn't really even think it mattered to go about my "other" job. When the time came for a round of lay-offs in 2009, I was let go, probably because I was, at best, really just a "C" player who wasn't really getting his tasks and projects done in a timely manner. I really believe it was because I had fully taken unfair advantage of the freedom of telecommuting.
Telecommuting IS a big adjustment from office life. Yes it's great but you have to have real self-discipline to make it work. Some people might take to the change quickly, but others have to be cautious about the freedom they have. I wasn't very cautious or discrete about the freedom. I don't need someone telling me what to do every second of the day in the office - if anything, I'd be leaving that job, quick, if that was happening - but the office is pretty quiet, relaxed, and allows me to retreat into my thoughts without the kinds of interruptions I have in a home with small children (or have an environment where you're either freezing or burning up). Others work in offices where there's constant noise, interruptions,
.... distraction. There are hell of a lot more distractions at home than at an office. Anybody who claims the contrary is either oblivious to facts or a complete liar.
Distractions at home that you don't have at work are (but not limited to):
- Kids (and/or other family members)
- Pets
- TV / Entrainment
- Personal phone calls
- Internet (particularly social networks)
- Food
- The "need to" exercise
It takes a hell of a lot more discipline to do work at home, than at an office.
Where I work, we've got a reactionary CIO who still believes that gas is $0.92 a gallon. (He also throws "cloud computing" under the bus, among other things.)
Really though, I had been graded top of my class for two years running. June 3rd, 2011 came as quite a surprise when many others, including myself, were told they had to either commute or leave the company. At first, they offered severance. Then this option was taken away. (More complicated, but I'll keep this short.)
Now we've got folks upside down on mortgages driving 180+ miles a day with gas fast moving towards $5 / gallon. (On cars that will be more than upside down.) Can't sell the house to move closer, and nor is there work available locally. I understand a manager in Iowa--at his own expense--takes a plane to Colorado, and rents a hotel room for the two days he's required to be present, then flies back. (Our executive was the hard-line, he requires three days in office.)
The touted benefits of "social interaction" are altogether missing, as most of the folks in a globalized company are remotely connected anyways. The forced relocations should have been to Chennai, India and not the office 90 miles away. Even our department is scattered throughout 7 states.
So: Any hints on where to find telecommuting friendly employers? Most of what I see online are either scams or auctions where the "employer" takes the lowest bidder. You spend more time looking for work--on very short term "contracts"--then making a steady income. I'm on Dice, but nothing is telecommute and minimum travel is 180 miles a day, if I'm lucky.
Thanks and take care...
--Robert
If your job can be telecommuted, it can be outsourced. I'll stick to jobs that require my presence at the office or nothing gets done.
["What are you working on?" is] a useful question.
It's still a complex question: What sub-step of what step are you on of adding what feature to what module, and to which bullet points promised by marketing does it contribute? There are five wh's in that, and answering all of them at once is like giving a stack trace.
For instance if you need to interface to a particular feature it is much easier to get going on that if you actually know the person who works on that feature the most.
Then the question becomes "What modules do you maintain?" or "Do you know who maintains this form or that report?"
Or it's time to pick some poor soul to do your code review and you need to know what people work on who might be most familiar with that piece of code.
I'd start by looking at who has made the last few commits to the module.
Home:
I've got no kids home, here. I can tune out the pets. The TV is too hard for the other to figure out, so it's off. I skip personal calls, if I don't have the time.
I will peek at my weather radar from time to time. (I can still peek when I'm in the office on lessor applications.)
Food? Don't have time to eat during the day.
Exercise? Guilty there. I'll keep the cordless on mute and jog around the yard on conference calls that last 10 times longer than they should. (At least I get the exercise.)
In the Office:
My iPod is broken, and the chatter boggles my mind when trying to code (when I'm awake). While I do have a parrot for a pet, he's less of an issue on conference calls.
Since they killed off telecommuting 3 days a week, the 180 mile commute leaves me "dead but dreaming" for the better part of the morning into the afternoon. (Not enough hours in the day, and going through heavy city traffic).
Tiny laptop monitor, vs. self purchased dual screen. Painful chair, vs. ergonomic (purchased). No mouse / trackball / keyboard, but for said company laptop. Bootup time is 1-2 hours, where I can leave it on, working from home.
Yes, working from home is better for some.
--Robert
I think the telecommuting debate can be easily answered by asking a single question-> which location offers the least amount of distractions?
If you have Office Space-style bosses, dropping by every 15 minutes, to see "how you're coming along with that project" then working at home is a godsend. You'll be more productive, and your code will show it.
If you have bosses who know to leave you alone while you're working on something (but they are known themselves for being generally available for when you have questions (you go to them) -> "What does the client want here?" or "Teach me how to Git" or "When you worked at Inuit, how did you guys solve this problem?"), and family life is filled with distractions (the GF is PMSing that week, the kids like to play loud music, the husband is in Marketing and has entered his mid-life crisis) than working at work would potentially be better. Hell, some of the most productive workers in human history are people who stay late at the office because they hate their family life.
And of course, if both home and work are filled with equal levels of annoyance, then you're kind of screwed. You can try working at a Starbucks or a Barnes and Noble, but it's still fairly rough. On the plus side, you do get the social interaction that you miss at both places, the coffee is usually hot, and there are lots of books on various subjects you might need to learn nearby (boss says learn Ruby, wander over to aisle with O'Reilly Ruby book in it).
If I had a choice in life, I'd have two offices -> one to meet with people in, and one to be productive in. The one to meet with people in would have conference chairs, a large Mahogany desk, and perhaps a small putting green next to the Koi pond (the palace at Versaille might be large enough). The one to be productive in would be at an undisclosed location, with a fiber connection & enough food / supplies to last me weeks (a Japanese sleeping tube might be slightly smaller than I'd potentially want here). The only people with knowledge of said undisclosed location would be the catering (for when I don't feel like cooking) and cleaning (for when I leave) staff, and they'd work for cash (no name given). I'd keep a separate email address and cellphone for said place; it's the only way to be productive. If you stumbled across the place, there'd be a pair of swords of the doorways, and a sound recording constantly being played over the outside speakers (said sound consisting of the last few moments of the life of the person who previously disturbed me while I was otherwise engaged in potentially deeper thoughts).
I am John Hurt.
I've been doing half time telecommuting for a few years now and I actually love (most of the time) how personal and work time change a bit. I can shift my working time around to fit my schedule. Wife is off today and wants to go to lunch? Cool, I'll take a long lunch and just work a bit later in the day. Friends called and they want to slam a few back? I'll work from home that next day and start late. Sometimes I'll have to take a call while I am doing something else once in awhile, but the gains are worth it.
Not to mention I find it a lot easier to focus on all tasks away from the office. The number of times people stop by to say hi, ask a non work related computer question, receive a cold call from a vendor, etc. I deal with while in the office is really high. Almost every time it blows all momentum I had. I try to do all the interacting with people I need to do when I am in the office and do the actual work while out of the office.
Learning some self discipline will solve this problem.
As the movie Contagion pointed out on a side note, telecommuting will skyrocket in the event of a pandemic or any kind of incident like it. It briefly shot up after 9/11 when people were afraid to fly.
I work for a giant multinational. While products in a suite may be globally distributed, we try to keep product teams in the same place.
There are certainly flexible working practices and telecommuting is allowed, but not all the time. It was encouraged for a while, until it was realised that it cut team effectiveness and it impacted productivity (IIRC) to have everyone working remotely all the time.
There are still communications problems between teams from time to time, whether in different time zones otr just different regions. I'm not sure you could solve these by having everyone in a giant office (and it would need to be huge), I think there are inevitable problems that will arise in any huge org. I don't think (100%) telecommuting and splitting up project teams is helpful, however.
We build a video collaboration tool (VSee) for telecommuters and distributed teams. We're 25+ people spread across the East and West Coast US, Europe and Singapore. Almost everyone works from home. Some things we've learned over the years:
Appropriate mode of communication: :) There isn't a one size fits all. The modes vary in how asynchronous they are (email: asynchronous, video/IM: synchronous), how "lightweight" they feel (video: heavy, IM: light) and how much human communication bandwidth they offer (video: high, IM: low). Knowing when to switch from one to another - and not get stuck in a sub-optimal mode of communication - is key. We've developed a sense for when an email thread or IM conversation has grown past its usefulness, and switch to video e.g. VSee. Used appropriately, video can really reduce conflict, promote understanding and speed up decisions. We usually don't start a conversation right off on video, but on IM.
Email, micro-blogging, IM, IRC, video - we've tried them all
Appropriately designed tools:
Because telecommuting is still in early days, often we've adopted tools which weren't quite designed for the "remote work" use case. E.g. with Skype, one can't do video + screen sharing at the same time, and the screen sharing quality is just not enough for real work e.g. looking at code together. With WebEx, video is sub-par and the UX is optimized for webinars/presentations, not group collaboration. VSee is our (ongoing) attempt to solve many of these problems and package group video + app/screen sharing in a UI that's pleasant to use throughout the telecommute work day. We love feedback on how to make it work even better in the trenches.
Team practices:
It's easy to get out of sync when relying purely on as-needed communication. We've found daily standups/huddles over video to be indispensable, even if brief. The formula we use is each team has its own daily huddle. Tech leads will often attend the huddles of other teams. After huddles, people often break out into smaller groups to discuss issues in more detail. All of this happens quite seamlessly on VSee.
Ambient awareness, team bonding: :) Micro-blogging, IRC and a culture of open sharing helps (e.g. every email list is open to all employees). For team bonding, we get everyone together for fun activities (snow sports, wake-boarding) twice a year, encourage team members close to each other to meet up more often, and in general try to create a family-like and family-friendly environment.
Being remote does take a toll on these aspects. Ambient awareness refers to the random ideas and conversations, things overheard while sitting in an open work area. We haven't fully figured that one out yet
All the best to telecommuters old and new!
Judging by my coworkers, the other 2/3 don't telecommute.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And now for people like me who don't really benefit (quite the opposite) from being able to transport information by body language...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There are still 3 very important differences. Since I have been working for a US company from Europe, I had to find them out the hard way.
1. Time zones. If you outsource half a globe away, your working hours won't overlap a lot. Unless one side is willing to work "odd" hours. Teleconferences are a way to overcome distance but not time, and it might not be the best idea to schedule a meeting where one of the people involved has to be present at 4am his time. Simply because he might not be as alert as he should be.
2. Language. No matter how well you learn a language, there are idioms, hidden meanings and speech figures that don't translate well or, worse, turn out to be the opposite. And even aside of misunderstandings because the meaning could not be transported sensibly, you might end up with a very unhappy and pissed business partner who might not tell you so due to cultural inhibitions to tell you that you just offended him. Hint: Some countries have VERY strict cultural laws who offers whom the "honor" of going to a first name base.
3. A combination of the two is the fact that you cannot simply come in and do things "damn right now" because something needs some polish because the specs weren't as clear as you thought they are but need whatever was to be delivered NOW. And I guess we can agree that time is usually a resource that's in short supply, especially as deadlines close in.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's not really THAT different from the local meetings my company has. There's a reason nearly everyone appears with their laptop, and it's not to take notes. One of the reasons is of course that the meetings are quite pointless to start with, where most people attending would be quite happy to be there for the 5 minutes their portion of the project gets some discussion time, but it's just easier to invite them and have them sit at the table.
Yes, that's not productive. But imagine how little would get accomplished if these people didn't bring their laptops along to work while they're forced to waste their time in a meeting.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
When I first started working at home, I missed having co-workers. I missed dressing up for work although I admit I liked not having to commute for work. In terms of productivity, I really needed to discipline myself. I have a child at home so my productivity was definitely affected in the first few weeks. I agree that telecommuting is a great option but I don't think it's something that should be implemented for all. Some groups of people need to be in the same physical space to work. Some are more productive working alone at home.
A team needs to be in one place at least part of the time, formal meetings (or teleconferences) are all very well, but what about the other interaction between team members, how do you allow this with remote workers ...?
Your Teams can be spread around, but if each team is scattered then it is not longer a team ...
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Public speaking classes tell you that over 1/2 of the communication between you and an audience is through non verbal cues including tone and body language, mostly body language. Even regular conversations are better in person because your meeting is better conveyed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_language
I completely agree with that.
If you're job can be done without communication then I can send that job to the cheapest place that can read the directions.
I completely disagree with that.
Communication *is* impaired by a lack of face-to-face contact. This means you need to employ (or train, but that is less reliable) employees that are superb at communication to compensate. Nonetheless, "reading the directions" is probably a very small aspect of most jobs. You need to find the place that produces the most cost effective results and I'm sure that there are many jobs that are ideally suited to telecommuting because you can still communicate when you need to, but you avoid a lot of the frivolous communication you see in office-based environments.
I say that as someone who works from home, and manages employees based in an office and other employees based remotely.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co_DNpTMKXk
I own a small company that builds computational systems for numerical analysis (hardware and software). I have 18 full time and 10 part time/hourly employees in a 12,000 square foot office/lab/assembly facility.
Distraction is a constant problem, even with as few people as we have. Whether it's walk-up traffic, other people having conversations, Internet time sucking, phone calls, or whatever, it all sucks money out of the bottom line.
We have tried numerous approaches to minimizing distraction and time-off-task, and telecommuting was certainly not one of those that helped. Between spouses and kids and errands and pets and TV and other life responsibilities, there was just too much getting in the way.
We tried office hours - people would set "office hours" during which time they welcomed visitors and interruption for various things, but that didn't work because people did not respect them - there was always something "too important" to delay.
We tried universal quiet hours, and that didn't work because it made it too difficult to meet the needs of our clients.
So, we finally did what America did for decades before modern "office efficiency" practices took over. I moved the company to a rented facility for four weeks and had a construction company come in and bulldoze the cube farm and replace it with offices around the perimeter of our building (it's a 120x100 building), and moved the labs and conference rooms to the center space.
Now, everyone has their own office with natural lighting, a pleasant atmosphere, and individual temperature control (THAT was freakin' expensive). Each of the 24 new staff offices is 140 square feet (14x10) with seating for up to four for small meetings. There are smaller shared offices for the part-time/temporary/hourly/co-op workers. We lost some lab space and a couple of conference rooms, but we're getting by without it just fine.
I had to suspend profit sharing for a while to pay for it, but nobody was the slightest bit upset about it. It was by far the best $350k I ever spent on my employees.
The moral of the story is, employees work best in a comfortable environment that they enjoy being in, because they're not thinking about how much they'd rather be somewhere else, doing something else. Some people like it warmer. Some like it cooler. Everyone likes natural lighting. Everyone likes to be comfortable in their surroundings. Give them a comfortable environment, and they will thrive and prosper.
No distractions, far better development machine, triple 24" monitors, etc.
Coming into work, I have to use a shitty laptop with a 1280 x 900 (900? not sure on Y axis) hooked to a single 1280x1024 monitor. Short cube walls. I'm really tall, so the typical cube desk is always too short for me, pinning my legs between it and the chair. (Gotta have the chair at its highest position or my posture is horrible.) Have to constantly be bothered when I'm trying to concentrate on coding. Listening to people blabber loudly on their phones in several languages. (I can easily filter out people speaking English, but if it's a language I don't know, then part of my brain is always focused on that, trying to find a pattern in the strange speaking.)
I'm not a social person while coding, so I get a hell of a lot more accomplished when I work by myself.
For the kind of work I do, there's no reason at all to come into work except for weekly meetings. When I'm working from home, I am relaxed and don't care how long I work. When I'm in the cube farm, all I want to do is leave.
I've been 80% telecommute for the last 5 years, and just two months ago started a 100% telecommute job. New employer is PST, I'm in Central timezone. On top of the new employer being very good with communication technology, it also just really helps to make telecommuting work when you have an organization of people with effective and complementary work ethics in general.
My previous employer was Eastern. Waking up AFTER your co-workers have already started their workday is annoying and gets old very fast, especially when the people to the east of you are idiots. Many places tend to treat email as a realtime communication tool these days, which breaks down very easily. Almost daily, I would wake up to an "urgent" email thread requesting a ton of last-minute work from me as soon as I "get in." I learned to check (and double-check) whether somebody else had been contacted to do it, because a majority of the time they would have found some other schmuck without telling me or even replying to the thread with a "nevermind."
It's no wonder our General Manager was a diehard "presentist." His constant, unsubtle reminders of how much better it would be when (not if) I relocated to HQ were one of the reasons I jumped ship. He knew I did all my work and then some. He knew first-hand that I performed better when I didn't have a herd of caffeinated New Yorkers drooling on the back of my chair and asking about my non-existent opinion on the recent sportsball encounter. He knew I was underpaid even though the cost of living in my hometown was almost 50% of that in HQ. Yet he still thought it was more important for me to relocate than to recognize and exploit the increased efficiency of keeping Grumpy Goldstein happy and alone in his secluded batcave somewhere out in the midwest.
If your company is always managed by firedrill, with poor planning and project management, it's a safe bet that your telecommuters are going insane. And he was shocked (SHOCKED!) when I left.
The only inherently tough part of working from home that I still struggle with is keeping my family from being too much of a distraction without creating unnecessary distance. I don't like keeping my office door closed unless I'm VERYBUSYDONOTDISTURBFORANYREASONBEWAREOFBEARS, but if I'm honest that's rarely the case. Sure, there are times when undivided focus would be a good idea. I just don't like shutting them out, because, well... They're my family, and I'm quite fond of them and wish them to be happy. I've considered putting some sort of studio light outside my office door: if the light's on, do not enter. But that's probably overkill. Most of the time, my wife will just IM me from the other room anyway, which works most of the time.
Anyway, now that I've gone from several wrong-way-to-do-it telecommuting jobs to one that is modern and good at it, I wonder if there are any decent trade groups for telecommuters. Or, better yet, I'd love to let some coke-bottled researchers observe my habits for some university study on long-term telecommuting.
Sure its nice to work at home, cuts down on office costs, but don't good managers read all the non verbal communication coming from their employees? How are managers suppose to do that through email or phone?
I would say a good candidate for telecommuting should be someone who doesn't need a lot of management. I think I would qualify. I hardly ever talk to my manager. He rarely ever assigns me work. I basically, on my own initiative, discover inefficiencies in the way our company does things and build the tools we need to make us more efficient. I work from the office, but it is extremely distracting and I find that I get much more work done when I am sick at home than when I am well at the office.
As an aside, in our company, sick means you are at home working instead of at the office working. You don't actually get to lay in bed and sleep or watch TV, but on the other hand, at least since you are still working. they don't actually limit your sick days...yet.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
If you're job can be done without communication then I can send that job to the cheapest place that can read the directions.
Most of the jobs we're talking about aren't the type where the directions are actually written.
A 3rd of Telecommuters can't even dress themselves in the morning as it's too strenuous.
When I worked from home full time, I'd torn a tendon in my knee and had on a leg brace and was on crutches, so I just had on my robe, and since it was a little cold, over the robe I had on this Mexican poncho sort of thing - very colorful. So FedEx shows up with a package for me (a laptop) and I open the door... the poor guy was so shocked by my appearance that he dropped the laptop upon seeing me. (He kinda caught it with his foot, it wasn't damaged).
After that I swore that I'd always be fully and properly dressed, no matter what.
Where I work now, you could show up in the office in swim fins, trunks, mask and a snorkel and maybe it'd get a comment... but probably not.
Stupidity... has a habit of getting its way.
It's great to see so many people extolling the virtues of working from home. I got very ill back in December, and was kind of forced to be allowed to work from home and now it's kind of an open option for me. I usually do it one or two days a week, and I get a lot done those days. I also usually put in more hours, because it's easy to just pop on the TV around quitting time, and work less efficiently, but keep on working since I have my laptop out and I'm already logged into things. Saving the miles on my car, the gas, the commute time, etc is all awesome. Losing an hour or more of my day to commuting is such a waste for me and the company I work for.
I've been working from home for 6 years now. My boss is 2000 miles away and I love it. I get more done working on my own than in an office where people are going to be stopping by every couple minutes to distract me. I don't take a lunch break generally other than to quickly cook something or grab something and head back to my home office or the couch. It also means I generally work longer hours than I would in the office since when 5pm comes, I'm already at home and if I'm into something, I just continue working on it. This isn't to say that working remotely is for everyone. It takes a great deal of discipline to be able to stay on task when you could be doing things like cooking, cleaning the bathroom, going shopping, watching TV or taking a nap. It's definitely not something for everyone but it has worked great for myself and the rest of my company.
It's probably easier to skate by in an office environment and go unnoticed than telecommuting. To say 10% of telecommuters aren't working means that chances are, 10% of your office workers aren't working. Lazy is lazy, people don't just magically become productive when you force them into an office. I'd venture to say because of improved morale, you're probably getting more work out of telecommuters than office zombies.
Half of your "distractions" are just as present in the office.
My CIO's feelings are, "I don't care where or how long you work, as long as you deliver and as long as you are reachable".
I try to work from home as much as possible. As a team lead, this means that I'm constantly shuffling meetings and workshops around, to free up a day here and there. However, I find that I only tend to work half the day - from lunchtime I mope around the house. But, I do the same amount of work in those 4-5 hours than I do in 2-3 days at the office. I'm a whole lot more productive, and it ends up being cheaper for everyone - I don't have to pay for petrol/gasoline, my employer doesn't have to pay for the energy to power the aircons, etc. Plus it's less stressful for both myself and my team (although I bug the shit out of them on skype & lync when I'm working remotely). I am planning to work 2 or 3 days a week from home, once we
My work day varies in length - it's fairly flexible depending on what is going on, was is broken and what my workload is. Some days I work 5 hours, other days 24 hours. I sometimes get looks from other departments if I stroll in at 10h00. But I care not: I'm here to get the job done.
We have a number of devs that telecommute from various places around the country and world. It works because they are the right kind of people to make it work. Yes, they may work slightly less or more than what their contract says, but they deliver. Other people just cannot work outside of an office, they need a strictish/rigidish environment in order to work properly.