Some time ago I wrote a blog post (called “How Much would you Pay to Telecommute?”) about the various ways an individual can save money by telecommuting. I gave some sample values and showed some basic calculations. However, I was recently asked if I knew of any web-based tools or calculators that can help an individual determine their own specific telecommuting cost savings, gas savings, reduced carbon emissions, etc. It was an interesting question and since I hadn’t previously stumbled across any, I decided to do some digging.

While I had expected to uncover numerous such tools, I was actually surprised at the limited options I found. However, even a few are better than none at all.

Tools for the individual:

By far the best tool I could find for calculating individual cost savings is the one at http://www.completesearchservices.com/wahSavingsCalc.html. While many of the tools focus only on gas savings, this one was much more comprehensive. Within the “Commute Savings” sections it tells you not just how much you save on gas when you telecommute, but also how much you save on operating expenses, vehicle ownership costs, and how much time you save. There are also additional sections that help you calculate how much you save on food and clothing, and how much you save on dependent care. Note that this tool is focused on encouraging you to apply for work at a specific company that supports telecommuting, but the calculations apply regardless of where you work.

If you want a simpler tool that will just tell you how much money you save in gas try: http://www.pacommuterservices.com/Commute%20Calculator.htm.

Tools for general population data:

The only details lacking in the above tools are those related to the environmental factor. This is the area where I was most disappointed. I found a couple tools that provided some details but were based on 10 year old data. The most useful tool I found however is not so much focused on individual savings as general population savings. However with a little math you can translate it into savings per person.

The tool at http://undress4success.com/research/telework-savings-calculator allows you to drill down to a particular region of interest and get statistical information about the current number of teleworkers and the savings from these numbers vs the number of potential teleworkers and the potential savings if they all telecommuted. It provides a wide range of data from the common, expected details such as gas and cost savings, to more interesting details such as greenhouse emissions savings, the equivalent number of cars taken off the road, and government savings on highway maintenance, etc

Tools for the employer:

Some tools I discovered were focused on the employer – to help a manager or a company determine savings from allowing their employees to telecommute. An interesting tool at http://www.tjobs.com/hiresavings.shtml calculates savings in taxes and benefits, office space, equipment, and absenteeism. It also provides some information about government credits for pollution reduction. The tool is a little awkward to use, especially if you start out clicking the “Credits” button first, like I did. Click the other buttons first and fill in those values, the Credits button just provides text-based explanations with no values to calculate. There’s also a nice ‘Source Data’ button you can mouse over that provides additional details for each section.

In all, there are a few good tools out there that, with some effort, can get you most of the data that you want. However, remember that these only show the quantitative benefits of telecommuting around, primarily, cost, gas, and time savings. These calculators however fail to elucidate the less tangible benefits in the areas of stress reduction, convenience, reduced interruptions, etc. Remember, there are more benefits to telecommuting than just the dollars and cents!

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

Social Networking is growing bigger and more popular than ever these days. Social networking takes many different forms and serves many different purposes. In my previous article I discussed two of the three major benefits of social networking to the telecommuter – those being to educate/inform on topics relevant to the telecommuter, and to help the telecommuter keep track of and even grow his/her social network. This, of course, can be a key tool for the telecommuter who can too easily be cut off from co-workers and miss opportunities to meet new people and build new relationships.

In this article I will discuss details on what I believe is the most important benefit of social networking for the telecommuter…

Maintaining visibility within your social network

As a telecommuter, staying top-of-mind with your co-workers, manager, and staff is a big challenge and doing it successfully is a critically important measure of success in your telecommuting career.

As I mentioned in my previous article, FaceBook can be used to provide updates about the day-to-day aspects of your life and allow your friends to easily check-up on you and keep up-to-date on your activities. The really nice part of this is if you are “friends” with someone who lives far away (or who you don’t see face-to-face in the office because you telecommute), through postings you can still remain top-of-mind for each other and maintain a really strong connection.

Like FaceBook, Twitter is another tool that allows you to provide updates to those who “follow you” via “tweets”. Tweets are short simple messages, similar in style and length to text messages, that are broadcast to everyone who chooses to follow you. Twitter is another tool that allows you to briefly pop into the thoughts and focus of those who follow you, even though they may rarely or never see you face-to-face.

However, while FaceBook and Twitter offer advantages to the telecommuter in helping maintain visibility to their coworkers, there are some drawbacks, or at least cautions, you must consider.

Both these tools frequently have a personal, non-work-related focus. People often post or tweet about details of their lives such as what they did with their family that weekend, their favorite new book their reading, and, for some who take it to an extreme, what they just had for breakfast that morning. They also often use it to complain about some aspects of their lives – work being near the top of the list!

If you do choose to encourage co-workers to “friend” or “follow” you via these tools, consider carefully what you post. Frequent posting/tweeting can become annoying for your co-workers, especially if you post during company time while people are trying to work. Not only is it a distraction to your co-workers, it’s also a clear indication to them that you’re not hunkered down working from home but are instead “goofing around” on FaceBook or Twitter. You may find that too much of this behavior leads to your telecommuting privileges, or worse yet - your job, being revoked so fast that your head will spin!

This is not to imply that these tools are all bad. Used properly, these types of tools really can help you maintain relationships with your work contacts you don’t get to see every day in the office. Think outside the box. These tools aren’t just for posting about your personal life. You can use them to share interesting information that you find online related to your industry or area of expertise. Twitter, has a nice feature where you can “re-tweet” interesting information that you’ve received that you think your followers would like to see. Sticking to professional topics to tweet or post about will cast you as a great source amongst your coworkers of useful/valuable industry-relevant information. Now if that’s not a perfect way to remain top-of-mind with people you don’t see very frequently I don’t know what is!

So talk to your co-workers before you connect with them via these types of tools and see if they agree to it. And if you do have a lot of your work contacts connected via these tools, think about what you post or tweet. If you forget that your manager is connected to you and you start posting/tweeting about how you’re getting bored with your job and plan to start looking around for something new, you may suddenly find yourself with all the free time in the world to job hunt!

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

Social Networking is growing bigger and more popular than ever these days. Social networking takes many different forms and serves many different purposes. In general it helps you build and maintain relationships. This, of course, can be a key tool for the telecommuter who can too easily be cut off from co-workers and miss opportunities to meet new people and build new relationships.

Social networking serves three major purposes, two of which are discussed in this article. Stay tuned for my next article with the third, and perhaps most important benefit of social networking for the telecommuter.

1. Education and information

Social networking lets you learn from others in a similar situation to yourself with very little effort. Whereas in the past you’d have to read a book written by an expert, or find in-person meetings with other people with the same interest or challenge as you are experiencing, social networking gives you easy access to all kinds of every-day folks, scattered around the globe, who want to talk about the exact topic you care about. You can find valuable information about all aspects of telecommuting – everything from how to request such an arrangement from your manager and where to find the best telecommuting jobs, to tips, tricks and techniques of all kinds to help you succeed as a telecommuter.

Blogs are one of the best places to gather this kind of information. For instance, there are many telecommuting blogs whose authors write posts on a large variety of telecommuting topics. Many of these blogs offer the very convenient capability to allow you to subscribe to the blog via an RSS feed, where you can be notified of new postings as soon as they come out without having to bookmark the site and keep checking it. You can track a handful of your favorite blogs easily – to get different viewpoints from different authors. Some blogs and sites (such as my own at http://avoidgoingtowork.com) also allow you to become a free subscriber where you can receive ongoing emails from the author about all kinds of telecommuting topics.

Another useful type of site that can help you learn a lot about telecommuting is a telecommuting forum. Forums allow groups of people with a particular common interest to become members where they can post questions, provide answers, and participate in ongoing discussions. You can find a forum on most any topic and a good forum can really help you, whether you just monitor conversations without choosing to participate, or you post your burning questions and receive answers. Of course, providing answers to other people’s questions and participating in the conversations and discussions helps build the community.

2. Keeping track of your social network

In our busy lives, we encounter many people, and it can be hard to keep track of all of them. With the advent of the internet, email certainly made it easier to keep in touch with people versus old-fashioned letter writing. Yet, the internet has evolved again with tools like Linked-In and FaceBook, making it even easier to keep track of people we know.

As a telecommuter, you don’t see your peers very often. And, if your company is globally distributed, or just a big supporter of telecommuting, you may have coworkers who are spread across the country or the globe. Keeping track of people can become difficult as time goes by and people move around. Even if they stay at the same company as you, if they change jobs and/or organizations it’s harder for you, the telecommuter, to keep track of them. At least if you work in the office, there’s still a good chance you’ll bump into them in the hallways or cafeteria now and then.

Linked-In is a popular tool that allows you to “connect” with people you know who are also members of Linked-In (and the tool has become popular enough now that many people are members). You can post information about yourself and people who are connected to you can see who else you are connected to, making it easier to connect to common acquaintances. The really nice aspect of Linked-In is that you can send someone a message via the tool. So even if you don’t communicate with a Linked-In contact for years, during which time they change jobs, move, get a new phone number, and change their email address, you can still find them to reconnect. Linked-In also has features that allow you to search on people who are in a similar profession or working on similar projects/goals/etc.

Like Linked-In, FaceBook also lets you connect with or “friend” people you know. FaceBook is different than Linked-In in that people use it a lot more to provide ongoing updates about their lives to keep their “friends” updated on the details. Linked-In tends to have a more professional/career focus whereas FaceBook is used much more for social and personal, non-work updates.

Stay tuned for my next article where I’ll discuss what is arguably the most important aspect of social networking for the telecommuter, and some important tips about how and how not to use social networking tools!

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

As I’ve previously mentioned, there are two ways for a manager to keep track of your productivity. One is to see how much time you spend working (see my previous article on using time tracking sheets). But the way a really good manager measures you is by the quality and quantity of the work you do rather than how many hours you spend working every day.

If you’re a telecommuter, you miss those casual hallway chats with your manager that helps him keep at top-of-mind what you’re working on and what you’re producing. So the best solution is to simply use a status report that you send him at the beginning or end of every week.

Tasks & Activities:

Your status report should show the tasks and activities you’re working on, broken up into 3 parts:

1. What you’ve completed in the last week
2. What you’re currently working on
3. What you plan to work on

This gives your manager the opportunity to have a weekly reminder of what you’ve accomplished and what you’re working on. It also gives him the opportunity to see what you plan to work on next week so he can ask you to change your plans if he has some urgent new task he needs completed or priorities have recently changed.

Priorities:

Speaking of priorities, it’s always good for you to list the priority of the activities you plan to work on. You can break item #3 above into two sections. There are the activities you plan to work on next week (e.g. your top priorities). And the activities that remain on your plate but you don’t expect to get to in the next week that will have to be put off for later. If you like, you can list each task with a HIGH, MED, or LOW priority so your boss can really see where your focus is and he can give you feedback to adjust it if things have changed for him.

Issues & Problems:

In addition to the section showing your tasks and activities, you should have another section showing issues, concerns, roadblocks, or areas where you need your manager’s help. Don’t be afraid to tell your manager about problems. If he doesn’t know, he can’t help you. Even if he can’t help you, he can prepare his management, reset expectations or schedules, or notify your peers who are depending on your work. Don’t use this section for whining or complaining. Only list facts, that cause (or you suspect down the road will cause) problems with your project or task, or cause you to miss a deadline, etc. If you have personal issues with a co-worker not pulling their weight for instance, save that for your next one-on-one phone call with your manager.

Administrative:

Lastly, you can add a short section at the bottom of your status report listing administrative details such as reminding your boss of the upcoming vacation you’re planning on taking, the conference you’ll soon be attending, or even the upcoming deadlines on projects that you’re working on.

By sending your boss a weekly status report, you keep your activities and accomplishments at the top of his mind. And he gets visibility into what you’re working on so he can adjust your priorities if he needs to, or confirm that they match his own priorities. As a telecommuter this activity is vitally important to help you stay connected with your manager and keep him in the loop. You don’t have to wait for him to ask you to send a status report, you can just start sending them to him each week – he will find them valuable even if he never thought of asking you for them before.

Sample Status Report

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

In an ideal world, your boss measures you on your productivity – the quality and volume of the work you do – rather than the number of hours you’re seated at your desk. But unfortunately the latter is a much easier method for some managers. If your manager is willing to let you telecommute, but has concerns about how to measure your time, you can propose to him that you’ll log your time, so he can see how it’s being spent.

A time-tracking log doesn’t have to be complicated or sophisticated. If your company doesn’t already have something you can create your own in a simple spreadsheet or Word document. Attached is an example you might want to use or copy: time-tracking-sample.xls

The categories you use will vary depending on the kind of job you have. I recommend not having too many categories or it can become overwhelming both for you to fill in and for your manager to review. Ten categories not counting the “miscellaneous” ones is probably plenty. As your job changes over time you can take items out that you find you’re not doing anymore or add new items.

Here are some ideas for the kinds of categories you may want to put in your timesheet.:

• Projects: List all the individual projects you’re working on. You may be entirely dedicated to one large project (if so, are there sub-projects within it you could list where you split your time across) or you may be working on a number of different ones.
• Role work: If you perform multiple roles throughout the course of your day, list these. For instance, if part of your job is to create presentations for your manager to use during talks he has to give, list that as a category. Or perhaps you’re the graphics expert on your team and you often have to whip up a quick graphic image for someone on your team.
• Measured goals: Think about what kinds of things you are measured on at the end of the year. What formal goals has your manager laid out for you for this year? For instance, if you are expected to generate a certain number of sales leads each month, put in a category for “lead generation” activities. If you’re being measured on successfully reducing the helpdesk call volume for your service, put in some categories like “helpdesk call analysis”, “service usability improvements”, etc.
• Miscellaneous: You’ll need a few miscellaneous categories that you don’t use very often but probably apply to just about everyone reading this article in one way or another:
  • Administrative: Use this for time spent in general things like attending your boss’ team staff meetings. But try to keep use of it to a minimum. Managers don’t like to see more than a few hours a week going into a general administrative bucket as they can’t really tell what you’re doing and lots of time on “administrative” tasks mean you’re not getting work done on your actual projects.
  • Training or Development: Use this category if you need to take training classes or spend some of your time learning a new aspect of your skillset.
  • Time Away: Use this track vacation or sick time.

Track your time in hours. For instance, I spent 2 hours on this activity or 3 hours on that. You can list .5 if you like but don’t split hairs down to the minutes. The idea is to give your manager the big picture, not the fine-tuned details.

You can choose whether to fill in your timesheet once at the end of the week or to fill it in at the end of each day. It may seem easier to just deal with it once/week but it can be hard to remember exactly where you’ve spent your time all week by late Friday afternoon. Looking at the meetings on your calendar or skimming through the sent items in your email can help. Try filling it out at different frequencies and see what works best for you. If you need to, put a daily or weekly reminder in your calendar, towards the end of the day – to help you remember to do this.

On a related note, if you spend all or most of your time on the phone (perhaps you take support calls for your company’s product or service, routed to your home number) – you can make a call log, similar to a time log. Track the start/end time of each call, who you spoke with, and what the general topic/nature of the call was. My suggestion: buy a phone that will display the time you spent on the call when you hang up!

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

Let’s face it. Without the right skills, telecommuting can be lonely - stuck in your home office all day, not seeing another person face-to-face. Fortunately there’s lots of techniques and tricks to make sure you get a little human contact most days. However, even the career telecommuter who has all these skills down cold can suffer from loneliness during crunch time.

We all have our routines when work is “normal” – going to the gym at lunch for regular workouts, clearing out our overloaded inboxes once/month, etc. However we’ve all had periods of work that are just crazy too. Maybe your boss dumped a major project in your lap with a tight deadline and lots of visibility. Or maybe a coworker just left the company with little advance notice and you have to help cover their responsibilities until someone new can be hired (and trained). These crunch times can be as short as a week or as long as a few months (if they’re more than that, then I’d say that has become “normal” and it’s time to evaluate if you still enjoy your current job).

During these crunch times we tend to keep our heads down and get less human interaction. If you work from the corporate office you might be working through your lunches and taking less breaks to chit-chat with your coworkers. While this can leave you with less human interaction, just having your coworkers around you gives you enough so you probably don’t feel too lonely – and you probably do take short breaks (walking to the cafeteria with a coworker to grab some lunch to take back to the desk?) to chat with others.

But when you work from home things are different. During crunch time you’re probably handcuffing yourself to your desk all day. You’re not taking breaks, not getting out of the house, and not seeing anyone. You probably feel you don’t have time for all the techniques you’re used to using to get out of the house and see people.

If your crunch time is going to only last 1 week, you can probably just deal with that lack of face-to-face human contact. But if it’s going to be a long haul, you might just go crazy from loneliness before you reach the end of the project. So consider carving out just a little bit of time to make sure you get some human interaction.

• If you’re used to going to the gym 2 or 3 times each week for a workout and to see other people, try to continue to go at least once/week. Block off an hour on your calendar on the least busy day of the week. Even if you only have time to do a ½ hour workout instead of your usual 1 hour workout, it’s more about getting out of the house than anything else.
• Or if you don’t have the time to drive to the gym and back, see if any of your neighbors are around during the day and want to take a weekly walk with you. Even a 20 minute walk will give you some company, get the blood going, and break up an otherwise lonely day.
• Perhaps you can take your laptop to a coffee shop once in a while and use their wireless access to continue working. You probably won’t talk to people much at the coffee shop (and we know you don’t have time for long conversations anyway) but you’ll be out of the house and around other people.
• Can your spouse work from home occasionally? If so maybe now is the time to push him or her to try it one day/week. Again, you’ll be too busy to hang out with your spouse much (and make sure he/she knows that in advance) but just having another person in the house can take away that lonely feeling.
• What about driving into the office once/week? Even if you can work from home every day, going into the office now and then will break up the monotony of working in an empty house week after week.

If you can just find a way to make sure at least a few days a week you see other people in one form or another you’ll find it much easier to bear a long crunch time without feeling too lonely.

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

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

Telecommuting is often a benefit - a choice people make that enables them to save money or time, be more accessible for young children, or a host of other reasons. And with the choice of telecommuting comes some challenges – that require new skills to overcome.

However, I’d like to talk a little about a work situation which brings it’s own challenges – where telecommuting provides an answer to that challenge instead of causing the questions.

I work with an incredibly distributed team. I have team members in the US, Asia-Pacific, and Europe. This means that I often have lots of early morning meets to catch my European counterparts as well as evening meetings to talk to the folks in Asia-Pacific.

This work-style can be hard on a person (not to mention his or her spouse, kids, etc). It can certainly make for very long days if you need to be in the office for a 7am meeting and stick around for another meeting that doesn’t end until 6pm or 7pm! Add the commute into that and we’re talking about well over a 12 hour day at the office. And in between your morning and evening meetings, since you’re at work, you’re going to spend all your extra time working.

So what can you do?

Well this is where telecommuting can really be a benefit. If I had to be in the office for a 7am meeting I’d have to get up at 5:30am so I could be showered, dressed, and out the door by 6:30 and into the office by 7am. But instead, I often roll out of bed at 6:45am and take my 7am meetings in my pajamas (thank goodness my company isn’t heavily into web-cams with their teleconferencing systems yet!). I can work throughout the day and when I finally get a break in meetings I hit the shower. If my day isn’t too crazy then once Europe is offline, around lunchtime for me, I can even take a little break and go for a walk or do a workout video. I can take a break here or there in the afternoon to throw laundry in the washing machine. I can prep dinner. Then, towards late afternoon, when my meetings with my Asia-Pacific counterparts start, I haven’t already put in a grueling 10 hours of work with more still to go. I’m fresh enough that my meetings with the Asia-Pacific folks are as productive and effective as those with my European team members. And I don’t feel like I’ve sacrificed too much of my life to get through each day with these brutal meeting schedules.

Sure, there are plenty of times when I do work pretty solidly through the day between my 7am and 6pm meetings – times when there’s just so much work on my plate that it’s the only way to meet my deadlines. And yes, sometimes it feels like this happens more than I would like it to. But those times are by my choice, when my workload is unusually high. I at least have the control over my work/life balance to decide whether I’m going to put in a 12-hour day or just let a particular deliverable take one day longer before I turn it in. Working from home gives me that flexibility in a way that I would never have if I were to take all my meetings from the office.

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