Telecommuting Poll

In My Humble Opinion
1

While I now work for a progressive silicon valley company (Cisco Systems) at my previous company telecommuting was frowned upon. Of the 350 or so people at that company I don’t know any that telecommuted even part time. For some jobs, such as those in manufacturing, it doesn’t make sense, but for lots of other jobs, such as technical managers, I think you could do your job just as well from home; and while 100% telecommuting would present some real challenges I think working from home a couple of days a week could reduce the amount of fuel workers expend getting to and from work, as well as provides the opportunity for less distractions than sitting at your desk all day.

I think my previous company’s reluctance comes from their philsosphy of distrust. How can I know you are really working if I can’t watch you whenever I want? I guess they figured that employees that telecommuted would sit home and watch tv all day. IMHO, in this day and age of technology, with IM, email, video conferencing etc. it’s easy to be plugged into what is happening at work without having to sit at a desk.

Here’s a quick poll to see if your company encourages or discourages telecommuting. If you are self employed, or you work in a retail environment, then this doesn’t apply to you.

  1. Does your company allow you to telecommute (assuming you have a position that doesn’t require you to be in the office all day every day)?

  2. If not, what is the rationale for not allowing workers to telecommute?

  3. If they do allow telecommuting are there any restrictions they put on it?

  4. Do you telecommute more than 2 days a week? If you do, what do you do for a living?

2

Here’s a quick poll to see if your company encourages or discourages telecommuting. If you are self employed, or you work in a retail environment, then this doesn’t apply to you.

  1. Does your company allow you to telecommute (assuming you have a position that doesn’t require you to be in the office all day every day)?

In general, yes. I have coworkers in India, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and one that travels with her husband. I don’t usually do it myself except for after hours but I could if I wanted to at least part-time. I am a developer and small-scale project manager.

  1. If not, what is the rationale for not allowing workers to telecommute?

N/A

  1. If they do allow telecommuting are there any restrictions they put on it?

None are clearly defined. You can just work it out with your manager. That would most like it being one or two days a week.

  1. Do you telecommute more than 2 days a week? If you do, what do you do for a living?

As stated above, I only do it after hours or if I am sick. I can’t really do it when my young kids are around.

3

1. Does your company allow you to telecommute (assuming you have a position that doesn’t require you to be in the office all day every day)?
I do not telecommute, but many here do. Many of our employees and contractors live far or do not want to commute, so if their supervisors agree to it, they are set up with our proprietary and other software and allowed to work from home. Some have even worked abroad.

3. If they do allow telecommuting are there any restrictions they put on it?
You need to work and check your email frequently and be accessible by phone. We have daily deadlines, so there’s no such thing as slacking for a couple days. People will email and call you many times daily.

4. Do you telecommute more than 2 days a week? If you do, what do you do for a living?
I do not, but to answer the question, we are a postproduction company in Los Angeles.

4

1. Does your company allow you to telecommute (assuming you have a position that doesn’t require you to be in the office all day every day)?
Yes.

3. If they do allow telecommuting are there any restrictions they put on it?
None have ever been mentioned. But I have a bit of a reputation for having a good work ethic.

4. Do you telecommute more than 2 days a week? If you do, what do you do for a living?
I telecommute two days a week, Mondays and Fridays. If I run out of work on Friday I’ll come into the office on Monday and do some work on the AS400, which requires function keys that are different from the function keys on a Mac, and work from home a different day. I’m hoping for another telecommuting day, as it’s a 205 mile round-trip to the office. I’m an Easytrieve programmer.

5
  1. I could telecommute for part of my week if I wished, but since I live only a short distance from the office, I prefer to come in to work, except in really bad weather.

However, for the first few weeks in my job I did telecommute – from home in Australia, to the office in the US, i.e., about as far as it’s possible to telecommute. I’d only been to the office a couple of times before I started this telecommute: about a year earlier, for the job interview, and about another year before that, for other reasons. But part of the reason for this was the slowness in getting a work visa for me to enter the US.

  1. I don’t think I’d have too many restrictions. I already have a lot of meetings on the phone, rather than face-to-face.

  2. No, I only telecommute a few times each year now.

6

  1. Does your company allow you to telecommute (assuming you have a position that doesn’t require you to be in the office all day every day)?
    In general, no, despite our work being virtual to begin with - our department is split across four states so most of us only see our managers at quarterly video conference meetings.

  2. If not, what is the rationale for not allowing workers to telecommute?
    A few years ago, some high-level muckey-muck was peeved that some people were telecommuting and didn’t show up for his meeting in person. Not a good reason, but that’s it.

  3. If they do allow telecommuting are there any restrictions they put on it?
    It’s gradually being phased in with microscopic steps. If I needed to be at home, say, to wait for a plumber, I might be allowed to telecommute that day instead of taking the day off. With the cost of gas and commuting going up, there’s been some renewed vigor behind the idea of scheduled telecommuting.

  4. Do you telecommute more than 2 days a week? If you do, what do you do for a living?
    I’m an information security analyst. As per #1, there’s not much reason I couldn’t work remotely all the time. Almost all of our meetings are by phone at our desks, and almost everything else is instant messaging or email, and my entire work environment is on the same laptop that I’d be using at home as I use in the office.

7

  1. Yes, as long as you and your manager can agree on the arrangements.

  2. Where agreement isn’t reached, it’s usually because the manager believes that the staff member can’t do the job effectively from home because contact with other staff is required. Or the manager doesn’t trust the staff member to actually do any work at home.

  3. Generally no more than two days per week.

  4. I don’t telecommute at all. It’s only a ten minute bus or train trip from my place to the office, so there’s no real need. I prefer to restrict my work to the office and keep my home work-free.

8

  1. Does your company allow you to telecommute (assuming you have a position that doesn’t require you to be in the office all day every day)?
    My company actually requires me to telecommute, but as a medical transcriptionist, I work in one of the few fields where telecommuting is the norm.

  2. If not, what is the rationale for not allowing workers to telecommute?
    N/A

  3. If they do allow telecommuting are there any restrictions they put on it?
    N/A

  4. Do you telecommute more than 2 days a week? If you do, what do you do for a living?
    I telecommute for my entire work week, as mentioned above. I transcribe medical reports for companies all over the US.

NB: As far as how they can be sure I work all my hours, that’s pretty easy in my field as I’m logged on to their system for the required hours, but they also require a minimum amount of work to be completed that wouldn’t allow for much goofing off. I suppose I could speed through it while watching reruns of The Waltons with one eye, but a high accuracy level ensures a higher rate of pay, so I don’t.

9

To start with, my company encourages it, and has a big program around telecommuting. I don’t, but I know plenty of people who do, and in fact people who moved with their spouses far away from a campus but stay employed telecommuting. Groups are often widely distributed.

Yes. I don’t as a rule, but when my wife had eye problems I telecommuted so that I could take care of her. I do it just with my laptop and a VPN connection, but there are better ways. Many meetings on the phone have half the people at home.

I’m not aware of any. It needs some level of approval, and it is officially encouraged at the top level, but locally controlled. One campus is full of flex offices - you have a locker for your permanent stuff, and sign an office out for a week at a time. This means that when people telecommute or take vacation their office isn’t empty, but used by someone else, which saves tons on real estate. We also have smart cards which allows you to get your session anywhere in the world, even at home.

No, but I hate telephones.

10

  1. Does your company allow you to telecommute (assuming you have a position that doesn’t require you to be in the office all day every day)?
    I have a medical condition that has given me FMLA/ADA requirement to telecommute. I had to essentially have a custom position created for me because they were being buttheads and refused to transfer me back to CS. I think they were just being very passive aggressive and didnt believe that I was a seriously gimp as I actually am. They about shit bricks when I had a prescription for sneakers for wearing my orthotics.

  2. If not, what is the rationale for not allowing workers to telecommute?
    Many positions in my company involve creating and sending/recieving paperwork and they have this irrational concept of security that they literally dont want any paperwork outside the building. My previous position was in contract compliance, so I handled vendor contracts constantly.

  3. If they do allow telecommuting are there any restrictions they put on it?
    They pretty much restrict it to executives and some trusted customer service drones, and me [I forced them into it by virtue of medical requirement]

  4. Do you telecommute more than 2 days a week? If you do, what do you do for a living?
    I telecommute about 50 hours a week - it is supposed to be 40 but I have unlimited OT. Mama wants a new kitchen for christmas=)

I work for the largest trash and recyclables brokerage/management firm in the US - we billed just over $600,000,000 [yes, six hundred million dollars US] this past year. I specifically deal with a single vendor - Waste Management, and I audit their accounts, make sure that they get paid properly, or that they have the required paperwork for cancellation of service, and if there are irregularities in the invoicing, I track down and solve the problem. I deal with a specific person in their corporate structure that is my opposite number. If memory serves, they cover something like 10,000 accounts for us.

11

1. Does your company allow you to telecommute (assuming you have a position that doesn’t require you to be in the office all day every day)?
Yes.
3. If they do allow telecommuting are there any restrictions they put on it?
There is no official policy, but unofficially it’s a tool to be used like any other tool. i.e. Sometimes if I’m not feeling well or if I don’t want to get others sick, but I’m still not sick enough to stay in bed, I work from home. If I have a project that requires total focus where I don’t need others’ input, I’ll work from home.

4. Do you telecommute more than 2 days a week? If you do, what do you do for a living?
I don’t. but my boss does 100% (he lives in Pittsburgh). And his boss telecommutes 100% too (she lives in California), and her boss is back here in my office, and he telecommutes from his lake house pretty much only when he will be on conference calls all day. We’re an IT shop. I’m a database administrator for a data warehouse.

12

1. Does your company allow you to telecommute?

Yes.

2. If not, what is the rationale for not allowing workers to telecommute?

(From a the previous employer, who gave us the tools to telecommute but hated it whenever we actually did it.) We were told that our homes had to be inspected by our supervisors and then a formal memo sent to HR to make sure that we had a proper office setup and that we weren’t just working on the kitchen table. Reason being, we might be more likely to have a “workplace” accident if we didn’t have a proper office environment and then the company would be on the hook for an insurance claim. Amazingly, this company sold Telecommuting facilities and solutions to their customers, but were very resistant when it came to alllowing management employees to do the same. It gets even more ridiculous when you know that all executive management above me was located in NY and Boston, so it’s not like they would have ever known anyway.

3. If they do allow telecommuting are there any restrictions they put on it?

I can’t do it every day for practical reasons, but it’s ok on an as-needed basis. There are lots of face-to-face meetings so it’s hard to do it more than once a week or so unless I have planned in advance and marked-out the time on my calendar.

4. Do you telecommute more than 2 days a week? If you do, what do you do for a living?

Not regularly, but I have been able to do a 3 or 4 day stretch when I had a need. One time I had a back sprain and the other time I was doing a kitchen renovation so I needed to be at home once or twice a week over the course of a few months.

I’m an IT manager for the city government.

13

1 - No
2 - Most of our work is classified - I’m from the government and I sit in my cubicle and help you. Unfortunately, you’ll never know that, provided I do my job right.

14

1. Does your company allow you to telecommute (assuming you have a position that doesn’t require you to be in the office all day every day)?

Yes

2. If not, what is the rationale for not allowing workers to telecommute?

NA

3. If they do allow telecommuting are there any restrictions they put on it?

It is between you and your manager. Most people work from home at least one day each week, and I know more than one person who has moved away in a few occasions to overseas, and who still continue to work for my company.

The group I manage, by design is all full-time telecommuters, about 10 people. Everyone gathers at the home office once a year.

4. Do you telecommute more than 2 days a week? If you do, what do you do for a living?

I telecommute fulltime. I work in the internet.

15

When I started at my last company in 1998 they were okay with occasional telecommuting at need, like if you had to hang around the house to deal with an emergency, or if you had to take someone to the doctor but didn’t need the whole day to do that. You could work from home for the rest of that time and only log whatever time you actually used for your personal problem, as PTO.

By the time they showed me the door, late last year, they were dead set against it. If you had to call in with one of the above scenarios, you had to take all the time you were away from the office as PTO. Ironically, it usually happened that I still had work I needed to do, and couldn’t leave until the next day, so it ended up being work off the clock. The catch was that if the office contacted me with an immediate problem I had to fix, then that could be counted as work time. But if it was just routine work, e.g. trying to clear out some pending tasks so I wouldn’t have to deal with them next day–that was PTO time.

16

1. Does your company allow you to telecommute (assuming you have a position that doesn’t require you to be in the office all day every day)?

Yes. It’s encouraged. Everybody in my department works from home two days a week (except the newbies; there’s a short probationary period for training, verifying work ethic, etc). In general, the company is very, very interested in people not driving; they provide free bus passes to anyone who asks, there’s bike parking and showers, and so forth. (When we move to a new facility in a few months, anybody who can prove they’re not driving into work will be paid an additional $75 per month.) Telecommuting is one of these “don’t drive” options. The standard computer issued to all qualified employees is a laptop, accompanied by VPN software and an aircard if you want one so you can connect to the network from anywhere you can get a Verizon signal. They’ve also had softphone technology implemented so you can plug a headset into your computer and get phone calls to your office line.

3. If they do allow telecommuting are there any restrictions they put on it?

Since you can’t be seen, you need to keep people posted as to your schedule. Your Outlook calendar must be permissioned for group access, and whenever you’re away from your desk at home for more than half an hour, you send an email advising of same. Other than that, it’s just like being in the office.

4. Do you telecommute more than 2 days a week? If you do, what do you do for a living?

We’re in IT, doing internal Tier III/IV application support and escalation.

17

Yes, as of about four years ago. Before that it was on a very limited basis. But the tools had improved enough and the corporate philosophy had evolved enough to make them change their attitude about it.

Rationale for not doing it: Depends on the position and the employee. There’s a great deal of trust involved on their part given what I do, but I’ve been there over 15 years. New hires - probably not an option.

Restrictions: I work with very confidential and proprietary software, so the office in my house is extremely secure, both physically and electronically.

I work remotely full time. Only in the office 3 days per month. I am a software developer for a very large and hated software company.

18
  1. Yes. It’s actually something they’re trying to encourage - at least for certain positions. For others its a case-by-case basis. It helps that the company’s based in Seattle, a city notorious for its traffic and commuting problems. The city and county government strongly encourage companies to try and reduce the number of commuters on the road; whether that’s via subsidized public transit, telecommuting, or other solutions.

In my case, we had decided that we needed to relocate back to Indiana from Seattle to be closer to my wife’s aging parents. At the time, our ‘team’ already had two other full-time telecommuters: one working from Federal Way (well south of Seattle) and the other working from Spokane, so my telecommuting wasn’t going to exactly break new ground.

Our company does have a significant office in downtown Indianapolis, but that’s more than 15 miles away from our house. When discussing the situation with my supervisor, I raised the issue that I didn’t really need to go down to that office every day, as (nearly) everyone I dealt with was going to be back in WA state (or telecommuted from some other location). I could make telephone calls/emails/IM them just as easily from our house as from a cube farm in the downtown office.

The one drawback is that my wife also telecommutes back to her Seattle job. Because of that, we had to (and still have to) pony up some significant dollars for a telephony package that could provide multiple internet addresses (for dual VPN sessions), two telephone lines, voice mail, etc. Ultimately, we had to buy a small business telephony package, which costs us > $200 a month, but that’s still cheaper than gas for two commuter cars, plus parking, insurance, etc.

  1. No real restrictions – other than (as others have mentioned) you need to keep your Outlook calendar up-to-date so everyone else can see when you’re in the office and when you’re not. We also have MS Office Communicator, which can tell you at a glance if someone’s online or away/in a meeting.

Because of the 3-hour time difference between us and the west coast, I had to get used to starting later in the day than I was used to - so that my hours and the hours of my west coast co-workers overlapped to the greatest reasonable extent possible. So now instead of working 7:00 - 3:30, I work 9:00 - 5:30. If I have to start earlier than that (if I’m going to leave early for an appointment or some such) I have to be sure to tell everyone I normally deal with that I’m going to be working different hours.

  1. I telecommute every day. I’ve only been back to the old downtown office twice in 9 months - once for a CIO visit, and once to get some new software installed on my laptop. I work in IT for a large insurance company.
19

1. Does your company allow you to telecommute (assuming you have a position that doesn’t require you to be in the office all day every day)?
Yes.

2. If not, what is the rationale for not allowing workers to telecommute?
N/A

3. If they do allow telecommuting are there any restrictions they put on it?
When my company first started their Work At Home program a few years ago, I was part of the small test group, and they wanted all of us to work exclusively from home. I asked if I could come into the office one or two days per week, pretty much just to keep my finger on the pulse of the company (I basically didn’t want to be forgotten). I was told that no, this was an all-or-nothing deal. Since that time they’ve rolled out the WAH program to most of the company, and I spend maybe two or three days each year in the office.

4. Do you telecommute more than 2 days a week? If you do, what do you do for a living?
Five days a week at home. The simplest answer is that I do a specialized form of computer tech support.

20

Gonna post my answers, then read everyone else’s.

Yep.

There was some noise a couple of years ago about how they were doing a pilot program and would evaluate the results before developing a policy yadda yadda but that, like many other corporate initiatives, faded away in the glare of actual practice. In reality, it’s negotiated on a person-by-person basis, with permission being asked and granted through three or more levels of authority. I didn’t think they’d let me do it and was (sort of) prepared to lose my job when I told my boss we were moving out of state, a little more than a year ago. She discussed it with the management and they decided they’d rather try me as a telecommuter than try to find my replacement, especially since there was (and is) a hiring freeze.

Our brand new department head announced recently that he thinks telecommuting is great. His predecessor thought it was fine. The one before that discouraged it. The one before that didn’t usually allow it.

I telecommute every day. I’m an editor in a large educational publishing company.

I telecommute full time – all day, every day, 2000 miles from the office. One other person in my department does so from a few hundred miles away. Several people in the department telecommute one to three days a week, or afternoons, etc. It’s also possible to telecommute for short-term reasons, like having a serious illness in the family. We also have a few full-fledged satellite offices similarly far away, and work together on projects without respect to location: someone in the New York office might co-edit with someone in the Texas office, for instance.

I think the company’s experience making the multiple-office thing work opened them to the idea of personal telecommuting. Also, the company has been sold a few times in the last decade and has had to answer to international parent-company management (I have some overlords in Ireland, for instance). Maybe most important, after many years of talking about it and dipping in a toe or two, we’ve finally got a true digital workflow. There is still hard-copy, colored-pencil editing done, but it’s now around 10% of the workload instead of the 80% we were doing four years ago or the 50% two years ago. The hiring freeze, mandated several levels above the department, made telecommuters look like a better deal to department heads than just losing people. All of these things slowly accreted a culture that understands the mechanics of telecommuting: everyone’s finally used to speaking clearly for the conference call mike, for instance.

I had to sign oaths that my discrete home workspace meets company standards for ergonomics and safety and won’t be used for any other purpose, that I have an actual door to shut me off from the rest of the house, and that I won’t do anything but work during work hours. It tickles me to note that my home office now has EXACTLY the same dimensions as my cubicle used to – except now I have two windows, tasteful furnishings, and regular visits from the pets!

I love telecommuting. Can you tell? The bad part is that it’s that much easier to forget to stop working. We don’t have kids, though, to remind me. And I had to get myself a really top-shelf phone headset to accommodate the remaining quiet talkers in my meetings.