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These days the swine flu scare may be settling down a little. But it’s still there and not going away any time soon. Many people are taking extra precautions to avoid exposing themselves unnecessarily – the top one is to avoid crowded places. And those crowded places for many, 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, are corporate office buildings.

That’s right - telecommuting is a popular option these days to avoid the germ-ridden corporate cafeterias, restrooms, and cubicle mazes. And in some cases, it’s not just an option, but a requirement. Some large companies have temporarily shut down facilities in areas that are most heavily impacted by the swine flu. They’re telling their employees to work from home.

But what is the impact to this innocuous-seeming solution?

The answer: a mad scramble for IT workers to make sure the infrastructure can handle the sudden dramatic spike in telecommuting. That precious Virtual Private Network or VPN that allows employees to “tunnel” into the corporate intranet from home needs servers running to support it, licenses for concurrent connections, and internet bandwidth. And as volume grows, these resources become overloaded. If there aren’t sufficient servers, etc, then everyone (not just the people in the location that was shut down) will suddenly see drastic reductions in quality and speed to their remote connection. They may even start losing their connection intermittently and have to keep reconnecting.

While those who usually work in the office and are just working from home temporarily may tolerate this inconvenience, the diehard career telecommuters who work from home every day will certainly notice the difference. And chances are they’ll be calling the helpdesk and yelling at whoever will listen. That adds up to increased support calls which means even more IT costs. And don’t forget the increased support costs from the large number of people who find themselves trying to work remotely for the first time and don’t know how to setup their connection properly.

While some companies may have the extra capacity to handle one or two sites being shut down here or there, do they have the capacity to handle large numbers of sites, possibly all sites, being shut down? If the swine flu truly turns into a major pandemic, will the IT infrastructure be able to support this new way of doing business?

Companies are willing to pay for an extra server or two for Disaster Recovery, in case the main servers running their VPNs break or the data center they’re located in go down. But in general they tend to size their solution assuming a certain % (say, for example 5%) of the company is working at home at any given time. Most companies will not pay to have numerous spare servers, licenses, and bandwidith available for the unlikely event of a world-wide pandemic of epic proportion that requires 20%, 50% or more of their employees to work at home concurrently. The cost vs risk analysis simply doesn’t add up.

It looks like Swine Flu is not shaping up to be the massive pandemic that the media was originally painting it as. But it certainly could have been. Every CIO/CTO of every large company has probably been sweating about this one and whether the infrastructure is going to fail under their “reign”. They can’t justify shelling out the big bucks to beef it up, so they’re crossing their fingers and hoping the “big one” will happen after they’ve retired and some other poor shmuck has taken over.

What can you do? Well for one, make sure you’re set up now to telecommute – that you have the equipment you need and know how to setup your VPN. And start using it, even a day or so per week. The more people who start telecommuting on a regular basis, the more resources IT can justify now, and the less impact there is if a major pandemic really does send the whole company to work from home! Depending on your position in the company (especially if you work in IT), if you can start asking probing questions to management about telecommute capacity, it might just get them to try to prepare a little better for the worst case scenario.

One more thing – if there is a major rush on telecommuting, when you have your VPN going, don’t disconnect. The licensing limitations (among other things) may be set on a first-come, first-served basis.

Technorati Tags: telecommute careers, telecommuting, remote work, telework, work from home, work at home, work from home mom

The other day my husband decided to telecommute because he had a bit of a sniffle. Normally this would never have stopped him from going into the office on a typical non-telecommute day. But this time he continued to work from home every day for 3 days until his cold had mostly passed.

Why? I give you two words: Swine Flu.

In the very unlikely event that he had somehow contracted swine flu, my husband didn’t want to take the unnecessary risk of infecting others.

I really applaud his approach. He had a few face-to-face meetings that he had to change around a bit, but he felt it important to keep his germs out of the office. Corporate offices are an awful opportunity for germs and illnesses of all kinds to spread. We’re all crowded into small spaces, sharing the same restrooms, cafeteria, etc. If one person is sick, it can spread through an office like wildfire.

Now I agree that the media may have hyped Swine Flu up a little in some cases. I think people are starting to suspect it may not be as severe and as serious of a pandemic as it was initially considered.

But we just never know - and nobody wants to take unnecessary risks.

I’ve read a lot about people who come into the office when they’re sick, because they don’t like telecommuting, feel they won’t get as much done, or that they’re afraid their managers won’t like it. I’ve heard that some managers do in fact discourage their somewhat sick employees from working at home because they just don’t know how to deal with telecommuters and truly think they won’t be working if they “work” from home.

These attitudes (both the worker’s and the manager’s) are selfish and frustrating. To get others around you sick (some of whom may have other health issues, where what seems like a mild illness for you has a major impact to them) for these reasons is inexcusable. If a manager can’t judge how hard his employees are working by the work they produce, rather than how many hours he sees them at their desks, he isn’t worth his salt.

And especially now with what many perceive as a potentially deadly illness circulating around, it’s ridiculous to ignore the risk mitigation that telecommuting has to offer. With all the technologies we have today like laptops, Instant Messaging, and virtual private networks to “tunnel” into your company’s intranet from home, there’s just no good reason not to spend a couple of productive days at home.

Now if those few days at home are an annoyance to your manager, think about this. When a co-worker gets me sick, and I’m either too sick to work or perhaps am just less productive than usual, by the time I’m finally getting better my kids are then sick and have to stay home from daycare. So I have to take more time off to care for them. But my kids probably already spread their germs at daycare before their symptoms started (nothing like sucking on the toy that some other kid just sucked on to spread even the smallest amount of germs) and suddenly other kids are getting sick, staying home so their parents have to take time off work. Then those parents get sick, are less productive, come into their offices, and spread the illness to all their co-workers. All because my co-worker couldn’t telecommute for a couple of days! How’s that for annoying?

And, too, unless your work is completely independent, think about how your co-workers getting sick from your cold will cause them to fall behind on the work that’s critical for your own project! Your own selfish actions can ultimately turn around and bite you in the backside.

So please, whether you do it for selfish or altruistic reasons, when you feel the sniffles coming on, skip the commute and fire up your laptop from home!

Technorati Tags: telecommute careers, telecommuting, remote work, telework, work from home, work at home, work from home mom

Many people will agree that there are some aspects of a job that lend themselves well to telecommuting. But they will also tell you that other aspects do not. Near the top of that list of “difficult tasks to perform virtually” for all but the most experienced of telecommuters is the job of interviewing a potential employee or team member.

Well, you can probably guess where I’m going with this blog post.

I do agree that in general there is a lot of benefit from a live, face-to-face interview. You can learn a lot from the other person’s body language, eye contact, etc. And this information can be valuable in determining the person’s comfort level with the topics they are discussing, as well as their general social skills and how well they interact with others.

However, I will say that even interviewing potential team members is something that can be performed effectively by phone if need be. I have participated in many such interviews myself due to the globally distributed nature of the team I work on. In fact, we’re so comfortable with this mode that we often even interview local candidates by phone rather than coordinating schedules to have them come into the office.

So what are the best ways to deal with interviewing a candidate by phone?

Well really, it’s not much different than any other important interaction that, as a telecommuter, you must handle by phone. 

• First, when you start the interview, if the person seems uncomfortable with the lack of face-to-face interaction you can take a couple minutes to chit-chat and break the ice a bit. A small chat about the big game last weekend or the local weather can give you both a few minutes to warm up to each other.
• Don’t be bothered by the silences. Interviews can be uncomfortable, or downright awkward for some people. When you’re face-to-face, a pause in the conversation can seem pretty natural. But on the phone it sounds as awkward as dead air time on the radio. Don’t rush to interject a comment just to fill the void. Give the other person the time to finish thinking through whatever they were going to say. Continue to talk and act comfortably so the other person knows you are not judging that silence.
• Without the body language to interpret, you might have a harder time judging the comfort level a person has with particular questions you ask. So you need to be a bit more explicit in how you ask them. For instance, if you ask the candidate if they’re comfortable managing a customer escalation and they pause and say yes, you can’t tell if they really are. So ask them how many escalations they’ve handled in the past, or ask them to describe their most difficult escalation and how they handled it. Or if they tell you they’re comfortable learning a new technology independently without much assistance, ask them to describe the process by which they would teach themselves.

Of course, if you’re interviewing for a job where the candidate needs to have really good people skills, and/or exceptional phone skills, you shouldn’t have to do any extra work to put them at ease or help interpret their comments – they should do all that work for you. And if they can’t, they’re probably the wrong person for the job.

However, performing interviews by phone is not all downside. In fact there is one big advantage I’ve come to discover. Often when there’s a couple of us on the phone interviewing a candidate together, we’ll use Instant Messaging (IM) to communicate during the interview. We can suggest follow-up questions to the team member who is talking, compare thoughts on how the candidate answered a particular question, even lead each other a bit on the direction we want to go with the interview as we learn more about the candidate. It can be quite useful and help make the limited time we may have with the candidate that much more effective in learning what we need to know.

Technorati Tags: telecommute careers, telecommuting, remote work, telework, work from home, work at home, work from home mom

Well folks, I have some really exciting news to announce. My Telecommuting Expert career is taking a big step forward. I am now a paid article writer for a telecommuting website!

Small Business Resources (SBR) is building a website full of useful information for telecommuters, which it offers for private label to its major clients (for example, telecommunications companies). They have asked yours truly to be their featured expert. I will provide articles and tips twice monthly for the site.

This will of course be great visibility for me and is a huge step forward in my journey of helping others succeed in their own telecommuting careers! And of course, it provides extra incentive for me to keep writing useful, info-packed articles on a regular basis, which benefits you, my loyal readers too as I will be posting those same articles to my blog. So keep an eye out here for more articles just like the great ones you’re used to reading.

Here’s some more info about SBR:

Small Business Resources (SBR)  is a boutique marketing company assisting Fortune companies and leading brands with customized programs for acquisition, retention and enhanced customer loyalty. Through its hands on approach, SBR has built a marquee roster of clients in the small business and consumer marketplace. SBR’s clients include major banking and telecommunications companies. SBR’s customized programs include Business Resource Centers, Moving Centers, Women in Business Resources, Retirement Centers and Home Office Resource Centers.

Technorati Tags: telecommute careers, telecommuting, remote work, telework, work from home, work at home, work from home mom

When you’re telecommuting, self-discipline is key. Think about it. You’re sitting down at your desk to start work on that important project that’s been hanging over you for a while. But first, you’re just going to check email to see if there’s anything urgent that you need to work on. Nothing urgent, but there is an email where it would be best to get a response out sooner than later, so you can get it off your plate and focus on getting started on your project. And while you’re working up a reply to that message, you get a phone call from one of your co-workers who needs to discuss an important aspect of the new code that’s going into the release cycle tomorrow. And after that you look at the time and realize you have a meeting in 20 minutes. No point starting on your project now – better to find some other small tasks to complete and you’ll get started after the meeting.

Does this sound familiar? We’re all capable of procrastinating, especially when we’ve got a big task looming over us. And all those examples I gave apply no matter where you’re working – even if you are in the office.

So what’s different for telecommuters? Well, when you’re in the office, there’s only so many emails, phone calls, and meetings you can hide behind. Eventually you realize you do really need to get to work. But at home there are even more distractions. Hmm – I need a break from my desk. I’m going to get up and throw in a load of laundry – it will be good for me to move around for 5 minutes. And now I notice it, the kitchen is a mess. Let me just wash a few dishes before I get back to work so the place won’t be so messy for dinner tonight. You know, now I’m in the kitchen, I’m feeling hungry. I’m going to pull out a snack – it’s still hours until dinnertime. And while I’m eating, I’m going to read just a couple pages in that great new book I’ve started.

Well if you’re really trying to avoid getting started on that new project, a few pages in that great book can turn into a few chapters! And even if you’re not avoiding your work, if the book is good enough, you may still get sucked in for much more time than you intended. At the corporate office, it’s much harder to sit and read a book for longer than the time it takes you to eat your lunch or your snack. You’re very conscious that people are walking by you – probably eyeballing you and questioning why you’re not working. Even if you have been putting in really long hours lately and deserve to take a nice long break, you’re not going to be so visible about it because you know others don’t know how long you’ve been working lately and you don’t want to be judged.

At home, you are really your own gatekeeper. You have to be self-disciplined and not let the household chores (or the household TV) call to you too loudly. That, of course, is not to say you can’t do anything around the house when you’re working at home. I’m a strong believer that just like in the corporate office when you take breaks to go to the gym, or chit-chat with your buddies, at home you’re allowed to take breaks and do household chores if that’s how you want to spend your time. But you do have to keep an eye on that time yourself. And for some people (myself included) I can be quite disciplined about most activities, but when I’ve got a really good book I do have trouble putting it down when I’m finished with my lunch and I struggle with the eternal “let me just read a couple more pages” battle!

So consider your own levels of self-discipline when you work from home. Use a timer when you take a break to do some chores around the house. And if you have a really good book, maybe you need to leave it safely closed away in the drawer of your nightstand and don’t take it out until the evening, after you work is over!

Technorati Tags: telecommute careers, telecommuting, remote work, telework, work from home, work at home, work from home mom

For those of you who like numbers, I came across an interesting statistical analysis of telecommuting trends in the IT Support space. The article is courtesy of HDI, an IT service and support membership association.

The focus of the article is on call support analysts. According to a survey of their members, 34% of IT support centers have analysts who telecommute at least once/week and 17%  of IT support centers have analysts who telecommute full-time.

This is encouraging news for those folks who may be looking for jobs where they can telecommute. Customer support centers (be it for IT or other areas) definitely seem to be leading the way for non-local work locations. While I often see these jobs (especially in IT) farmed out to low-cost off-shore locations such as parts of Asia, it’s nice to see that a “local” can still get a job in this space and work from home.

In fact, I have read about some companies that have tried to move their support centers to other countries but found that due to the cultural and language differences, their customers had increased satisfaction dealing with people from their own countries. Thus we may be seeing a trend of the jobs coming back to their companies’ home countries and when you’ve already got all the technology for remote work, it’s a no-brainer to allow telecommuting.

The article is a quick read and goes on to provide some other stats about office attitudes toward telecommuting in this space, what services companies are paying for when their telecommuters work at home, etc. Worth a look if you’re interested in the IT Support world.

Technorati Tags: telecommute, remote work, telework, work from home, work at home, work from home mom

We all know that telecommuters get less “face time” with their co-workers, but some get none at all. If you’re a full-time telecommuter, perhaps living too far away to commute by car, you may only see your co-workers when you get on a plane and fly out for an on-site meeting. Or if you’re in a company where there are offices in different parts of the country (or even different countries altogether), regardless of how often you come in, you may have close co-workers who you’ve never seen at all.

Sure, you can build a relationship through phone calls and emails. I’ve had plenty of close working relationships with people I had never met in person. Heck, I even had a boss once who I didn’t meet face-to-face for nearly two years! Email is an effective medium for getting basic work done and during phone calls you can normally even fit in opportunities to get to know each other a little. You can find out if your coworker is married, has kids, learn what his or her hobbies are, etc. And this kind of personal knowledge can help you bond in areas of common interest, and can enhance your working relationship. As we get to know each other personally, we have more trust in each other, are more willing to go above and beyond to help the other person out, learn where we can rely on each other, etc.

So I’ve found that I can get to know people quite well and have a great relationship with them, without having any idea of what they look like. But then one day I’ll stumble across a co-worker’s picture on LinkedIn or they’ll send out a picture from a team off-site meeting that they were in, and I’ll do a double-take. “Wow, Bob, that’s not how I pictured you!” To which the response is invariably “Oh? How did you picture me?”

My answer is that I didn’t even realize I was doing it, but somehow I had formed some kind of mental image to fill the gap. For some reason it seems that human nature drives us to try to visually picture this person with whom we’ve suffered through stressful or difficult work experiences, commiserated on disappointments, and shared our successes. I don’t even realize I’m doing it at the time, but somehow I put a vague, imaginary face to the voice. My guess is it’s a confused amalgamation of all the people I’ve known in my life with the same name, voice, and/or personality as my faceless co-worker.

Afterwards, it somehow feels more “right” when I call up Bob for my weekly phone meeting with him, to have a voice to put with the name. I feel almost closer to Bob, and our working relationship becomes that much stronger.

So lately when I work with someone for a while but never have a chance to meet them live, I’ve started looking for opportunities to send them a picture of myself. In fact, I send them the address to my family website which is full of pictures of my kids too (any chance to brag about my children is, of course, taken). I figure if one picture is good, many is better! And they typically reciprocate with at least a picture or two.

Give it a try. You can even try looking for opportunities to send a picture to the folks you find challenging to work with. Perhaps getting them to see you as a real human being with a real face will make them realize that you have your own set of challenges in your job and are just trying to do the best job you can under difficult circumstances like they are. Hey, if a little humanity and familiarity helps make your job easier, why not?!

Technorati Tags: telecommute, remote work, telework, work from home, work at home, work from home mom

Some of you may have noticed that my URL has changed. My blog site where I’ve placed many posts about every aspect of telecommuting and working from home that you can think of used to be at http://nicolebachelor.com. And my main site where you could sign up for my mailing list, purchase my book, etc are at http://avoidgoingtowork.com. Well I’m doing some consolidating and have moved my entire blog over to avoidgoingtowork.com. Now I have everything on one site.

Don’t worry, I’ve updated all my links so any emails you get from me will always point you to the right place. And if you forget and accidentally go to my old site, it will redirect you.

So I’m still around, still pumping out great information about telecommuting for you. And I have lots of plans for additional improvements to my site in the future. You just have to get used to a new URL for now. Change is good - embrace it!

If you already read Parts I and II of my “Home-buying for the Telecommuter” series, you’ve learned already about 2 factors that the average telecommuter must consider when house-hunting that non-telecommuters may not need to concern themselves with.

Read on now to learn about the final factor that is probably the last thing you’d expect me to tell telecommuters to be concerned about!

Location:

Every home buyer (or home seeker) has heard the real estate mantra “Location, location, location!” Getting a home in just the right location can be one of the biggest challenges when buying your house. In Part I of this series I mentioned, however, that the exclusive telecommuter may not be concerned about location – sometimes living hundreds of miles away from his or her company office. And even for people who still have to go in once in a while, a long commute once or twice a week is a whole different consideration than a long commute every day. Obviously if you only telecommute occasionally then you still need to live driving-distance from work. But chances are, the more often you telecommute, the easier it will be to tolerate a long distance to the company office.

However, no matter what your current telecommuting status, one thing you must remember is that the only constants in life, as they say, are death and taxes. I’ve never heard telecommuting added to that list.

• Even if you work for a company that is very pro-telecommuting, you never know when the rules might change for you. I’ve seen even very large companies that are known for excellent telecommuting policies suddenly switch gears and call all their telecommuters back into the office. I’ve seen policies so strict that people who were unwilling to move could no longer keep their jobs. All it takes is a new CEO, or new head of your organization, and suddenly the rules are all different.

• Don’t forget the risks from down-sizing. Suddenly your whole group is cut and you’re job-hunting. But the jobs you apply for may not be as interested in hiring someone who lives in the middle of nowhere and can’t come into the company office on a regular basis. Do you have a large financial cushion to take the extra time to find a job that permits full-time telecommuting? Or do you have a family depending on you as sole bread-winner, and you can’t afford to be out of work for more than a couple months?

Unless you are certain that you’d rather take the time and make the sacrifices to find a new telecommuting job than go back into a company office again, or you don’t expect to stay in this house you’re buying for very long, don’t get too cocky about how flexible your home location can be. You may want to hedge your bets and make sure you live close enough to your company (or other companies in your industry) that you can drive in (perhaps nearly daily) if you absolutely had to!

Technorati Tags: telecommuting, telecommute, remote work, telework, work from home, work at home, work from home mom

If you already read Part I of my “Home-Buying for the Telecommuter” series, you understand that telecommuting offers some additional flexibility for telecommuters choosing a new home. The challenge of finding a home in just the right location may become easier to deal with if you don’t have to worry about the length of your commute. However, you also learned that there are some new factors for telecommuters to consider that are less of a concern for the non-telecommuter.

In Part I we talked about the first factor – space. Now we talk about the next factor:

Network Access:

If you plan to do a lot of your work over the internet, perhaps connected to your company’s internal intranet via a VPN (Virtual Private Network), it is critically important that you have a fast network in your house. Working on an ongoing basis, regularly communicating by email and Instant Messenger, sharing and exchanging large spreadsheets or other documents, simply isn’t feasible using a simple phone-based dialup connection. You need something fast.

While there are a few good options out there for most people, not everything is available to everyone. For instance, your standard DSL connection is simply not available at all houses – even in an affluent area full of technological conveniences. Availability depends on how close you are to the nearest cell tower. You may not be able to get DSL at all. Or you may only be close enough to get the basic connection which is slower than the much faster “professional” connection.

There are other options like a cable modem, which is also a good choice (it’s what I use today). However, you still need to make sure your new house has capabilities for this.

So when you start looking, explain to your realtor the importance of this factor. And if you see a house you really like, enlist your realtor’s aid in finding out in detail which internet access options are available.

Be sure to read for Part III of this article to learn about the final, and rather surprising, home-buying factor for telecommuters to consider!

Technorati Tags: telecommuting, telecommute, remote work, telework, work from home, work at home, work from home mom