Although I agree that telecommuting should be a serious consideration for all companies considering some of the benefits: environmental, employees save money, productivity, change to routine, however when talking to people I know who telecommute full time feel isolated and this separation becomes an impediment to their career.

Currently in our IT infrastructure telecommuting is ad hoc and based on permission from the person's manager. However, a couple of us are working a case to allow employees to share their cubicle with a perhaps a peer and alternate a 3-day and 2-day workweek. So one person in a week works three days at home, two days in the office while the second person works three days at work and two days home. They would then alternate in the second week. Make sense?

The idea is this would save on real estate costs as we could compress and bring in people from rented office spaces, and provide a system where telecommunting is adopted as a part-time work arrangement allowing for continuous contact with managers, peers and a growing career.

Thoughts?

Paul

It's true. The company I work for has an attitude of not exactly trusting telecommuters, or "home-office" employees, as they cheerfully call it.

It's OK for some people to telecommute, but not for others, and that's entirely at the boss's discretion. Personally, that makes me feel uncomfortable. Maybe because I'm in the group of the not trusted. Mea culpa for being outspoken about issues.

I like telecommuting and I don't give a damn about office morale. I don't go to the office to make friends. At this point of my life, I already made the friends I had to make. I just want to be left in peace and given the tools to do my job. These things are very hard to attain though.

Cheers.

I think the situations where an employee can commute full time are pretty rare. But part-time telecommuting can be used by many.

My organization utilizes ad-hoc telecommuting. Most commonly, only higher-level administrative staff are allowed to enjoy the luxury of working from home. Typically, those people are allowed to work from home when interruptions at the office become overbearing.

It's also been used as another way to give more to a good employee when monetary compensation is not an option. Employees find this favorable because they get one day per week when they don't have to drive in to the office (saves gas) and they can work all day in their pajamas.

Quite a number of my co-workers and I have been telecommuting for years. We benefit from reduced costs and wasted travel time while our company doesn't have to pay for office space or parking.

As we provide technical support, worldwide, it is to the company's advantage that we be available and not trapped in traffic for hours. It also helps protect the company from things like terrorist attacks, illness like the flu, etc. as we are not in the same building.

We also work well over 40 hrs a week and it helps to put up with the long hours.

While not everyone is capable or has the discipline to work remotely full time, those that can are usually more productive. No unnecessary interruptions from folks stopping by just to chat really make a difference.

As far as feeling isolated, I talk to so many of my co-workers and customers each day via phone, I couldn't imagine feeling isolated. We also use AIM as well as Sametime for instant messaging.

I would guess that 75% of the support staff work remotely and it's just something you get used to. Most of my group is scattered across North America so even if we were sitting in an office, we would still be hundreds, if not thousands of miles apart.

I will say that it works better for senior-level staff, as junior staff tend to need more guidance.

The bottom line is if the employee has a good work ethic, telecommuting seems to work well.

My company has over 90,000 employees worldwide and if workers can be located in the far East, then they certainly can be located 100 or even a thousand miles away in the U.S.

As a technology professional who has worked remotely for 6 years for 2 different successful companies, I will readily admit that it takes a strong person to succeed. I have never felt isolated from the development teams, even from a team lead\manager perspective. What is sad is that there is some isolation from the upper management at times, which I attribute to the old-school practice of measuring the work one does to the time one is seen at a desk in the "office."

At the last company I had team members in Sweden, California, Georgia and China. We used Skype extensively to maintain a constant connection. In my experience productivity is much higher while in my home office compared to my visits to the "office." The people at the "office" tend to have too many long-winded meetings with limited agendas, which can eat up the majority of the day. When a company is focused on the next great product or version, developers are far more motivated when allowed to get in the groove and stay there versus the stream of interruptions that prevail in the "office." Short Skype messages from developers or managers focus on brevity during crunch time to the benefit of the company goals.

That said, not everyone can be effective long term in a telecommuting situation as it requires more senior experience, strong self-discipline, deep creativity and excellent communication skills. I believe that the gains will be great when old-school mentality catches up to the technological reality. The myriad methods available today to share, connect and accelerate require that more companies focus on workforce solutions that focus on what one does versus where they do the work.

Telecommuting takes discipline on both the part of the telecommuter and the employer. The employer has to understand that the telecommuter is still an employee, and still working at the behest of the employer. The employee has to be disciplined enough to actually work and stay on task without letting themselves be distracted.

Telecommuting is of great benefit to both. Personally, I have over an hour drive to the office. My normal work day is about 7:30am-5:30 pm. I can either spend an hour driving each way to and from the office, and put in a 40 hour week in the office, or I can work at home and easily put in 47+ constructive hours. As long as my support infrastructure is appropriate (printing, information exchange, communication, backups, local security policy, etc) I should be able to be perfectly functional with fewer distractions (no buddies stopping by the cube on the way to the copier, no fighting over the setting of the thermostat, etc.).

If you have the ability to stay focused in your "home office" and are disciplined enough to keep working, the single biggest issue for telecommuters is "out of site, out of mind." If you are not in the office, it is easy to be forgotten. This is espeically easy in a geographically distributed company where you are not near any corporate facilities. The telecommuter can very easily become "one of those remote people," regardless of the relative value of their contribution.

It takes effort on both the employer and the employee to NOT let that happen.

Telecommuting is a concept whose day has come. However, its permanence will be determined by its ability to demonstrate organizational efficiencies and competitive edge. On paper, the numbers look good. There is a potential to save office space, leverage external talent more seamlessly, improve workforce flexibility and geographic diversity -- not to mention mounting data that seems to indicate a telecommuting preference within the workforce.

The challenges associated with a telecommuting environment are also significant. Team collaboration and coordination, and the ability to seamlessly synthesize work contributions into a strategic whole may require some organizational/operational rethinking. Productivity and accountability also need to be maintained. The loss of the "human element" is also a concern. Depending on the study you quote, up to 90% of communication is non-verbal, leading to significant communications challenges in a telecommuting environment. Translated: it's hard to integrate body language into an email.

This said, telecommuting appears to be here to stay; technology and the workforce are pushing us in this direction. It will be a competitive advantage for organizations that implement it correctly. A key to correct implementation will be an organization's willingness to change its internal operating models to accommodate a geographically diverse workforce (at the individual level). MBWA, project management, collaborative discussions, brainstorming, and overall productivity and accountability will require translation into the new paradigm. Technology can help. VoIP, teleconference, videoconference, document sharing and blog technologies will replace cubes, meeting rooms, white boards and overhead projectors.

Perhaps the most challenging component of a telecommuting environment will be replacement of the current trust model, which is based on personal observation, with something more virtual. Leadership, people and resource management, planning and communications skills are more critical in the virtual telecommuting world. The question might be asked, "Is the organization ready for telecommuting?" The more salient question is, "Is organizational leadership up to the challenge?" With MBBS (management by baby-sitting) out, true leadership and management skills will be at a premium.

-Dave

I am new to telecommuting and I have found that I am way more producive working from home than sitting in my cubicle at the office. I have way less interruptions and I seem to be able to focus on the task(s) at hand since there is less ambient noise. I don't have to listen to the conversation of my cube-mate or listen to him/her cough and sneeze all day.

My company uses the ad-hoc approach to telecommuting and it seems to work out well. I for one have chosen to work 2-3 days a week from home and the other days I am in the office. I am on a team of about 40 or so and the majority of the team works on the same sort of work schedule - 2-3 days telecommuting. The team is spread out all over the country so face-to-face meetings are not too often. The team lives on Sametime, email and BlackBerries. Telecommuting works for us.

Thx

My company uses ad-hoc telecommuting. It is at the manager's discretion to allow an employee to telecommute.

What is interesting is that the IT department has a policy of no telecommuting. On the other end, in sales & marketing where I am, telecommuting is better accepted. This is probably because we are used to work with plenty of home office-based salespersons across the world. That said, I am imposing myself some guidelines:
- Do not put hard-scheduled days on calendar, be flexible
- Do not ever exceed two days a week, one day a week is fine
- Never telecommute when there are visitors and big meetings; be there available to impromptu meetings with your visitors
- Keep contact with the office when telecommuting, email, IM, phone
- Really use telecommuting to progress in projects requiring focus and time to put your head around. The most benefit comes from this approach and lets me deliver real value-add, thanks to telecommuting.

This discipline works well in an environment where telecommuting is the exception. The main issue is that even if your boss sees the true value added of this way of working, other bosses and colleagues might not necessarily understand.

Hopefully everyone knows that I am serious about work.

I am the only person at our small office that is in generally allowed to telecommute. I am able to accomplish more from my home office due to a lack of extraneous interruptions. That being said, I do like to be in the office a few days a week so as to remain a part of "the office." I do think it should be an ad-hoc arrangement because not everyone can be productive in their home environment. In pleading my case with the company I used the fact that there are savings involved not just on my part but on the part of the company also, ie: my office alone has eight sets of lights containing four lamps each, etc.

I worked in the office for 5 years and had a local apartment where I lived 5 days a week. I made the trip home every week for the weekend.

In that arrangement since all my home interests were a long way off, I tended to work very late every day...etc.

A year ago, I was offered the opportunity to work from home. I gave up my local appartment and I think that I work later now than I did when I was at the office and I work more.

In the office, as long as I had a telephone and an Internet connection, I was good to go. I really could have worked at the bus station as long as I had those things.

I did not see many people during the day while at the office but was in my own world.

Now that I work at home, it is very much the same. However, I do miss the interaction sometimes. I can still interact over instant messaging or the phone but it's not always the same but it is very managable but it does take some time to get used to.

Certainly a person with a bad work ethic would not be a candidate for working at home.

Thanks!

Thanks for the comments, everyone. Sounds like a lot of you are in the same position re: telecommuting. Now let me ask this: is your company taking note of the potential/actual savings from you and others being able to telecommute? If so, how are they responding? If not, what does that mean for your ability to keep doing it?

I have been working from home since 1992. That was before working from home was popular. I have saved money on gas and have significantly reduced emissions.

I am a highly rated employee and am rated higher then most "in the office" workers. I am available 24/7 for any issues that arise, yet, I have a complete and perfect balance between my work and personal life. I have seen my kids grow up and am intimately involved in their lives. I never call in sick. I only work 40 hours per week and get 40 hours worth of work done in those 40 hours, not 10 or 20 like the average office worker who "works" 50-60 hours a week. I can multitask on all meetings, if necessary, since most meetings are on the phone. It has not harmed my career and has not made me feel isolated.

Be that as it may, working from home is NOT for everyone and not for every job. I am an analyst/developer with clients in various locations and countries and my job has allowed me to work from home full or part time over the past 16 years.

The company needs to set policies on working from home, including that the employee must have a dedicated work space. Without that, I would not have been able to get rid of the home distractions. It should be transparent to the customer and the peers that the employee is working from home or the office. There should be no dogs barking in the background, or birds, screaming kids, traffic noises, airplane noises or music. And, there should be a dedicated phone line, after all, you don't want your teenage daughter answering the phone when the CIO calls!

I believe (and hope) working from home is the wave of the future, not just because of gas prices, but due to the high benefits for both the employer and the employee. The employer benefits from higher productivity, higher availability, less to no sick time and higher moral. Higher moral leads to less turn over, which costs the company less.

I also believe that all individuals that are against working from home are living in the past. These people have a control problem as they want to control other people. With today's technology, workers can work anywhere, anytime. We are truly a mobile society and we should take advantage of that.

Companies that are against telecommuting but have offshore employees are schizophrenic. After all, an offshore employee is a telecommuting. They are performing the job thousands of miles from the peers and supervisors. Whether they are in an office or at home, is irrelevant. Companies need to get their act together and have a standard policy. They need to look at offshore employees as telecommuters. If they want to offshore, they should allow telecommuters.

I have been telecommuting since 2001, and full time since 2003. The experience has been a complete success for both work accomplishment (corporate HQ in metro DC area), and blend of active lifestyle which I enjoy at the beach in NC. A key success I found was having an "office" separated from my main house. When I married in 2005, I had a separate building built on my property to house my office. Its more like a "shed," but has all the amenities of a regular office (telephone/cable lines, electric, HVAC, etc), including bamboo floors and windows looking out at pine forest! It's a completely separate area from the home, and allows me distinct space for work, free from distractions that may be found in the home, especially when sharing the house with another. At about $7,000 to build, it was a great investment to fully take advantage of teleworking. Given current fuel prices and the commute many face with the daily traffic grind to and from the regular office, the "shed" likely paid for itself in less than a year! Plus, what better commute than to leave the door, walk down the steps, turn left, and follow the wooden walkway to the "office!"