Do you bring your laptop to long team meetings and try to monitor emails during topics that aren’t so important to you? If you frequently work from home or you are a remote worker, flown in for the meeting, stop and think about what opportunities you’re missing by doing this!

Last week my boss had flown in a handful of my teammates located in other parts of the country/world so the whole team could talk about some large projects face to face. We spent two days closeted together in a conference room going through all our services and discussing how they were impacted by these projects and what we needed to do.

I noticed that my teammates paid detailed attention whenever the conversation was related to one of their services. But as soon as we started talking about a service unrelated to their own, their heads would go down as their eyes fixed on their laptop screens and their fingers clacked away furiously on their keyboards.

Who can blame them? Our day-to-day jobs don’t go away when we’re in these kinds of meetings. The emails and action items don’t stop. While we may all have out-of-office messages saying we’re tied up these two days and responses will be slow, we don’t want to spend our evenings or the following work day trying to dig our way out of our overflowing inboxes

However, there’s an opportunity cost to this. Sure, those folks who are located with the core team and who come into the office every day may be well plugged-in to what all their teammates are doing. But for the people visiting from out of town, and for the telecommuters, this is a perfect opportunity to get some more detailed exposure to what else is going on in their team and learn more about some of the activities, challenges, etc of their peers.

This kind of exposure, while seeming unimportant in the short term, can be valuable down the road. You get the opportunity to learn from your peers – for instance, if there are issues they are dealing with that you struggle with too, you can contact them later to compare notes. And it increases the opportunity for cross-collaboration and integration of projects down the line if you have a better big picture of everything that’s going on in your team.

So I made a real effort to stay tuned-in to what my coworkers were discussing, even if it wasn’t related to my services. The coffee helped! Sure, I paid for it in my workload after the 2-day meeting was over. My cost was an over-full inbox the next day. But that’s no different from when you’re away on vacation and the workload is piling up. (At least I *hope* you let the work pile up when you’re on vacation and you’re not sneaking into your hotel room to check emails while your spouse is lying on the beach.)

So telecommuters and remote workers, next time you’re face-to-face with your team and tempted to sneak in some time working on your email, consider the opportunity you’re missing. Grab an extra cup of coffee and pay attention to what your peers have to say!

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

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

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

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

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

Definitely worth a read if you want to see how some companies are handling the challenges of telecommuting in a very real way.

Technorati Tags: telecommuting, telecommute, work from home, work at home, work at home moms

How much is telecommuting worth to you? People have all sorts of reasons to want to telecommute, money being just one of them. So when you’re job hunting, and you find a job that allows telecommuting, factor the cost and other savings of this benefit into the salary and overall compensation package being offered. It might just sway your decision on how good that offer looks!

Many people rate telecommuting as an important benefit in their jobs. And so they should. Telecommuting saves you the time you’d otherwise spend on the road and the cost of gas for the commute (which is getting more and more expensive) - and those are just the two most tangible benefits. The long list is, well… long.

I realize this is not news to most people. Yet somehow, people forget to factor these items in when making decisions on what job to choose. Let’s take an example. Say you have two job offers. Both look equally as interesting and rewarding and they offer similar salaries. But the one with the slightly lower salary will let you telecommute four days/week. What does that do for your family budget’s bottom line?

First there’s the actual cost savings:

Gas: $40/week. Let’s say you live 30 miles from the job and your car gets 25 miles to the gallon. That’s nearly 10 gallons per week you’re saving – at the current $4/gallon rates.

Clothing: $20/week. Consider the savings on your office wardrobe and dry-cleaning bills. Now that you’re only dressing in corporate garb once/week, how much will you save?

Food: $40/week. Grabbing something from your fridge at home may cost you a couple dollars for lunch, compared to the $10+ the cafeteria charges. And those fancy coffee drinks at $4 or more each don’t compare to the pennies it costs to make a coffee at home. Let’s say you save at least $10 on the days you don’t go in.

That’s $100/week right there. In the average working year you’re looking at close to $5,000.

There are also significant time savings:

Commute: 4 hours/week: You can probably save 1 hour each day just by avoiding the commute.

Increased work effectiveness: 2 hours/week. How much time do you waste at work from gossiping coworkers and idle chit-chat. Believe it or not you probably can save at least 1/2 hour per day just from avoiding that (and that’s a conservative estimate).

Then there are the less tangible benefits:

• Avoiding the high-fat, -sodium and –sugar content of the cafeteria food as well as the candies on your co-worker’s desk is better for both your waistline and your arteries.
• Avoiding the stress that comes with fighting heavy traffic to and from work in rush hour improves your physical and mental health, as well as your relationships with your family members.
• Use the time you’re saving to finally start up that exercise routine you’ve been meaning to do. A regular exercise program will reduce stress, improve relationships, reduce your medical expenses, increase your longevity, and make you look and feel better!
• Working from home gives you the flexibility to fit in an appointment, have the occasional breakfast with your kids or attend their ballet recitals.
• Taking a car off the road 4 out of every 5 workdays does so much more for the environment than putting in a couple fluorescent light-bulbs in your house!
• Avoiding public germ-ridden offices reduces your frequency of colds and other illnesses.

So remember those 2 jobs in the example? Suddenly the telecommuting one increases your relative salary by $5K after taxes (what’s that to you pre-tax?), reduces your workweek by 6 hours, and includes all the other benefits above.

Now which job are you going to choose?

Technorati Tags: telecommute, telecommuting, work benefits, work from home, work at home, work at home moms