Introduction
Within just the past few years, affordable residential high-speed Internet saw somewhat of an explosion. Suddenly, rapid access to a world of information become almost commonplace, and with it, companies started to think about unusual possibilities related to geography, infrastructure, and even employee morale. Call it telework, telecommuting, or working from home, people were ready. In some cases, though, many companies - from IT departments to leadership - were not. For good reason, people have immediate preconceptions about what it means to telecommute. Concerns about productivity, visibility, and team camaraderie, to name a few, are certainly valid. But with solid infrastructure, trust, and healthy amounts of discipline, even entire teams can successfully manage working away from the traditional office. With that said, not all jobs may be suitable for telecommuting - employees at every level should reasonably determine if remote work is even a feasible possibility. But once one is faced with the opportunity, there are many, many cases where physical location does not need to impact the quality of work output, and the challenges associated with telework can be overcome.
I am not an MBA, nor am I currently an Account Executive in charge of a hundred souls; I am a techie. While I speak fluent zeros and ones, I have been fortunate enough to check off the "Team Lead" box throughout several engagements during my career. I have worked with colleagues in the next cubicle, next timezone, and half a world away. More to the point, though, I have worked in offices great, small, and everything in between - and have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of telecommuting. Given this background, my point of view will largely be from a software development perspective; but the overall ideas can hopefully be applied elsewhere. Here, I will be detailing some of the tips, techniques, and issues I have encountered during my career while telecommuting - information that I have seen cost people their jobs, or out-perform their colleagues.
My current professional life sees regular telework successfully in action. I am an employee of a large, Fortune 500 company, and am presently part of an organization of nearly 100 people. It is made up of about third technical, a third business, and a third various operational staff (team leads, Project Managers, etc.). There is significant geographic diversity among the organization: three time zones across the U.S. and two foreign countries. Nearly every U.S.-based employee works from home. It is from this background that I have learned some of the most effective tools behind productive telework.
Putting these thoughts to paper gained increasing interest with me throughout the past several years. What started as a daily routine for most - up early, battle rush-hour traffic, sit in an office, commute home - slowly transitioned into a nearly full-time telecommuting schedule now approaching 14 years in practice. While I (and my managers, as based on my performance reviews) saw no tangible negative effect on the quality of my work, the change was met with predictable reactions from my friends and family. Hearing their attitudes made me realize that while telecommuting does carry a certain stigma associated with the undisciplined, views like theirs were not going to improve the case for telecommuting in the eyes of the professional and personal worlds. And to those telecommuters who consistently work over forty hours a week - while receiving glowing appraisals - marginalizing the workday simply because of location borders on offensive.
With these thoughts in mind, I set out to find existing resources which could guide any level of employee through successful telecommuting. But after discovering only high-level / general information or overly-expensive printed references, I decided to share my own experiences and interpretations in the hope that the phrase "working from home" no longer connotes "catch up on Battlestar Galactica."