As a research mathematician, I could work anywhere and always did most of my work at home. Right in the living room too. My kids (and wife) learned that they couldn’t distract me and it worked quite well. At my office there all sorts of distractions. Of course, I needed office hours to see students and the like. The arrival of computers meant only that I now typed my own papers (much more efficient in the long run).
I used to telecommute, now I ROWE. Everything I do is data private, but we are pretty much paperless. I do have a locked file cabinet if I have to bring home a district court file. I purchased my own office equipment - desk, chair, file cabinet. My employer provided me with a laptop, internet connection, and land line. Now that we ROWE, we’re responsible for our own internet and land lines have been replaced with cell phones.
In telecommuting, I still had set in office hours and set telecommuting hours. If I was scheduled in office, but was ill, I had to take sick time. That caused problems as some supervisors would allow sick employees to work from home, others would not. Not everyone could telecommute and those of us who could seriously thought before pursuing other job openings, as if you left a telecommuting team it was a given that you would not telecommute again.
Now, our entire division ROWE’s. It’s had many bumps along the way, and my particular team still has issues with our supervisor and her trust issues. The basic premise behind ROWE is work when you want, where you want, as long as you get the work done. We must have our 40 hours per week done. If we have to be in office for one reason or another, we better be there or we may be written up (discipline has become a major issue). One coworker has not been in office since mid-June, but her team ‘buddies’ up and her partner does any in office work for her (or she puts off coming in). I’m in office once a week for at least part of the day, as communication with our attorney’s must be done face to face and the courts do not accept documentation via e-mail.
For the most part, I like it. I like that if I have a migraine I can shut down for a few hours, but then can come back and work later without worrying whether my boss will okay sick leave. However, I do not trust my supervisor as far as I can throw her. One very good, very thorough, but somewhat slow co-worker was put on a disciplinary plan within a week of ROWE going “live”. It was very punative, and now a person who has worked in our agency for 30 years is afraid she will be canned if she looks crosseyed at the boss.
I get a lot more done when I don’t have to spend two hours commuting–that is, I figure I can actually put a couple more hours into the work, since I don’t waste any (of my) time at all getting there.
The down side is, once my husband gets home, it’s really hard to have the same degree of productivity.
I edit books, and I have to send in a daily time sheet of how much time I put in doing what on every book, and I have to do that whether I work from home or at an office. So it’s very obvious that the work is getting done, because if I say I did 7.5 hours of manuscript editing on a book and the book isn’t 7.5 hours closer to production, then obviously I didn’t do it.
I’ve noticed this is a big concern of employers about working from home: How will we know they’re really working? Very simple answer. The work doesn’t get done. If it gets done, they’re really working.
I have to do file-sharing through a VPN connection. When I’m on the VPN, there are certain sites I can’t get to, and my internet actions can be monitored. There have been times when I’ve had to ask for access to certain things. When I sign off the VPN, I can go anywhere. So if they wanted to find out if I was surfing the net instead of working, all they’d have to do is look.
I have set, regular hours, but just as I used to take work home on the weekends occasionally, sometimes I still do. I will, however, take a break and pop in a load of laundry. I will also clean up the office on work time. I had these days in the office when I made a super mess making coffee and spent half an hour cleaning up the break room because of it, and if something similar happens at home, same deal.
I brought desk, two filing cabinets, and two computers (and about five million paperclips) from my office. This pretty much means I’ve given up one room of my house, though. Company pays for internet and work phone.
I would still take sick time if I needed it, but not being in an office with other sick people has led to me never being sick. I have taken it for my kid’s doctor’s appointments and when my husband had surgery.
We don’t miss out so much on the office grapevine because I do still spend time on the phone. Probably talk to my boss more than when I was in the office.
BTW, we do have policies around telecommunting. One is that if you officially telecommute, you cannot be responsible for watching children. Another adult needs to be present or you have to put them in daycare.
When my kids are sick, I telecommute - some time, my employer believes, is better than an entire lost day. And when they are home I get very little done. I think its unrealistic to expect to telecomute and have young children at home that you are responsible for. Even the dog gets disruptive (“let me in, let me out” “oh, you are talking with that thing to your ear, are you talking to me, can I talk back?” “you are home, can we go for a walk?”). Even the cat gets disruptive at times (Bat at the screen, lie on your keyboard, complain loudly).
Our office has people who on occasion will work from home. I do it from time to time when I have research or report type work that is WAY more comfortable done from a couch than a desk.
There is also field work (maintenance on the field truck) that I can and have done from work :D. As someone else said, it’s pretty obvious if you’re doing a task for someone and you “work from home” and they ask you the next day “hey can I see how far you got on that database?” and there’s not much done.
I disagree about the “can’t work from home if you have a baby” though. If you’ve got a nice normal baby, not a colic-y one, there is a TON of free time to do things. There’s no reason a person couldn’t at least work part time from home as long as they are, disciplined and truly producing.
I had a job (2002-2004) where we were allowed wfh on occasion. We all had laptops anyway; the setup at the office didn’t include those fancy bases (I think they didn’t exist yet) or a bigger monitor, just a full-size keyboard and mouse. I bought an aluminum “monitor base” at Staples for something like $15, to sit the laptop on it to avoid neck cricks: right now I’m typing on a laptop standing on that same base.
The job involved a lot of travel time: I have the company’s record for 2003, with a 70% travel time; thus, the laptops and VPN were needed in any case. Some of the “wfh” was actually “there is some work which needs to be done at 3am on a Saturday night and shouldn’t take more than half an hour, please do it from the hotel”. Some of it was “I just came back after a month abroad, am out of clean professional clothes, have no meetings until tomorrow” - you’d connect via VPN to download anything you needed although most of your files would already be in your laptop, keep webmail and the instant messaging program open (these did not need the VPN, so you could close it once you were done downloading).
Sometimes it was “I need to do something which will be more efficient if I do it at home”: for example, I needed to run some jobs (local) which could easily take 6h each. Doing it in the office would have meant running one per day, because you could not leave the laptop there. Doing it at home meant running continuously, so the global work got done a lot faster; during the 8 hours I was required to be “available”, I kept webmail and the IM open on my personal computer, so the one with the data would be able to chug that little bit less slowly; and meanwhile, I got to clean the apartment (where I hadn’t spent one whole day in 6 weeks), listen to music without headphones and prepare a lot of frozen homecooking.
The technical setup required was actually minimal: VPN, IM, webmail. The IM we used allowed us to “share the screen” or even let the other people in the conversation control our computer, so we could look over each other’s shoulders remotely when needed. And as has been pointed out, the way to show that it was a good system is that the work got done (in some cases, 4 times faster than if I’d been in the office).
The wife of one of my coworkers works for a big enterprise software company; she’s a team manager. She works from home and goes into the office once a week; all her meetings must be set for Tuesday because that’s the day she’s in, period. Their two children (ages 9 and 6) are currently on vacation, but they are also old enough to mostly take care of themselves during the day, and responsible enough to understand that You Do Not Bother Ma When She’s Working. Food is prepared as if she was going into the office, for example green beans will have been cleaned and cut the previous afternoon (the kids help) rather than on the same day. They have a cleaning lady, which they’d have anyway with a 400 m[sup]2[/sup] house.
I’ve had jobs which were absurd in not allowing wfh: every single company computer was a laptop, we had VPN, most people in my team could go weeks without needing to speak with another person for work reasons, but we had to go into the office, period. Whether wfh makes sense or not depends a lot on the nature of the work and of the people: for example, I know salespeople who do all their work over the phone, but because they are very sociable they feel a lot better if they work out of an office and have coffee with their coworkers than if they’re all alone at home; OTOH, your average computer professional would be perfectly happy working from his living room.
I’ve done the WFH thing twice.
The first time was a moonlighting job doing data entry. I supplied my own computer and connection, they supplied the necessary software. It was the ideal part-time job.
The second was one where I could telecommute 1-2 days a week. There were a lot of things that I had to be at the office to do, but there were some things that were just as well done at home. In fact, some of them were performed more efficiently at home because there were fewer distractions. The company furnished a laptop, keyed software and a blackberry. The laptop was docked at my desk when I was in the office and it and the rest were also used there and when traveling on company business, so they weren’t extra expenses.
I had no problem with getting things done from home. I treated my work hours as just that: work hours. The nice part, no traffic and I could work in my jammies. 
This is very similar to how my work is set up. The one thing that I’d add is that our KPIs are very much tied to outcomes/work produced, and that’s what we are measured on, rather than time spent at our desk.
After my maternity leave I went back to work part time. Because of my commute and my childminder’s schedule, I can’t actually do a full 8 hour day in the office, so doing 2 1/2 days means I have a couple of hours left over I need to work. I do those extra 2 hours from home, and have done since my daughter was born - she’s now 3 1/2.
When she was a baby it was a breeze - she’d be ready for a nap by 9 am when I had to start work. As she got a bit more mobile it became a little bit more difficult, but she then got to a point where she could amuse herself with Lego, or drawing, and I can get on with work. Now, it’s getting to the point where it’s increasingly difficult to manage, and I feel like I’m shortchanging her a little bit, apart from anything else. I can just about manage 2 hours worth of ‘honey, I’ll be with you in a minute, I just need to send this message’ but there’s no way I could do any longer with her at this age.
I work on my own computer though a VPN, with a work mobile. I have a work laptop but rarely bother to bring it home, all my files are on a network drive anyway and my own desktop is faster and nicer to use. I work in IT consulting and it’s incredibly common to telecommute - on a Friday particularly the office car park is empty, as everyone is on that well known project ‘WFH’. I have an very micro-managing boss and even she accepts it without a qualm. I take my work very seriously and always deliver results and I’d be insulted and job-hunting if anyone attempted to force me into clockwatching at a detailed level, or insisting i demonstrate how I spend my time. I regularly work more than the hours I’m paid and it’s recognised by all parties that a bit of give and take is necessary in the role I’m in, anyway.
So - I do think it’s possible to do it with a small child, but it depends on the child, and exactly what needs to be done. I certainly wouldn’t attempt to do a full day whilst looking after a child of any age, tbh. I know the maternity leave policy is very different in the US than here in the UK, but here if I was on bed rest during maternity I’d get that paid as sick leave, or once the pregnancy gets to a certain point, as formal maternity leave anyway, so there’s no way I’d work whilst I was doing it. After the baby’s born you actually have to be careful here not to work too much, or your maternity leave is assumed to have ended, and given that we can have up to a year, you wouldn’t want to shorten it unless you have to.
A good point. A recent study I read in the last 6 months or so indicated that remote workers save companies about $8k/yr.
My company used to be much more liberal on their WFH policy. We were pretty much able to work from home whenever we wanted at a moment’s notice. Some people abused it and now we have much tougher policies.
We are issued laptops when we are hired. That is our main computer that we HAVE to take home everyday. My company had their entire business in the twin towers. They lost a bunch of people and all their computers and servers on 9/11. Now we have to carry our laptop to and from work and all of our servers are offsite.
I test software on all those servers, so I have to connect and log into it no matter where I work from. Our business is cyclical, we go from boring days where I spend most of the day on the Dope, to days where I have to work 15 hours a day to get my work done on time (the trials and tribulations of being SQA can fill its own thread).
During our slow times, I would work from home and substitute DVDs for the Dope. During our heavy times, I got a lot more done since I didn’t have to waste time commuting between the office and home.
I liked working from home. I didn’t feel like I had someone breathing down my neck or constantly looking over my shoulder. I’m an adult and I know how to get my work done.
We have to connect to a VPN before we can access any servers. We also use a mix of AIM, Yahoo IM and Outlook Office Communicator to chat with each other. It works well since we already have people in different offices around the country. We also use web based meeting software so we can show each other documents and such on our computers.
I know a lot of people have issues with their kids when WFH, but mine are old enough where they can take care of themselves. They just need an adult around to make sure they don’t burn the house down or anything. They stay in the rec room and I stay in the family room when I WFH.
In short, it works for me. I’m none too happy that they’ve cracked down on it here.
What are KPIs?
The term is Key Performance Indicators. It’s the latest output of the IT buzzword generator.
Specifically, a BI (Business Intelligence) system is supposed to track, compute, and display KPIs so management can think they understand what’s going on. Think “Needle in the green means my bonus is safe. Otherwise I should start yelling at my people to work harder. Hey, this business leadership stuff is easy.”
I’m betting he’s refering to the formal quantitative metrics by which his production quantity & quality are measured.
Okay one more word of advice. I’ve been working from home the last couple of days since I’ve been ill and there are a million things that I can’t pass on to other people right now.
I realized tonight that I’d been away from my computer for a grand total of 30 mins in the last 10 hours and yesterday wasn’t much better.
If you tend towards being a workaholic it’s a good idea to set reminders to get up and walk around and possibly eat since you don’t get the hint when desks clear out around you.
Something related I just thought of.
My current bosses are very nice, but both of them believe that it’s necessary for two people to be able to sit together in order to communicate. The client we work for does not accept wfh, although every single subcontractor is required to provide his/her own laptop and install the company’s VPN; it seems to be yet another case of the ettin’s two heads not being able to decide whether to eat or drink. In conversations about wfh, the bosses have agreed that because I’m the person who interacts less with the rest of the team, I actually should be able to wfh pretty much 100% of the time.
I have a problem with allergies which lowers my productivity (it’s hard to concentrate when you can’t breathe); it does not affect me at home. I’ve been able to identify some of the allergens at the office but not all, and can’t do anything about the ones I’ve identified (“excuse me, could we chop off those decorative trees?”). So right now working from home would mean more productivity simply because my nose and brain wouldn’t be compdetdy cdogg’d!
I work for a small company that has offices in two different cities. One of these offices isn’t big enough to accomodate all the employees in that city. We have even more employees scattered all over the world. In fact, in my team of nine people, there are only two of us who can go to the office to work.
We have a conference call service with two lines. We use GoToMeeting, which lets a user present their computer’s desktop to other users. We VPN into the servers we work on. The company has relaxed business hours; in theory there’s a two-hour window to begin working in the morning, but in practice, the guy in Europe works during our nighttime and several of the programmers drift into the office around 11am and work till later in the evening… and/or end up troubleshooting in the middle of the night.
Employees are given laptop computers which they may take home from the office at night. In practice, when I WFH, I use my own computer. We can claim reimbursement for cell phone minutes.
I don’t feel that it’s an ideal situation for the productivity of the company, but we were doomed with the dual-city setup from the beginning. Since we were in the habit of teleconferencing with the other office anyway, it didn’t seem to hurt anything when employees wanted to move to other cities but keep working for us, or when we wanted to hire someone who wouldn’t re-locate.
I’ve worked out of a home office off and on for years and through trial and error I found rules of thumb that are useful, though these might not all work as well for SAH Moms:
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Treat the home office as if it were your office at work. Get up and start work when you normally would. Organize your home office. Dress like you would at work. Pretend that any moment, your boss could drop by to check in on how you are doing (which of course they wont or cant by law, at least not without your permission ahead of time). Getting up at noon after partying until 4am and shuffling around in gym shorts, a tee shirt and no shoes will not help get you motivated to work or make you productive.
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Beware of “time vampires”. That 15 minute break you decide to take to check your Facebook page can quickly turn to 2 hours. That quick trip to the grocery store to pick up a salad for lunch can suddenly become a 2 hour shopping trip torpedoing your day (after all, who is monitoring how long you take for lunch anyway, right?). Remember work at home means WORK at home, not goof off on The Straight Dope most of the day.
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Start each day with a time chart and write down which priority items you plan to finish that day. Feel free to squeeze in ESSENTIAL household chores in between, but make sure you have all of your work done that would normally be done for that day. If I have 8 hours of work planned in my home office for that day, and I start at 8, its OK to me run a load or two of wash. But I know that might take me up to 30 minutes. So, I plan to keep working until 4:30 if I do that.
If I’m going to take a half hour lunch and watch the boob tube, guess what? I’m working until at least 5. Clean the cats litter box? 15 minutes. 5:15.
Its OK to squeeze in CHORES while working at home (as long as they don’t interfere with that day’s deadlines), because after all, isn’t part of working at home to relief stress, as long as you set reasonable expectations for how long each household chore will take.
Its the web surfing and running out of the house to shop for things that will quickly torpedo your day really, really quick. Many “home office” people quickly mistake their jobs as easy money to sit around and play videogames all day, they will usually get found out in about 6 months.