Thinking of Working From Home?

I ran across a post "My flexible friend the office" by Tomas Mcinernery over at IT@Intel Blog.  Mcinernery does a good job of talking about some of the issues dealing with telecommuting.  He talks about the need to have a policy and working with Human Resources and the Legal departments to determine to what extent can people work from home with out breaching regulations or local work rules and laws.  He also mentions looking at the technical issues to make sure your employees come in via a secure connection.

While Mcinernery does discuss the issues such as employees feeling isolated, the complications of mentoring and developing junior staff I think a lot more needs to be said about the human factor in telecommuting.

There is no doubt (at least for me) that in many cases telecommuting is an excellent alternative to the conventional office work model.  By providing flexibility it can make for happier, more dedicated, more enthusiastic and more productive employees.  However it can also present some challenges, frustrations and career limitations.

Effective telecommuting involves more than giving your employees a laptop and VPN link and sending them home.  One of the more important but often under estimated aspects of productive work is the interaction with our fellow employees and supervisors.  Sure instant messaging (IM) and "live meeting technologies can help with both informal and formal communication.  However, sometimes you need to meet face-to-face.

Telecommuting can work with teams working on a common project but usually only works with already established teams where all the team members know each other.  This is because the team members know each other and have formed a relationship and a trust factors.  Team work via telecommuting where the members don't know each other well is a risky operation.

Much of what we learn at work both about what we are working on and about the company is informal, the proverbial "water cooler" talk.  Telecommuting without and in-office time severely limits this informal network.  IM alone will not fill this gap.

Working unsupervised at home is a matter of trust between the employee and the supervisor.  The manager trusts the to be productive.  The employee trusts the manager to provide adequate feedback, supervision and mentoring.  Again, much of this depends on how well the employee and manager know each other but even in well-established relationships face-t0-face time is necessary to maintain it.

Lastly, one significant factor that employees must understand when choosing telecommuting is that it will likely limit their promotability.  A study by Futurestep, a subsidiary of recruiting firm Korn/Ferry reports "More than half (61 percent) of 1,320 global executives surveyed say they believe that telecommuters are less likely to advance in their careers in comparison to employees working in traditional office settings . . .".  A rather sobering statistic.  Dan Sweet over at FRACAT provides more insight on this including some tips on how to telecommute and get promoted.

The bottom line is that you have to include the human interaction factor when developing an effective telecommuting policy.  This should include a minimum amount of in-office time and I would suggest that it be done on a regularly scheduled basis where everyone will be in the office on the same day.  For example, everyone works in the office on Mondays and can telecommunicate other days.  This facilitates both formal communication such as scheduling meetings and informal communications as you meet your team members informally.

What's been your experience with telecommuting as a manager?  as an telecommuting employee?

"working virtually can be a rough life" photo by fbz

If this topic was of interest, you might also like these:

• Put me in, coach - I'm ready to play today
• Another Day In Paradise?
• Scaling the Heights
• Or the posts in the "Organizational Development" category