This iReport is part of an assignment:
Telecommuting: Your productivity tips
Working from home
- PM91, CNN iReport producer
I have successfully worked from my home for the past two and a half years.
The first requirement is that you still need the equivalent of an office, and it needs to somehow be separate from normal household traffic. The second requirement is that other household members need to treat your office space the same as they would if they visited you at company headquarters. The third requirement is having a normal work schedule. It can be flexed or extended as necessary, but your co-workers need to know when they can reasonably find you at work, and just as important, when it would be unreasonable to find you at work. Everything else depends on the job for which you are being paid.
In my case, all my employers customers for which I am responsible routinely contacted me via email and to a lesser extent, telephone. To this day, most of them have no idea that I am not still located at my employer's main office. I also benefited in that my primary technology requirements were all web-based, and that I am technologically self-sufficient. If it breaks, I am not on the phone for an hour to the corporate helpdesk to fix something that would take 5 minutes if I were still in the office.
My co-workers and I rarely need to phyically see one another to advance project oriented work. However, I make it a point to visit the office for a couple hours each month and drift around holding ad-hoc stand-up mini-meetings to catch up on pertenent work related gossip. At the same time my typical absence minimizes the time I spend on 'office politics'. I can also stare out my office window from time to time - or sing with the radio - and do some THINKING without somebody thinking I am goldbricking.
Telecommuting isn't for everyone, but it sure works for me.
The first requirement is that you still need the equivalent of an office, and it needs to somehow be separate from normal household traffic. The second requirement is that other household members need to treat your office space the same as they would if they visited you at company headquarters. The third requirement is having a normal work schedule. It can be flexed or extended as necessary, but your co-workers need to know when they can reasonably find you at work, and just as important, when it would be unreasonable to find you at work. Everything else depends on the job for which you are being paid.
In my case, all my employers customers for which I am responsible routinely contacted me via email and to a lesser extent, telephone. To this day, most of them have no idea that I am not still located at my employer's main office. I also benefited in that my primary technology requirements were all web-based, and that I am technologically self-sufficient. If it breaks, I am not on the phone for an hour to the corporate helpdesk to fix something that would take 5 minutes if I were still in the office.
My co-workers and I rarely need to phyically see one another to advance project oriented work. However, I make it a point to visit the office for a couple hours each month and drift around holding ad-hoc stand-up mini-meetings to catch up on pertenent work related gossip. At the same time my typical absence minimizes the time I spend on 'office politics'. I can also stare out my office window from time to time - or sing with the radio - and do some THINKING without somebody thinking I am goldbricking.
Telecommuting isn't for everyone, but it sure works for me.
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