Last week I wrote a blog entry about a federal agency that was in a somewhat sticky situation with respect to telecommuting policies. This week I’d like to talk more about that.

As you know if you read my previous blog entry, this agency had to allow *all* employees to telework 3 days/week. I already discussed the problems with that.

The other problem with their arrangement is they had to follow the policy of not requiring any personal information from the employee. So the managers could not demand their employees’ home or cell phone numbers. This meant that when a manager need to quickly contact a telecommuting staff member, he couldn’t just pick up the phone. The manager’s best choices were to leave the employee a voicemail on his work number and wait for him to pick it up, or send an email and wait, similarly, for a response. The policy required the employee to check for voicemails/emails every 2 hours but, as you know, when you need an urgent piece of information from an employee, 2 hours is a long time to wait!

When you combine this with the previously discussed problem that there were many telecommuters whose roles or skills weren’t suited to telecommuting, you can see what a burden this becomes.

While I suggested IM (Instant Messaging) as a tool to reach an employee quickly, there was ambiguity about the managers’ abilities to require this. If the employee had up to 2 hours to respond, they said, then didn’t they have the same privilege for IM? Couldn’t they just ignore the IM for 2 hours? Clearly now you can see we’ve gone beyond the intent of the rules here. The policy to check for messages every 2 hours (at most) is not to give the telecommuter the freedom of waiting a few hours before having to respond to their managers or coworkers, but rather to make sure the telecommuter is checking in without overburdening him to check voicemail every 10 minutes. IM, however, is a tool that actively notifies you (through a popup window) immediately when someone is trying to reach you. However, bad relationships between the managers and telecommuters, including a serious lack of trust, had degraded the situation to the point where some telecommuters were holding the managers to the letter of the law (rather than the spirit) of every policy and managers were paralyzed into inaction for fear of being reported.

All these problems seem quite extreme so I should probably clarify. In the room full of managers I was training, there were some whose employees were willing to give out their home phone numbers. Similarly there were some who used IM without complaint. However, there’s always a couple of bad seeds, as they say, that can ruin it for everyone. These were the folks who caused the general frustration and lack of trust amongst the managers, and some managers had more of these than others (and perhaps these managers’ frustrated actions exacerbated the problem making other more neutral staff members behave more extremely too).

Again, there simply isn’t a magic bullet to solve this problem. I still believe IM is the right answer in this situation (well, ok, if you work from home I actually believe giving out your home # is appropriate, but short of that, IM is the best answer). However, to make use of the proper tools the relationship between the managers, the telecommuters, and the policymakers needs to be improved to the point where frank discussions about the best way to operate can take place, and open-minded interpretations of policies can ensure the best environment for getting the work done.

I have one more aspect of the challenges this group faced which I’ll write about next time. Stay tuned!

I’d like to tackle a sticky subject today. Some time ago I taught a “Managing Teleworkers” 2-day course for a US Federal Government agency located in California. I came to find through the course of the 2 days that they had a few major challenges they were facing. I will focus on just one today and revisit the topic another time to discuss the others.

This agency’s biggest challenge was that a labor union representative had helped negotiate some very strong pro-telecommuting agreements which included the rights for all workers to telecommute 3 days/week.

As I teach in my courses, there are 2 major factors to determining if someone should telecommute: their role and their skills. By saying that across the board, all employees who want to can telecommute, means there are people telecommuting whose roles really require them to be in the office. Additionally there are people telecommuting who sorely lack the proper organizational and communication skills to be effective. The managers of this agency had their hands tied and were struggling to balance the demands of the office with the lack of physically-present staff. In addition, since they couldn’t choose based on skills who could telecommute, they had poor performers or just people who weren’t well equipped for the telecommuting work style. While I’m sure many of the employees had the best of intentions, the managers were left worrying if any or all of the employees were really working to their full capacity.

Unfortunately I simply don’t have a silver bullet for cases like this. Of course I made suggestions as to how to help balance the workload between the in-office workers and the telecommuters but there were further restrictions there (I’ll cover this more later) which prevented a simple solution (nothing is ever simple, is it?). The other tools and techniques I teach should help them with their difficulties measuring the employees’ performance. However, when measurement throws up red flags and other means of resolving performance problems fail, the option to reduce or remove the benefit of telecommuting is not available (or at least, very difficult to exercise) to this particular group of managers. This of course is a real challenge that will require some easing of the policies to really accomplish a workable long-term solution.

Stay tuned for my next blog entry where I’ll discuss the other challenges facing this group of managers and their teleworkers.

I’m woefully behind on blogging, but I am making an effort to get back into it. And I have so many new things to write about. As I mentioned previously, I’ve started providing training to the government on managing telecommuters. I’ve done some in-person courses and lots of webinars. I’ve learned so much about the problems and challenges facing government agencies within telecommuting. It’s definitely a different culture than the private sector.

The main difference is simply that whereas telecommuting has been widely accepted into the culture of the private sector (at least in some industries like high tech), it hasn’t yet become pervasive (by any stretch of the imagination) in the public sector. Therefore, they don’t even have the basic elements like trusting that just because someone is at home, that doesn’t mean they’re sitting on the couch eating bon-bons and watching Oprah. All the things that many of us who are used to a telecommuting culture take for granted are all completely new to many in the public sector.  Besides the simple element of trust (which of course, is huge), there’s many other concerns too.

Another big challenge/adjustment is around the question of how to measure people you can’t see. In the public sector, managers are still very much used to measuring someone based on how much time they see them at their desk. Of course, even the most naïve manager understands that just because you’re at your desk doesn’t mean you’re actually working. It’s pretty easy to surf the web or play solitaire or whatever without getting “caught” if you really want to. But when someone is in the office, right near you, you interact with them nearly constantly and can, on a fine-grained basis, see just how much work they’re getting done. With the removal of that direct contact, managers who aren’t used to a more virtual environment simply don’t have the tools (and experience/confidence) to determine how much of the time people are really working. Of course the solution lies in measuring the results that are produced, but this doesn’t come naturally to many.

Yet another big area of concern I see is around team dynamics and cohesiveness. Never having faced a telecommuting environment, it can be quite intimidating to imagine how you will make sure your team continues to work together as the finely-oiled machine you’ve built them into thus far!  If you, as a manager, don’t know how you’ll keep track of what your telecommuters are doing, how can you expect your non-telecommuting team members to do the same? And if they can’t, how will they collaborate, handle dependencies within a project, etc?  

This is just a small sampling of the concerns that arise in an environment that hasn’t integrated telecommuting and other virtual work styles. The public sector has other issues around policy that don’t arise in the private sector. In particular, there’s a big push to integrate telecommuting into Continuity of Operations (COOP) in the federal government. COOP is simply the ability of the government to continue running in the face of severe weather, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or other events that can shut down their offices.

Keep reading – I plan on blogging about all these topics. And as you know, I always have a lot to say!

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

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

Buying a home can be both an exciting time, as well as a stressful time. On the one hand, now is your chance to try to find the home of your dreams, with all the details exactly as you want. On the other hand, the home of your dreams may be out of reach for you financially and you have to choose which items on your wish-list are the top priorities, and which you’re willing to sacrifice.

Two of the biggest factors in home-buying are, for most people, cost and location. For the exclusive telecommuter it’s possible that you have a lot of flexibility with location. You may not have to worry about living very close to work. You may even choose to live in a different state or country than where your company’s office is located.

However, while the flexibility of telecommuting removes some of the limiting factors in home-buying, it does actually impose some new ones. There are other items that may be lower priority for the non-telecommuter that suddenly become an important factor for you to consider:

Space:

Many people, at a minimum, are looking for sufficient bedrooms for themselves and their children (if they have any). However, for the telecommuter, an extra room that can serve as your home office may now be very important. Especially if you do have children who are at home during the day, you really may need a separate room where you can close the door and close out the noise. If you have the option, making sure that room is far away from the center of the family activity is also important.

If you don’t have children at home, you can be more flexible. Perhaps you can use the dining room or set up an office in the corner of your bedroom or some other part of the house. Perhaps you can make do for a few years and then build an addition down the road after you’ve had time to save a bit. There are a lot of options if you can’t afford an additional room in your house, if you get a bit creative.

Be sure to read Parts II & III of this article - to be posted soon - to learn about other home-buying factors for telecommuters to consider – including a final, rather surprising factor!

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

Many of us know that telecommuters can get more done working from home, both on work activities and personal activities, due to time savings and increased focus. But I recently discovered a specific situation in which I, as a telecommuter, found myself getting less done.

In a typical work-day I get started working early, in my pajamas. I work hard for stretches of time, but like all people, I need the occasional mental break. During the times I need to step away from my work I might read and respond to personal emails, throw a load of laundry into the washing machine, pay a few bills, etc. Because I save at least an hour each day I telecommute from avoiding the drive to the office and because I avoid the gossip and non-work-related chit-chat of my co-workers I have more free time during the day to go the extra mile on a work project or get some personal tasks checked off my list.

So I’ve always felt there are really only up-sides when it comes to personal productivity and telecommuting.

However, I recently spent nearly 2 weeks at home with my husband and children during the Christmas holidays. During quiet moments (such as when the youngest was napping and the older child was watching a movie) my husband would happily disappear into the office for an hour or two to work on personal tasks on his computer. However, I found myself avoiding this as much as possible. Sure, I’d spend 5 or 10 minutes a day glancing through personal emails or handling some paperwork on my desk. But I kept it to a real minimum. I found other ways to avoid going into my home office – any little excuse I could. The dishes needed washing, I needed to work on a grocery list, anything.

At the beginning of the holiday I had grand plans on working on more articles such as this one and all kinds of other tasks. But I managed to avoid almost all of them.

This morning as I laid in bed resentfully staring at the alarm clock that had just gone off for the first time in 2 weeks, I thought about this odd avoidance. I realized that it’s because I associate sitting at my desk in my home office, in front of my computer, with work. I mean my day-job work. I knew I was on a nice long vacation and therefore resisted anything that felt like that kind of “work”.  My husband, who drives into the office most days and only telecommutes once or twice per week, didn’t have such a strong mental association and so he didn’t have that difficulty.

It was an interesting revelation. Definitely something for telecommuters to be aware of, especially if you have some important activities you want to get accomplished during a holiday. I think next time I have a vacation at home I’ll try moving my laptop into my bedroom or the dining room – and see if it makes any difference. Think about it for your next vacation!

Technorati Tags: telecommuting advice, telecommute, work from home, remote worker, work at home moms

You may have noticed I haven’t posted in a while. Where has Nicole been?

Well the answer is I’ve been commuting! Work has gotten really hectic lately and on top of that, I’ve had more meetings lately where I had to attend in person. So I’ve been driving in more than usual.

This morning I was crawling along on the freeway in heavy traffic and heavy rain. I looked at the clock and it occurred to me if I were working at home I’d have already been working for nearly half an hour - and I wasn’t even at work yet.

It just drove home (no pun intended) how much time is wasted commuting. And when work is busy, the reality is we telecommuters don’t take the time saved avoiding the drive for our own personal use. Rather, we use that time to get our overloaded plates a bit more under control.

So, employers, pay attention. Telecommuting really helps you in tough times get more out of your employees!

Technorati Tags: telecommuting advice, telecommute, work from home, work at home moms, remote worker