Telecommuting
This article over at RealTechNews caught my eye. For those of you who don’t know me that well, I have a 130+ mile commute from Folsom to Yahoo! in Sunnyvale. I’m fortunate, really, that Yahoo! lets me work from home two days a week. I work from home Monday and Friday and I’m in the office Tuesday through Thursday, staying with family on Tuesday and Wednesday night in nearby San Jose.
I’ve been doing this crazy commute for two and a half years now (since May 2003), so I can honestly say that I’ve experienced telecommuting first hand. When people hear that you work from home, they think it must be so wonderful. You get to go to work in your pajamas. You don’t have to leave your house. It must be the greatest thing ever. Right?
Wrong. Telecommuting fails any time you’re dealing with a company that isn’t set up for it. My wife spent 5+ years with Sun Microsystems. They were set up for telecommuting. They were completely transitioned to a decentralized phone system, a decentralized desktop computing platform and everybody was expected to work from home some of the time. Since everybody worked from home, everyone understood that meetings were hard with bad speakerphones. People who were in conference rooms understood they had to speak clearly towards the phones so people miles away on the phone could hear you.
In my last two and a half years at EarthLink and Yahoo!, I’ve learned that most companies aren’t set up for this. They don’t have the decentralized network. They don’t have a culture who understands what it’s like for the person on the other end of the phone who can’t see the whiteboard. They don’t understand that during a 3 hour planning meeting, the person working from home without a speaker phone is getting a very sore ear and a tired arm from holding their handset. If you’re the only person telecommuting, you’re also the only person missing out on hallway conversations, technical talks, fun lunches and more. You miss an entire half of the work experience.
This isn’t to fault EarthLink or Yahoo! Quite the contrary. I think there’s an enormous benefit to being in the office. Hallway conversations that turn into great brainstorming sessions as nearby cube dwellers are pulled into fun topics just aren’t possible over IM or the phone. Missing out on personal life chit-chat during lunch makes you less in touch with your coworkers. Not being at your desk when an emergency outage occurs deprives you of visibility in handling touch situations.
Telecommuting only works when it’s done within a culture that has adopted and fully supported it and very few companies have made telecommuting a company-wide way of life (and thank god for that).
December 26th, 2005 at 10:54 pm
I used to do that with a telecommunication company. Customers would dial a 800 number and the call would get forwarded to my house phone. Sometimes the boss would have meetings and it would be hard for me to understand what he was saying without actually seeing the whiteboard… I completely understand.
Any new updates on the beta? I actually got an email last week saying that my turn was coming around soon.
December 26th, 2005 at 11:08 pm
There’s nothing better than being on the phone when someone in the conference room says, “see this here?” I just want to shout, “NO…I CAN’T SEE ANYTHING!!!”
December 27th, 2005 at 10:33 am
[...] In my last two and a half years at EarthLink and Yahoo!, I’ve learned that most companies aren’t set up for this. They don’t have the decentralized network. They don’t have a culture who understands what it’s like for the person on the other end of the phone who can’t see the whiteboard. They don’t understand that during a 3 hour planning meeting, the person working from home without a speaker phone is getting a very sore ear and a tired arm from holding their handset. If you’re the only person telecommuting, you’re also the only person missing out on hallway conversations, technical talks, fun lunches and more. You miss an entire half of the work experience. Read the whole story…em> [...]
January 1st, 2006 at 12:24 pm
I hear you about the telecommuting. Add to that: companies that have several offices all over the place. It’s an easy path to: none of the benefits of telecommuting with all of the down sides for the team members in a location other than the one with most of the team.
January 1st, 2006 at 3:08 pm
Yeah, when you’re in the satellite office you’re easily forgotten. This might sound crazy, but it can even lead to not being assigned work for weeks on end.