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."

I telecommute but you can avoid this issue

[tirk]

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. :)

Re:Visibility is an issue for all

[Anonymous Coward]

Candy solves all problems.

Re:There is probably truth to that.

[ISoldat53]

The same thing happens to road warriors or remote offices. If you are not at the HO to rub elbows at the right parties or be seen with the right people you don't really exist no matter how successful you are. Conversely, no matter how f'ed up you are if you do throw a roaring party or golf with the boss you will survive the downsizing.

Re:Expanded answer

[Deep Esophagus]

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.