With the holidays mostly, but not completely over, many of you may be struggling with the tension between desire and reality. You’ve packed up the whole family, survived hauling the kids through airports, making them sit still on long flights, dealt with layovers and flight delays (or maybe you’ve suffered an equally challenging road trip with all the usual potty breaks and are-we-there-yets) to get the family to grandma and grandpa’s house on the other side of the country or further. Everyone is there - your parents or in-laws, your siblings and their kids, and a great time is had by all. You’d love to stay longer - through New Years Eve.

But the reality is that you don’t have enough vacation days to stay as long as you’d like. In the US, our vacation time is meager, and every day is guarded preciously. There’s a few days between Christmas and New Years that you’d be quite happy to work - but you don’t want to leave where you are to do it.

Enter occasional telecommuting! Even people who normally prefer to work in the office and never telecommute can take advantage of this opportunity. For one or two days during the annual family trip you can leave your spouse to take care of the kids, and find a quiet room somewhere to sit down with your laptop and get some work done. You can work for a solid day (or spread it out over 2 half-days) and that’s one less vacation day you have to burn through. It may make the difference between being able to stay where you are for New Years or not.

The nice thing about this arrangement is you can really get a lot of work done. Chances are not many of you coworkers are working. So you can sit down, get focused, and plow through some projects you’ve been unable to get to because of all the usual interruptions. And after the holidays, when all your coworkers are struggling to get through their inbox, yours will be nice and empty already from the hour you spent going through it during the holidays! You don’t even need to worry if your in-laws don’t have high-speed internet access. Since this will be a day of mostly working on that Word doc or spreadsheet you’ve been needing to roll up your sleeves and deal with, you can dial-in over a slow modem line, let all your email download to your inbox, work offline for most of the day, and just dial-in once or twice more to let the emails you’ve written get sent and synch your inbox.

What a perfect arrangement! Just be sure to get the ok from your boss so he knows and approves of what’s going on.

Technorati Tags: telecommute, work from home, remote work, virtual presence

Does Santa telecommute? Well, I’d have to say yes. In fact, I think he telecommutes almost exclusively. You see, for 364 days/year Santa works from his home workshop, overseeing the elves who make toys for the children. But one day per year, he has to travel all over the world, delivering said toys.

What’s my point? My point is that telecommuting isn’t an all-or-nothing arrangement. You may not be able to, or even want to, find a situation where you telecommute exclusively. Some people work from home just a few days per week, going into the office on regularly scheduled days (e.g. every Tuesday and Thursday). Even if you want to telecommute exclusively, you will probably still find there are times where you need to go into the office on occasion. Perhaps you have an important customer meeting where your boss wants you to appear face-to-face. Or maybe a coworker who is located in another part of the country or world is visiting on a business trip. Or maybe you’re kicking off a new project where it’s helpful to sit down with your coworkers in a conference room to brainstorm on a whiteboard.

The point is, be flexible. If you’re arranging a telecommuting situation with your boss, or have just started telecommuting, make sure your boss knows that you are willing to come in on occasion for important face-to-face meetings. This occasional physical presence also helps you reconnect and strengthen your relationship with your coworkers - something that is valuable to do once in a while when your only presence is virtual most of the time.

I will add one caveat to this. An experienced telecommuter can manage with few to no face-to-face interactions. I had a teammate who, for personal reasons and with agreement from HR, actually moved to a different part of the country where there were no corporate offices. He was allowed to do this and continued to perform very well in his role, working remotely almost 100% of the time. He did fly out for a few team meetings once or twice per year, but that’s about it. So if you do have special circumstances, where you can’t come in to the office at all, don’t worry - it can be done! You just need the right working habits to be effective and retain your virtual presence with your teammates - stay tuned on this blog and watch for my upcoming e-book where I’ll give you the information you need to succeed!

Technorati Tags: telecommute, work from home, virtual presence

So my last few blogs have been talking about some of the advantages of working from home. Well here’s another one.

My husband has a very short attention span. He knows it - he’s the first to admit it. He gets very easily distracted - especially when he’s trying to avoid working on some hard project. He’s also an occasional telecommuter; he works from home about once/week.

Well today he worked from home and was amazed at how much he accomplished. He didn’t have his usual plethora of meetings (which is why he chose this day to work at home) and half-way through the day, his only meeting was canceled.  Hmm - maybe something to do with the impending holiday season and coworkers on vacation early? Anyway, at the end of the day he looked at me and said, “Gee honey - I can’t believe how much work I got done today. I broke through a wall on a big project I’ve really been struggling with forever. I don’t how I did it!”

Hmm - was it magic? Did Santa’s elves come and give him a bit of assistance? No, more likely it was his ability to sit down and work the whole day without any interruptions from coworkers swinging by his desk to ping him with a question, chat about the latest sales at Fry’s Electronics, or drag him off to join them for a cup of coffee. This is one of the many advantages of telecommuting - the ability to have a large chunk of time to sit down and focus on some particular piece of work. No, your meetings won’t go away. But in between meetings you can turn off your IM if you need to for a few hours and crank through that roadblock you’ve been banging your head against!

Technorati Tags: telecommuting, work from home

Everywhere we turn these days we’re being pushed to be green. But it’s tough. I’ve tried switching to flourescent lightbulbs, but most of my light switches have dimmers (I’ve put them there - I love being able to dim the lights in just about every room in my house for various and sundry reasons). I think I have 2 or 3 places where I have lights without dimmers and those have been switched to the flourescent bulbs. But what’s the campaign push - if everyone were to replace 5 lights in their houses with flourescent bulbs, it would be like taking 300,000 cars off the road - or something to that effect? So I feel guilty about only making it to 2 or 3. But here’s an easy answer - by telecommuting I’m taking pretty much a whole car off the road singlehandedly! So let’s change the campaign. If everyone were to telecommute and take a car off the road, it would be like… it would be like… well, you get the idea!

Technorati Tags: telecommute, environment

Although my previous post showed my current main reason for telecommuting, I have another reason, a few years older that got me started. Here are the pictures - then and now!

Kevin was born in March, 2004. After my maternity leave I returned to work and asked if I could go part-time for a while. I worked at a large high-tech company with a reputation for family friendliness and being a great place for working mothers, and I’d been there a number of years and really proven myself. Well to my chagrin, they said no (new management, politics, etc). So I started searching around, reaching out to my old contacts within the company. While I could not find a part-time arrangement, I did speak to the new manager of a team I had worked for previously. She told me I had a good reputation and although she couldn’t offer me part-time work, she was willing for me to telecommute exclusively, and have flexible hours (within reason).  I had already been telecommuting a few days per week anyway, so this was not too big of an adjustment.

Well the situation worked wonderfully for me. Just as I wrote in my last post about taking breaks during work to grab time with my baby now, I did the same with Kevin when he was a baby. It was the next best thing to working part-time - I still felt like I got to spend much more quality time with my son working from home than if I’d been commuting to the office every day. I could spend my lunch break with him. I could occasionally sit in his room and cuddle with him and rock him to sleep before his nap, and nursing was much easier than if I’d had to pump at the office! Even when I had a phone meeting during his feeding time, the nanny simply brought him to me and I could nurse him while taking my meeting (thank goodness we weren’t using webcams!).

Even after Kevin started daycare away from the house, I had become so accustomed to, and comfortable with, telecommuting, that I never looked back. When I work full-time and every minute working is one less minute to spend with my kids, why would I want to spend an extra hour every day away from my kids to sit in traffic? It just seems crazy. Life is too short and time is way too precious!

Technorati Tags: telecommuting, work from home, work from home mom

So here is the primary reason I telecommute!

My daughter, Danielle, was born Sept 20, 2004 (yes, the picture is a few months out of date but cut me some slack, I’m a busy, working mom!). I work from home and have a nanny come in to look after her. (For those future moms and dads who have a baby on the way and think they can work at home and take care of the baby simultaneously, please rethink - more in me e-book coming soon!) This way whenever I need a break from sitting in front of my computer, I can stop and play with my daughter for a little while. I get to have little spurts of quality time with her throughout the day and she gets to know mommy is around if she needs me. I also can be around for the nanny to answer any questions or help her with any problems (which especially gives me peace of mind when the baby is sick).

Telecommuting allows me to have a closer connection to my baby than if I were going into the office and just seeing her for an hour in the morning and a couple hours in the evening before her bed time five days/week. I am very thankful that I’m in a situation that allows me to do this.

Technorati Tags: telecommute, work from home, work from home moms

So why do people want to work from home? The infamous answer is that you get to work in your pajamas. But really, what’s so great about that? Why do we take such delicious pleasure in working in our nightclothes? Perhaps it makes us feel like we’re not really working (how can it really be working if I’m wearing my bunny slippers)? Or like we’re somehow getting away with something irreverant or inappropriate from a professional, corporate perspective?

In my personal case it’s typically because I have early morning meetings (often 7am) because I work with such a distributed team - I’m in California and my coworkers are spread throughout the US as well as in Europe and other parts of the world. And even if I don’t have a meeting, there’s often some urgent email or other that’s been sitting in my inbox for a while, where I want to get an answer back quickly (especially if it’s for my European coworkers). If I can get online and get some emails out as soon as I’ve rolled out of bed, that helps my team. And of course, then I’m sucked in and end up in my pj’s until 2 or 3pm before I finally hit the shower! Well the good news is if you do that every day, at least you’re still getting a shower roughly once every 24 hours!

There’s many other reasons for telecommuting that have nothing to do with attire -which I’ll explore more as time goes by. Stay tuned for my next posting where I’ll include a picture showing the main reason I telecommute!

Technorati Tags: telecommute, work from home, distributed teams, corporate, professional

Since this is the beginning of my blog I thought I’d take a minute to cover some fundamentals. And I’m not trying to be insulting here - if you know what telecommuting is, you know what telecommuting is. Basically the term is most commonly used to describe people who work for a corporation, but work either exclusively, or partially, from home.

But I just spoke to a friend in the UK and apparently the term has very little meaning there. I think many Americans are used to the term ‘telecommuting’ and it’s variations - ’telepresence’, ‘telework’, etc. My friend in the UK says that the closest name they have for this working style is “work from home”. Which is interesting because in the US “work from home” or “work at home”, while referring to telecommuting, can also refer to people who have a home-based-business (people who run their own small business out of their homes). There’s even websites dedicated to “work from home moms”, for instance, for mothers (and fathers) who want to earn a little extra money while still primarily caring for their children.

While my own personal experience right now fits the more formal telecommuting definition I gave above, many of the issues, challenges, advantages, and other miscellaneous bits of knowledge I will cover in my blog and eBook apply to folks who are working from home, running their own business too. Especially those who want to interact with their clients by phone, and other virtual means, to some degree to avoid long drives or flights.

Technorati Tags: telecommuting, telepresence, telework, work from home, work at home, home-based business, work from home moms

Hello and welcome to my blog. My name is Nicole Bachelor and the purpose of this blog is to explore all things related to virtual presence - telecommuting, working with distributed teams, working with offshore teams, etc. I have been telecommuting now, exclusively, for over 4 years, and telecommuting occasionally (working from home some days, going into the office on others) for many years before that. I’m working on my first eBook which will have tons of information on how to telecommute, tips, tricks, etc. I will make that available here just as soon as it’s ready and in the meantime, of course, I’ll be putting some great info into my blog.

Thank you for joining me and I look forward to a fabulous virtual relationship!