Tell me about the advantages and disadvantages to telecommuting/home office. But, I am especially seeking out feedback from those who do NOT work for themselves. Are there drawbacks? If so, what are they? Can you maintain a 8 hr work schedule to separate work from your life? Or, does this open a Pandora’s box of problems you could not foresee? Would you do it again? Did you find your position, or did you have to negotiate the telecommuting option? If you found it, how might one find a telecommuting job…they don’t seem as abundant as I’d have guessed in the energy-poor, 21st century. Tell all!
I’ve done it. I found the work days a LOT longer, and that I felt more responsible for the work that I was doing rather than working at home… but then I was an entire dept myself.
Now I have 32 people who report to me, all of who are dependant on another 20 people to brief in jobs. One of them works from home frequently, and she makes hard work harder. “Can you look this up for me?” “What is his number again?”
So IMHO unless you can do it self sufficiently, you need to look at it really closely.
I work from home once or twice a week. There are a few things that I absolutely have to be in the office to do. My biggest problem is stopping myself from doing little things around the house when I’m supposed to be working. I’ll finish working on a drawing and then I’ll think that maybe I should empty the dishwasher, or do the dishes in the sink. Sometimes I’m able to resist, other times not so much. My other is the near-constant lure of the refrigerator. Snacking is a big problem. Plus it’s hard to feel professional when you are on a conference call in your boxers while playing (muted) Civilization IV on your home PC.
I tried it for myself in my software developer role for a couple weeks. Didn’t work for me because I couldn’t really get myself into work mode. I don’t have kids or pets or other disruptions, but it was too easy to waste time doing other things rather than working. As an example, the Dope is just as accessible from my work PC as from home, but I NEVER Dope around at work. It just feels wrong.
I’ve let some of the developers & IT types who work for me try it on a limited basis too. There are a lot of challenges in quantifying the work output in a short experiment, but if anything, we saw a decline, not an increase.
The coordination challeges are larger. Things that used to be easy to settle in a 5-minute face-to-face now take 3 hours worth of email exchanges. And we have & use all the latest tech toys to make remote coordination easier: LiveMeeting, RDC, etc.
I guess I’d summaraized my attitude like this: If they’re in the office, I’m paying for and getting about 8 hours of work which, considering commute time, takes the worker about 9 hours away from home (ignoring lunch). If they’re telecommuting, I still pay for 8, but I get about 7 of useful work, and in addition to an extra hour of play time during the day, they’re saving themselves the hour of commute time. in addition, most telecommuters eat lunch at home which is both qicker & cheaper.
It’s easy to see why it’s popular with the workers & less so with the managers. If I could do away with their office space that would offset some of the cost, but for all but the cheapest workers, their wages are large compared to the rent on their office space.
I want to believe it can work, and I know other companies in our industry do it sucessfully, but I/we haven’t found the trick. Maybe it’s one of those “you can’t get there from here” situations, where if we’d built the business & the culture on telecommuting from the beginning, using just telecommute-experienced workers, we’d be fine. But with present habits & present employees it just fails.
Either that or the benefits take a few months to show up & we just aren’t patient enough to wait that long.
I’ve been working from home exclusively for the last 4 years. I work for IBM, they have good technology for enabling remote working, my ability to work hardly changed at all when I switched from a traditional office to a home office. My job involves folks scattered across the country, rather than people in my building, so losing face to face meetings was not an issue.
On the plus side, obviously I don’t have to commute, so that’s a significant time savings. I also get to have lunch with my wife and help out around the house if I have a break from work. I work a regular schedule, and when I log off at night, I’m OFF, no going back to work after dinner, no answering the work phone.
On the downside, I’m turning into a hermit. My wife is the only person I have regular contact with, all of my communication with coworkers is over email, instant messaging and phone. That’s no way to develop a relationship. Many days, I have absolutely no reason to leave the house, so I don’t. I haven’t gotten into the “wearing pajamas until lunchtime” routine, I still shower and dress before work (95% of the time). For me, working home every day isn’t going to work out long term, I’m actually looking for a new, office based job, so that I can have human contact.
Working from home once or twice a week is a nice benefit, if you manage the opportunity correctly. Shower and dress like you’re going to work. Maybe it’s “super-casual Friday”, but get dressed. Try to stay on your normal routine, start work around the same time, end work around the same time, take breaks like normal.
My husband just started telecommuting about a week ago. He works for a company that processes third party insurance claims. The company picked a couple of their top performers to see if this would work out on a larger scale, so my husband was chosen.
Since he’s judged on quantity (and quality) of claims paid, he doesn’t have the luxury of slacking off during his shift. He can work 7 days a week, from 6:00 am to 7:00 pm and overtime is always available.
During breaks, which he keeps the same as if he were in the office, he will do some light housework. I love that, of course! He’s saving money on gas. There’s no vending machine to worry about and he’s snacking less. All he has to do is leave at 4:00 to pick up our daughter and wait for me to get home if he wants to put in more overtime.
He has IM, so if he needs to communicate with the office, he’s able to. He hears a lot less of the office drama now, although he still hears a bit of it through IM.
He told me a couple of days ago that someone sent a department-wide email asking who wanted Chinese food for lunch. That would be a little difficult for me to handle if I were eating a salad or a PB&J, but at least he’s not eating junk like conference room birthday cake and pizza, etc.
He likes it so far, but it’s early yet and who knows if their experiment will work. We’ll have to see. I’m just afraid he’ll get lonely without direct human contact.
I do it, one or two days a week. It came about after my car got totaled, so it’s with the same employer I had before.
Days I work from home have been a little bit harder to handle. My inclination is to sleep later and then just start work over breakfast… but then there’s no time till lunch to take a shower or get dressed, and somehow the whole day goes by then with me never getting ready to face the world. A few times, it’s okay, but then it’s tiresome, because I hardly ever feel like going through my morning routine at the end of the work day! Now I try to make a point of being up, showered and dressed before I get started on work.
Communicating with colleagues isn’t bad, because I’m on Google Talk whenever I’m home, and I do get into the office for at least half the week anyway. Sometimes I’ll have to jiggle around my days home to make a meeting, but as long as I have enough notice it’s not bad.
About self-sufficiency - I can do my work alone, for the most part, and if I can’t I just do my best to get it out of the way when I’m in the office.
I did this. My office kept getting smaller and smaller, as in number of people. At a certain point, we were asked whether it could work if we moved stuff to our homes, so we did, and it did work.
Advantages: Instead of commuting up to 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, my boss and I get together once or twice a week, so commuting time–which I didn’t get paid for–has been reduced from approximately 10 hours to 1 hour a week. Time savings, and gas savings.
Instead of supervising my almost-teenager over the phone, I’m right there to stand over him (if need be) to start his homework. But, since I’m working, he seems more willing to start working too.
During big snowstorms, we don’t lose productivity. (Although we had electricity outages at the office, too–a lot.)
I am much less likely to get sick because I’m not exposed to anyone else’s germs.
Disadvantages: I had to set aside a whole room in my house for the stuff I need–a library, a big printer, storage room for a LOT of paper. I have a small house with small rooms. I had to get a new monitor because the old one was so humonguos. It just did not fit on the table and leave me enough room to turn around and work at my desk.
When I have computer problems I have to fix them myself, on the phone with a guy from tech support. This was mostly the case before, since we were in a remote office, but every once in awhile someone who knew what they were doing would come out and rewire the network or something.
It’s been kind of hard for my family to totally get that I am NOT available for things like taking the car to the service dept., or taking the cat to the vet, any more than I used to be. I am still AT WORK during the same hours I used to be.
If I did get sick, I would probably work anyway.
Off to work now…
I am a software developer for a large company, and I work from home two days per week. Given the prevalence of instant messaging, email, on-line meeting software and conference calls in my daily work, and the complete availability of all of these tools at home, I have found there to be no decrease in my effectiveness when I work at home. The company I work for has offices in several states, and meetings often involve people from several offices, people working at home, and people who are in offices but choose to dial in to the meeting rather than physically attend it. I can program my office phone to forward to my cell phone, so people who call me don’t even realize that I’m not there.
My actual software coding activities are generally more productive at home. I have few distractions and find that I concentrate much better at home. When I first began to work at home, I had to spend some time convincing my wife that I wasn’t available to do whatever popped into her head at any moment. She pretty much ignores me now when I’m working.
I miss out on some face to face interactions that would probably be helpful, the impromptu kind that I can’t exactly schedule on my in-office days.
If I should ever be given the opportunity to work from home full time, I would definitely do it.
I work from home most of the time. I’m a grad student who (theoretically) works 20 hrs/wk as a research assistant. The biggest positive aspect of working at home is that I don’t have travel time, which is a big issue for me because I have a kid I have to take to grade school at 9:15 and pick up at 3:30. Also, I don’t have much of a dedicated work space on campus, so it’s easier to work at home where all of my stuff is. Another perk is that I don’t have to pack or buy a lunch.
However, I find it much easier to be lured in by the temptations of the SDMB at home, or to spend the time doing personal tasks, or to even wash dishes if my RA work is just that dull. I think it must take someone with more self-discipline than I have to be very productive working at home.
I’ve worked from home for about 10 months now, working for a company in California. I’m having more trouble with work taking over my life and NOT being able to take advantage of all the flex time that was vaunted so highly. I start work at 9 AM (which is 7 AM CA time) but the CA people will still be wanting to talk about work at 730, which is not late for them but getting late for me. The guys in India are always IMing me at midnight, too, and I get and answer emails at all hours. And if I take off at 530PM to meet friends, man, the IMs when I get back. “you there? <ping> I need something. help. big meeting.” And it is hard to stop work when there is a lot to do and it all needs to get done right away. I have worked harder at this job than any other I’ve had, though part of it that is it’s a startup with some crazy deadlines; but I’ve been working 12, 15 hour days fairly regularly. And yet, no one sees me work them so I don’t get the brownie points for working late.
I miss out on a lot of general info from not being in an office; I don’t know what big potential clients and projects are coming up, whcih leads to conversations like “Where’s the mockup for X?” Me: “X? I heard we were talking to them a month ago, but I didn’t know I had to do anything for them!” “Yes, we just signed them yesterday, I need a site up in two hours!”
I’d still do it again, and I’d probably be a lot happier if I was working for a job with a less gruelling schedule. But working from home has made me realize working in an office is not so bad after all. Plus the commute was nice “me time” to read and think and it gave you a solid END to work. Oh, how I wish I could LEAVE work. Sorry, this is a bit whinier than I’d planned it to be when I started. 
Mr. Athena and I both work from home. We are both self-employed, but both of us also have a primary client (not the same) that more or less treats us like we’re employees. We’re both software engineers (or programmers, or code monkeys, or whatever you want to call us. We write code.)
I’ve worked both in and office and at home, and productivity-wise, there’s no comparison. I’m much more productive at home. The amount of socializing and general screwing around that occurs in an office situation is amazing. Once you add in meetings, in my experience, real “work” can only happen around 4 hours a day in an office.
At home, even if I have to attend meetings, I can mute the phone and work while they talk about all the things that don’t involve me. There is no socializing. I don’t have to worry about that guy who comes in my office and yammers for 45 minutes about his weekend while I’m trying to work, or be subjected to taking an hour to go out to lunch with everyone because it’s someone’s birthday/it’s Friday/whatever.
I know some people seem to have discipline problems while working at home, but I’ve never had any. Plus, I’m a software person; if my manager/boss/client has any concerns about whether I’m working, there’s solid evidence that proves/disproves it. Either the code got written or the bug got fixed, or it didn’t.
I found my current client through an ad on a completely unrelated message board that a friend saw and forwarded to me. Previous work-at-home positions have been either through working for small companies who saw it as a money saving venture, or I was an employee at a company that allowed it.
If you’re a software person, it’s harder to find work at home positions than traditional ones, but it’s not impossible. Both Craig’s List and Joel on Software’s job boards allow you to search for telecommute positions, and there’s always a few ads.
For non-software people… I don’t know. It seems that work-at-home is less common for those type positions.