OT somewhat: Do you telecommute? What do you wish the boss understood about it?

[Anton Vredegoor]

estherschindler wrote:

> * If you telecommute, full- or part-time, what *one* thing do you wish
> the CIO or IT Management would understand that they don't currently
> "get"?

I'm not currently telecommuting but last year I had a telecommuting job 
for half a year. What I would want to say to all future employers 
considering to hire telecommuting personnel is : Don't let the 
telecommuter pay the extra costs that are caused by telecommuting. And I 
don't mean only the financial aspects, I also mean the immaterial costs.

For example if one is working at home it can be hard for an employer to 
check whether the work is still progressing and if there are no 
immediate results there can be some suspicion that the employee is just 
sitting at home watching television or is out shopping, because hey, 
there's no way to check that anyway and people tend to become lazy if no 
one is watching them? So the employer can become tempted to find ways to 
check upon his employee by other means. Why not let him write a daily 
report of his activities even if you never read it? Why not ask for an 
open MSN chat window at all times so that one can check how fast the 
employee is responding? Is he at his desk *right now*?

These are all things that are not usually asked of the people sitting in 
the main office and create an extra burden for the employee. In fact the 
employee gets burdened with the costs of the employers insecurities. If 
one doesn't trust the employee then don't hire him or don't let him 
telecommute in the first place!

Then there are other aspects. For example sometimes I had to use an 
expensive mobile Internet connection when I was on the road or when the 
Internet connection at home didn't work. It was some account that lets 
one use some amount of megabytes for free but after that was used up 
there were high costs for each further megabyte. It was certainly the 
wrong kind of subscription but sometimes it's hard to determine whether 
one buys an expensive flat rate subscription with the risk of all this 
money never being used because one is using the home Internet connection 
all the time. On the other hand things can really get expensive if one 
has the cheap fixed megabytes type of account and the home Internet 
connection fails for an extended period or if one has to be on location 
often.

So sometimes the wrong business decision was made. But if someone at the 
workplace has a HD crash or some other costly error happens this is 
normally not something the employee has to pay for. If one is informed 
about the costs and one doesn't read the emails but just says "fix that 
server malfunction *now*, don't mind the connection costs" one should 
not be scolding the employee for the large bills that appear one month 
later.

Then there are things like travel costs and hotel costs, say we want the 
employee to be present at the office for a few days each month, the 
employee can pay for it in advance and the employer will reimburse him 
later on. Normally employees get a fixed paycheck each month and there 
are few extra costs involved and things can get arranged quickly.

However the extra costs for the telecommuter are highly variable and so 
there can be a situation where one has payed in advance out of ones own 
pocket and one has to ask more than once to receive the money back. If 
one has to ask too often this can be highly demoralizing, because this 
is time and money spent on the company without earning anything.

The employer maybe starts to think: "Hey this guy is living in an 
expensive hotel and eating in restaurants while other people go there to 
have a vacation, so why should I have to pay for that?" Well for the 
employee it's a completely different story, hotel rooms aren't fun if 
one arrives late at night and leaves early in the morning and cities 
remain tantalizing mysteries if one never has the time to do some 
sightseeing.

There is also the idea that working at home is some luxurious privilege 
that the employee should be thankful for. I can tell you that even the 
nicest home can become a prison if one has to be there all the time. In 
fact any escape can be a relief so one is thankful to spend some time in 
a hotel room ... But that doesn't mean it's vacation! No way. It's just 
that other people get out of their homes normally at the beginning of 
the day, a telecommuter *has* to go out for a walk or go bicycling for 
half an hour or so during lunch break just to keep fit. A normal 
employee can integrate that into his routine of coming to work and 
having lunch at a nearby restaurant.

So all in all my conclusion is, if one wants the employee to be happy 
and loyal, don't destroy his good intentions by letting him pay for all 
kinds of luxuries that he didn't ask for and that aren't even much fun 
anyway. Even though such things might seem the most desirable working 
environments for those having to work in a crowded office where they 
have to go to each day, sitting alone at home or being in anonymous 
hotels in big cities and eating at restaurants is *not* as good as it 
seems when one has to do it in someone else's time.

Then there is the disadvantage of not being informed adequately of what 
is going on at the main office. If there is a blame game going on for 
something that went wrong, those in the distance are always last in line 
that can distance themselves from the problem, and anyway, electronic 
communications don't work as well as face to face contacts. Be aware of 
that too and don't let your telecommuters always be the ones who get 
blamed by the nearby workforce. You'll end up hiring and firing 
telecommuting workers at a regular basis and knowledge about the company 
  and its software will *not* be preserved, to your own detriment.

So have a little faith and pay those extra expenses in advance, trust 
your distant workforce to not watch television and accept that they too 
must go out of their homes now and then. If you accept all that I think 
that things will go extremely well because a distributed work force can 
mobilize a lot more diverse assets than a single main office.

But that last point would be a topic for an entirely different post. I 
just wanted to end this dragon with a positive note :-)

A.