In a message written on Fri, Dec 02, 2011 at 12:25:41PM +0000, Thorsten Dahm wrote:
The downside of this is that you are not around in the office in case someone wants to talk to you. I often end up with guys from our operations team or other teams stopping at my desk and ask questions. Or guys who want to have a quick chat about a problem and want to ask for an advice or idea. Or people who want to learn Perl and have a question that you can answer in 30 seconds.
I've both delt with remote employees and been a telecommuter. After those experiences, and reading a few books I've decided the hardest thing about having successful telecommuters is dealing with the folks in the office. Telecommuters quickly turn to technology, they want to video-chat with collegues. Are eager to pick up the phone and talk. They reach out (generally). It's the folks in the office that are reluctant. They don't see the point of figuring out how the video chat software works, of setting their status to indicate what they are doing, and so on. The "water cooler" conversations can be moved to Skype, FaceTime, Google Hangouts, or any number of other solutions, but it requires everyone to be in that mindset. If you have telecommuters _everyone_ in the office should be forced to work from home at least 2 weeks a year, including the manager. It's only from that experience you learn to deal with your telecommuting co-workers in a way that raises everyone's productivity. Once over that hump there are huge rewards to having telecommuters. You can pay lower salaries as people can live in cheaper locations. People in multiple timezones provide better natural coverage. People are much more willing to do off hour work when they can roll out of bed at 5AM and be working at 5:05 in their PJ's, rather than getting up at 4 and getting dressed to drive in and do the work. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/