More People To Work From Home
from the trending-up dept
After years of (always overhyped) predictions that telecommuting was on the verge of becoming a big thing, here’s yet another article saying that telecommuting’s time has come. The argument is that with the increase in virtual, global teams combined with improved ability to inexpensively work electronically, companies will start pushing for more workers to work from home. They also point out that this can save companies a great deal on real estate, by setting up “hoteling” options for when people are at work. Of course, this still raises questions (all noted in the article) about the importance of face-to-face contact, and building up a highly motivated work culture. Also, psychologically, most people like to have a desk/office/cubicle that is their own. I still think that’s the biggest hurdle. You don’t want your workers to feel uncomfortable. However, in cases where people need more flexible working conditions (for example, those with kids) the option to telecommute seems worthwhile.
Comments on “More People To Work From Home”
telecommuting
One obstacle that telecommuting has to get over if it is to gain widespread acceptance: the need for managers to control. I’ve worked for some manangrs who didn’t think they had enough control over me and my colleagues when we were sitting in cubicles twenty feet from the manager’s office. The spectre of the worker who isn’t even in the office is terrifying to the control freak, and many of those control freaks make the decisions over whether or not tleecommuting will be adopted.
In actuality I’m telecommuting right now. I’m helping found a startup, a virtual company formed of former business associates scattered throughout the US. We’ve never all been in the same room, and in our case the situation was simple: we could telecommute and have the people we wanted, or we could go brick-and-mortar and limit the team to whoever happened to live in a certain geographical area. It certainly helps that we’ve telecommuted from the beginning; if we had started out as a regular company and then tried to institute telecommuting, I think it would have been much more difficult.