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

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

When gas prices went sky-high, a lot of people started telecommuting to save money. But now gas prices have started to drop, will more people start driving to work again? And what will that do to the environment?

Come on, you must have noticed. When prices went up there was just less traffic on the road… less crowding on the freeways. Even during rush hour the drive home (on the days you drove in) just wasn’t so bad. The hit to people’s wallet was enough to make people change their behaviors.

This was great for the environment. We all know that exchanging your old-fashioned light-bulbs with electric light-bulbs, or even driving a Prius, just reduces the energy you consume. But telecommuting, and other methods to actually avoid driving your car, are by far the absolute biggest ways for an individual to really help the environment.

But then the gas prices started to drop. Now, I’m hoping some people were so thrilled by the joys of telecommuting that they kept it up regardless. But I know that some people saw the costs go down and hopped right back on the freeway again. And I think this is a real shame. Although we all intellectually understand the dangers of global warming (I hope), and have the best of intentions to do our bit for the environment, the reality is, it can be hard to do the right thing.

But money is a much bigger motivator. When it hits our personal budget, we’ll do much more, go much further, make much greater sacrifices to save a few dollars. When these changes we make benefit the environment, all the better.

So now I’m going to say something that may shock or bother many of you.

I actually hope gas prices go up again. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like the high prices any more than the next guy. I have 2 small children along with the pre-requisite mini-van and I’ll tell you that filling that beast up at the pumps can cost me an arm and a leg when prices are high. But I know when prices are up, more people are taking actions that are good for the environment.

So if you were telecommuting when prices were up, don’t stop when they go down. If you found some inconveniences to telecommuting or some aspects of your work or interactions with your boss and co-workers were a bit more challenging, there’s many ways to overcome these. Take a few minutes to do a little research – you’ll find plenty of tips and tools out there to help you. Make the effort and keep telecommuting. It’s good for your wallet, and it’s good for the environment!

Sometimes even a small break from telecommuting can make working from home feel like a bit of an adjustment again. Fortunately, it’s not difficult.

Last week my kids’ daycare was closed all week for their annual July 4th holiday week. My husband and I took the week off from work and my in-laws came down to visit. The house was full - 6 people (and the kids have the energy of 2 apiece), all day. We had fun and got lots of quality family-time.

This morning I got up and hit my email inbox in my pajamas. After a short time the kids woke up and I got everyone dressed and fed and dropped the kids at daycare. When I got back home I was struck by how quiet it was. At first it felt lonely - I felt a shadow of that same feeling when I started telecommuting and when my husband got a ‘regular’ job after running his own business out of our home for a while. I was surprised at how quickly it could come back.

But the good news is as soon as I sat back down to work I was so busy going through a week’s worth of emails and urgent tasks that were needed yesterday, before I knew it the day was nearly over and I hadn’t given a thought to who was or wasn’t in the house.

In fact, if I’d gone into the office I’d have spent half the day chit-chatting with coworkers about how my vacation went, how their July 4th long weekend was, etc and would not have been half as far through my backlog as I am now!

Yes, working from home can even be an adjustment for a seasoned telecommuter. But it’s a small adjustment!

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

Although my previous post showed my current main reason for telecommuting, I have another reason, a few years older that got me started. Here are the pictures - then and now!

Kevin was born in March, 2004. After my maternity leave I returned to work and asked if I could go part-time for a while. I worked at a large high-tech company with a reputation for family friendliness and being a great place for working mothers, and I’d been there a number of years and really proven myself. Well to my chagrin, they said no (new management, politics, etc). So I started searching around, reaching out to my old contacts within the company. While I could not find a part-time arrangement, I did speak to the new manager of a team I had worked for previously. She told me I had a good reputation and although she couldn’t offer me part-time work, she was willing for me to telecommute exclusively, and have flexible hours (within reason).  I had already been telecommuting a few days per week anyway, so this was not too big of an adjustment.

Well the situation worked wonderfully for me. Just as I wrote in my last post about taking breaks during work to grab time with my baby now, I did the same with Kevin when he was a baby. It was the next best thing to working part-time - I still felt like I got to spend much more quality time with my son working from home than if I’d been commuting to the office every day. I could spend my lunch break with him. I could occasionally sit in his room and cuddle with him and rock him to sleep before his nap, and nursing was much easier than if I’d had to pump at the office! Even when I had a phone meeting during his feeding time, the nanny simply brought him to me and I could nurse him while taking my meeting (thank goodness we weren’t using webcams!).

Even after Kevin started daycare away from the house, I had become so accustomed to, and comfortable with, telecommuting, that I never looked back. When I work full-time and every minute working is one less minute to spend with my kids, why would I want to spend an extra hour every day away from my kids to sit in traffic? It just seems crazy. Life is too short and time is way too precious!

Technorati Tags: telecommuting, work from home, work from home mom