Building a Case For Telecommuting 230
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."
Not exactly a balance (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Lights Out (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm definitely sick of (Score:5, Insightful)
Being in a 6 by 6 foot cube surrounded by co-workers who have annoying habits or have extended conversations.
Re:Not exactly a balance (Score:3, Insightful)
Log out and turn off your phone at 5pm, then. If you're not getting paid for those extra ten hours a day, you are giving your employer free labour.
Re:They know your not playing Angry Birds (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they think your posting to slashdot.
Classical case of false metrics. For practical business purposes, you should be measured on what you're actually getting done, not on what you might be doing alongside of it. I mean people do that kind of stuff in the office, too, you know. At the end of the day, the question is, did the job get done?
It can be hard to seperate work and personal time (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Poppycock (Score:3, Insightful)
You're not using the tools available to you then. Phone. IM, chat rooms, teleconferences available at a moments notice. We have a number of people in our group that work remotely (and the rest of us work from home once or twice a week). We keep a chatroom going with the lot of us (8 of us) in there at all times - mostly it's used for the usual office-type banter, but its great for collaboration etc. We also have loose rules, that if you want to telecommute, you HAVE to make yourself available at a moments notice by phone. Sometimes you step away from the computer, so you miss an IM etc, but if that phone rings, you better be answering it or you're going to lose your telecommuting privs.
Just set the expectations with the group. We have no problems getting stuff done on very short (minutes) notice.
Re:Poppycock (Score:5, Insightful)
Implicit in the idea of "telecommuting" is the idea of "at a distance," a.k.a. "tele" -- the same root as "telecommunications" and "telephone." If you need to get in touch with your employees quickly, is there a reason you can't just make a phone call? Obviously, if your business is of a kind where employees need to be able to do things hands-on, then probably it's not a good candidate for telecommuting and TFS doesn't really apply to you. Otherwise, I'm not sure I see what the problem is.
Re:Actually, (Score:5, Insightful)
My standing rule for working from home (I spent years as a consultant and often find myself telecommuting with my current job): Get up at the same time you would if you were to go in, get dressed, shower, shave (if that's your thing), brush your teeth, have breakfast/coffee/etc... away from your work space. At the point you would typically leave for work, sit down at your desk. Do so dressed as you would at work.
Keep your desk in the same state you would feel comfortable at your job. If you smoke, go outside for a typical smoke break. If you stop for coffee, do so by walking away from your desk.
Take lunch away from your work space.
Finally, log off VPN at the end of "your shift". Don't fall into the habit of "working late", it's only going to set a habit of allowing your schedule to fluctuate and will make you less productive where it matters.
Works Best When... (Score:5, Insightful)
...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.
my company "flex work" works well (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:person to person = best communication method (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org]
If you're job can be done without communication then I can send that job to the cheapest place that can read the directions.
Re:Poppycock (Score:2, Insightful)
I understand what you're saying, but do you realize that you're contributing to someone else's need to get away from distractions? By showing up in someone's office to ask just one question, you're interrupting her -- which she might not appreciate. Peopleware made the point a generation ago that it takes 20 minutes to get back into a warm creative fog after you've had your elbow joggled.
Instead, as a full-time telecommuter (who does like to see colleagues in-person once every three months or so) I live on IM. A message can pop up on my screen, and I can ignore it until I finish my thought (whether that's a paragraph of prose, code, or brilliant repartee). I can see who it is, and immediately triage my response: Client=answer-right-now; friendly acquaintance= The world won't end if I respond in 5 minutes, etc.
Dealing with isolation is another issue, and so is "out of sight, out of mind." That's why a telecommuter does have to work to ensure that communication stays healthy.
But in my opinion, it's a heck of a lot better than working in an office. For one thing, I can't imagine how anyone gets work done without a cat on one's lap.
It's never been about employee productivity (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It can be hard to seperate work and personal ti (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:They know your not playing Angry Birds (Score:3, Insightful)
Hold on, hold on, you're saying people don't actually work at 100% theoretical capacity 100% of their official work time? That they, like, ramp up on Mondays and wind down on Fridays? That they, like, cannot go from 0 to 100 instantly when coming into work and back down to 0 instantly when leaving? That they're, like, humans, not robots?
Woah, woah, stop the presses, this is a mayor breakthrough!
Re:They know your not playing Angry Birds (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they think your posting to slashdot.
Classical case of false metrics. For practical business purposes, you should be measured on what you're actually getting done, not on what you might be doing alongside of it. I mean people do that kind of stuff in the office, too, you know. At the end of the day, the question is, did the job get done?
^^THIS
Most weeks I telecommute two days and go to the office the other three. We have a strong "get the job done, the rest is window dressing" philosophy. One of the things I tell my new hires early on goes something like this:
"I don't need to walk past your desk and see you working non-stop for 8 hours. I don't expect it to happen. If I walk past you and you're checking some news site or playing minesweeper or freecell or whatever it is you do to pass time, I don't care. At the end of the week, I know if you're getting the job done. I know if you've completed all your assignments or have good reasons for not having finished. I know which projects you've asked for more details or clarification about, and that tells me all I need to know. I don't care how or when you're getting it done, so long as you're getting it done."
Re:There is no such thing as working at home witho (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:person to person = best communication method (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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.
We tried it and it didn't work well (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not exactly a balance (Score:4, Insightful)
It depends on your situation. A 2 hour commute (hour both ways) makes telecommuting a lot more attractive. And when you can spread out in a larger house in the 'burbs instead of being in a tiny place in the city. Have a dedicated office where you can close the door and put away the business phone.
Extended days is one of the well-known problems of working at home, the temptation to clear your inbox as long as you're taking a break. Some people say it's a self-discipline issue, but when you have both that and a feeling of responsibility, the two get in each others' way a lot. Turning on the work computer to get a personal mail from your corporate outbox can be quick or a two-hour issue response.
Especially, and this is where people who say "self-discipline" can be forgetful, if your job entails on-call work. A quick response now, while you have cycles to spare, could prevent a call early morning or middle of the night. And if you work internationally, late night turnaround means your India, China, or maybe UK team can get back to work instead of having a day lag.
The temptation to get a problem checked off the list varies with your situation, and the benefits likewise. I'm currently on a virtual team, and there are perks, but I miss being able to slap someone on the back of the head when they screw up. In a few years I'll be looking to work in a physical building with as many people located on site as possible. And then I'll wish I could work from home, I'm sure.