Getting it Right

Jul 18, 2008

I’m so excited. I just came across a fascinating article in CIO.com titled “Everyone Works at Home at Chorus“. OK so the title isn’t very exciting. But the article is about a company named Chorus that moved entirely to telecommuting. They’ve shut down all their offices besides their data center and all their employees work 100% of the time from home.

Now the exciting bit is that they went about this, for the most part, correctly. They didn’t just throw all their employees out of the offices and say “Go work from home”. Instead they put together a plan and processes, considering everything from technology requirements, to their home workers’ environments, to ’softer’ issues such as people interactions and work relationships.

The article is broken into 3 parts. The first part focuses more on the technology and, while interesting to folks setting up the IT, probably isn’t as exciting to the rest of us. The second and third parts are how they handled things like IT support for their home workers and then how they handled the communications, relationships, and management of these people. That third part is definitely the most interesting to me.

As I said, they really thought all this stuff through and did it right. They made it easy for their home workers - made sure their needs were addressed and looked at the human factors and not just at the bottom line. One part I read said their workers had a hard time because when they made the switch they did it all at once and the employees found themselves missing the social interactions of being in the office. I immediately thought they should have gone for a more phased approach - starting the employees working a few days at home and then gradually increasing it to full time telecommuting. I was glad to see that the manager of that group said the exact same thing in the very next paragraph. People really do learn!