Imagine this… You’re telecommuting. One of your teammates puts together a last-minute face-to-face meeting for an important project that your involved in. You can’t get into the office that day, so you miss the meeting. And important decisions are made without your involvement!

Don’t let this happen to you. There is no reason you can’t attend a meeting virtually even if everyone else is there in person.

Make sure your teammates know how important it is to always send you meeting invitations, even though you are not physically around. Tell them not to worry about whether they think you can or can’t make it - that this is your problem to deal with and not theirs.

When you receive a meeting invitation, contact the meeting coordinator and ask if everyone is meeting face-to-face in a conference room. Then find out if there’s a speaker-phone in that room and ask the meeting coordinator to either call you at your home work line from the conference room or get you the number for that room so you can call in (or perhaps you can look this up yourself or check with an admin rather than slowing down your teammate to look for it).

Being the only person attending a meeting by phone when everyone else is there in a room together face-to-face can have its challenges. I write a lot about how to overcome these challenges (and I will, of course, blog on this topic too) in my book which I will be publishing soon (you can go to http://avoidgoingtowork.com to get on my mailing list for a special introductory price when the book is ready). But attending by phone is certainly better than missing out all together!

Never miss a meeting or discussion because you aren’t physically present. This means helping your teammates get used to the idea of not leaving you out either. You can’t attend a meeting if you don’t know it’s happening!

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