Office Anywhere

I’m on paternity leave and fighting the expected lack of sleep. I may be on leave, but I’ve still fielded a few (very apologetic) calls on work-related issues and can actually attend to things occasionally. While I am getting interrupted at home, it does illustrate how taking your office anywhere can really benefit both parties in the deal. Contrast this with early on in my career, when I wasn’t completely out of the office and went on vacation. Two days in I received a panicked call on my cell phone from a client, who was having some major problems and unable to reach my backup. I offered what advice I could, but I was over eight hours away from the office. Even working partially from home at that point would have saved the day.

My boss knows I can give feedback on critical items even if I’m officially out.
I’m more willing to devote a short segment of time when I don’t have to go into the office to deal with it.

However:

• Don’t fall pray to taking days off and still working 4 or more hours.
• Make sure you and your boss have a mutual understanding of what’s “critical”.
• Prolonged distractions on vacation days and weekends deserve comp time if you’re salaried.
• If it can wait, say so. Everyone likes to be a hero, but killing your off time isn’t worth it in the long run.

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For all the benefits taking your office anywhere get you, losing your link can bring you to a grinding halt. You don’t have IT services at your house to help you, and some companies don’t have desk support at all in the first place. You should be at least somewhat tech-savvy, or have help from the IT department to minimize the possible impact of having your links with the office go down, or any other technical failures. You can mitigate these, even if you’re not getting direct support from your company. the simplest solution might just be to go to the office if you’re close enough, but this isn’t always the case.

Backup - Get an external HD or purchase online storage. External HDs have come down significantly in price, and often include software to manage the backup process. The online storage could be an online backup service, or excess space on a web host. The web host space is much cheaper than any dedicated online storage option I’ve found, but it is more work to maintain properly. Supergeeks might want to look at SVN or CVS storage even if it’s just documents that you work with. Online storage isn’t a good option though if you have large storage requirements, such as art files.

Connectivity x2 - If you’re working remotely, you generally need broadband access. It’s becoming more prevalent and faster, but you need a second option. Being able to use a modem to dial in when something is down is a good fall back (office modem pool, bundled with broadband, whatever), also using a data cable and using a cell phone link. I’ve also made good use of a Analog/Digital phone converter when I was on the road and didn’t have access to a normal analog line, only a digital that didn’t support analog modem connections.

Phone services - If you want to travel while working the office, a cell phone is a must. Also very nice is a call management service that lets you forward to a number of your choosing, take faxes to image files, or voicemail to email depending on your interaction needs with other people at the office.

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Second kiddo appears to be coming early, so can’t guarantee I’ll have the energy.

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This is probably the biggest drawback to telecommuting and taking your office anywhere you go. Work is available everywhere you go, and can begin to consume more time than you expect. I’ve been doing the office anywhere gig for years now, and it still creeps up on me. It’s almost 10PM right now, and this is a break from doing work.

Any job has it’s ‘crunch’ times, and that’s completely expected. Even if I do have to put in a lot of extra hours, the flexibility is a huge bonus. I can leave work alone for a while, eat dinner with the family, get the kiddos to bed and then go work some more. I won’t be dragging myself home, completely shot at 8pm.

The flip side is you end up doing this more often since it’s not as much of a hardship, and you have to watch out for it being a regular occurrence. It’s been well established that long periods of crunch are counter-productive. Just because you can work more hours doesn’t mean that you should. Even if you don’t have a family, everyone needs the time away from the job. Crunch doesn’t mean that you can skip the following:

• Take lunch away from your desk
• Have a leisurely dinner
• Exercise

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It’s rare to start as a telecommuter, usually you need to get the boss to buy into the idea. How?

1. Accountability

This is probably the biggest reason the boss might not like the idea of telecommuting. “How do I know you’re busy, or you’re not slacking off?” Or even “how can I manage you if you’re not here?” You need to prepare and establish this one before you even step into his office. Shift as much as possible to phone and email beforehand as a demonstration to how little you need the face to face time. Without establishing the trust that you will get things done, it’s hard to push the idea. Even something as simple as offering to provide a daily update on what you accomplished will go a long way towards this.

2. Availability

Preach the fact you’ll be able to get right to any issue from home. No having to commute into the office means you can get on top of something right away if there’s a problem on the weekend or evenings. Do keep in mind you won’t regularly be working then, on-call 24-7 defeats the point of the flexibility of home office work!

3. Savings

For you and the company. For you, it effectively gives you a raise with the lowered commute and food costs. For the company, plenty of savings in terms of office maintenance&supplies, power usage, and other in-office perks.

4. Temporary

It’s much easier for the boss to swallow if you stress it’s something to try in the short term to see if it works out. Give a timeframe you’d like to try X days a week from home, and then review at the end. When you do review at the end you should be able to point out the benefits that the company got out of you for that period as ammo to continue the remote work.

5. Retention

Don’t approach this as a threat. They want to hear that this will make you happier, and keep you at your job longer. Not having to commute all or some of the time is a boon to the work-life balance. HR loves to tout phrases about work-life balance, and this is a chance for them to really show off in this regard.

6. Conservation

Not for everyone, but the saved commute energy and the savings at the office itself is a significant towards environmental impact.

7. Productivity

This is the easy one. They will doubt this, so don’t make it the primary focus of your pitch. The benefit is there for most people, even if it’s simply taking half of your commute time and adding it to your effective day instead of ‘wasting’ it traveling.

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Interesting conversation with a manager this week on some of the differences between remote workers. Many do an acceptable job and get things done remotely, but rarely extend themselves beyond immediate tasks. This does happen all the time in the traditional office environment, but becomes even more noticeable when working remote. It’s easier to coast along in the office, but when you’re remote, it’ll be apparent very quickly.

Even if you do have skills, it’s easy to fall into the coasting trap and not go beyond the immediate assignment. To be successful remotely, you have to be more active than passive. Take on new challenges, think of better ways to accomplish tasks. It’ll show, quickly. Managers should really not fear giving people the chance to go remote, because it becomes easier to see the performance, not harder!

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I’ll stop banging on the communication drum for a bit, and expand into motivation. Particularly self-motivation. This was the hardest area to keep up for me, and it’s rare that people are naturally self-movitvated when it comes to a relatively isolated work environment. Fortunately, the more isolated environment certainly increases shorter-term attention on tasks thanks to less distractions from around the office.

The long term though? Harder. Some folks may have gotten through high school and college by waiting a few days before a large project was due to actually start on it, and that just won’t sustain you at your job. If it does, you’re very lucky, or overly skilled for what you’re doing.

Break it down into smaller bits. Nothing should take more than one day to accomplish. If you’ve got 500 of something to go through and that will take all week, break it into 100 a day. If you only do 50, you’d better go back and re-think how long it’s actually going to take without killing yourself in the process. I’d much rather think ‘I just need to get through 100 today’ than ‘Crud, I need to get through 500 this week’.

Once you get better at breaking things down into day (or even half-day) chunks, your boss will love you when it comes time to making plans. You don’t have to share your day max breakdown, but it gives you a much more accurate idea of how long something will take.

At least in the programming arena, if you plan a phase or section that takes more than a half day you haven’t thought it through enough. This pretty much equates to guessing. You want to avoid being in ‘crunch’ mode all the time, and leave time for other work tasks. It may seem obvious, but I constantly see people trying to schedule based on 90% time working on a task. It never happens.

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‘Where were you?’ is one of the worst things to hear as an anywhere worker. I hate to keep banging the communication drum but it just keeps happening. Today it was discovered that nobody on this particular project call had talked to one of the people involved for an entire week. It’s not as if he had nothing to do. Most of his time is dedicated to the project in question, but if he does show for the call tomorrow, I expect a lot of very pointed questions. Our mutual manager was out half of last week, but it’s hardly an excuse.

Sometimes it’s hard to take the extra effort, but in this case he could have saved himself a lot of trouble and from having extra scrutiny in the weeks to come.

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My company has been using non-US resources more and more, and it can work well or very painfully. What applies to people working from home also applies to those working overseas, and those working with them. I’ve successfully trained some of our global folks and they’ve become very valuable members of the team. The most recent failure is one that I didn’t personally train, but did have to work with frequently. Perhaps I share some of the blame for not pushing them harder, but not everyone is willing to change.

The first clue of trouble I had with this particular employee was a couple months after they started. They had become familiar with most of the routine aspects of the job, and ready to take on some simple development work. I gave them a spec sheet with the objectives of what the program had to do, the target for the data, and a sample of what one of the output files should look like. I could have banged it out in a week, but we decided to give him a couple months so he could become more familiar with the system and use whatever tech he thought was appropriate for the job.

I go on vacation for a week, answering the occasional email and then spend the next week catching up. The following Monday I offhand ask him how the task is going and what he’s decided to use. He says that he’s decided to use Perl (like something similar I wrote) and hasn’t found any information on one aspect that’s available in the documentation. This pattern continues to repeat every few days for another month until I finally talk to our mutual manager about the situation.

A week after that, he messages me with some very specific questions about implementation which makes me wonder how much he’ actually got written. The following day I get a message from him saying that he’s got a script but is having trouble resolving a bug and leaves for home due to the time difference. Until this point, I haven’t seen any of his actual code.

It doesn’t even compile. I spend 2 hours even getting it to a point that it does, and it takes him almost another 2 weeks to make it functional.

One year later he is removed from the project, with very little changing in work habits. This pattern continued to repeat over and over for even simple tasks where they would get stalled as long as possible. More communication on either side of the equation could have prevented this, but the organization is largely made of people who can work relatively independently. Perhaps he’ll find a position where daily updates and checks are the norm instead of viewed as an impediment to actual work.

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A remote worker lives and dies by communication. Some people do this very effectively without much trouble, and others have to learn it. I had to learn it. For a long while I actually avoided ‘wasting time’ on more idle communication and focused on completing the tasks at hand so I could get them done faster. Sometimes that worked, but often your co-workers do actually have valuable information to share with you, and some will be happy to help out to make things easier. The reverse holds true as well. Being able to tell the boss you were able to save the company a couple hundred hours worth of work over the next year is worth it, even if it’s not your work.

It took me a long time to realize exactly how much simply talking with your co-workers factors in to how you are viewed in the company and develop some really simple ways of keeping on top of staying in the loop. Simply getting your job done isn’t always enough. It’s certainly easier to get the basic work done if you’ve set up your home office or remote workplace appropriately, but staying interconnected with everyone else becomes the harder part since people don’t just drop by anymore.

It’s slightly different for larger and smaller companies. With a larger company there are more opportunities to grab someone’s attention for a few minutes. With a smaller company, it might be harder but it’s even more important! You shouldn’t let a day go by without discussing something with a co-worker via IM or phone. It doesn’t matter if it’s a work question along with a quick weather discussion, but formal meetings of 3+ people do not count.

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