A few overheated gurus had predicted that most of us would one day toil at home. While this may never happen, Hal Lancaster counters the myth that telecommuting is a fading fad

There’s a problem with writing a column on telecommuting. Your sources are never in the office. I make this observation not to get a cheap laugh — although I’ll take one anytime I can but to point out an issue surrounding the debate over telecommuting and its effect on business careers. How do you communicate effectively when your work force is spread across the globe? Before we get into that, let’s examine the general concept. When people think about telecommuters, most envision a professional who wants more time to spend with family and is willing to sacrifice some career ambitions. But, truth be told, most of us are telecommuters in one way or another these days. Do you work at home a day or two a week? Do you manage people who telecommute or are scattered around the globe? Are you a road warrior, constantly hopping on planes to visit clients, show the flag at remote offices or attend conferences? Are you a so-called day extender, who routinely begins or ends her workday in a home office, writing reports or reading e-mail? If so, you’re a telecommuter.

Here to stay

You might have read stories earlier this year proclaiming that telecommuting is a rapidly fading fad. True, some overheated gurus had predicted that most of us would one day toil at home. It’ll never happen.

But telecommuting isn’t going away. Companies and work styles have become more global and mobile, not less so. “Telecommuting is morphing into a different kind of thing,” says telecommuting expert Gil Gordon, a Monmouth Junction, New Jersey, consultant. You may not be home two or three days a week, but you may be on the road and working from a remote location. The point is that you can do the activity we call office work away from the office, at least for a time.

Moreover, if any companies really were turning away from the concept, the events of Sept. 11 may have them reconsidering. Some companies were forced to reassess their positions, some because their old offices were destroyed or inaccessible; others because their staffs were uncomfortable working in an office setting. A third group started to wonder whether herding their key employees into giant buildings is strategically unwise. “Do you want to put all your eggs in one basket?” Gordon asks.

Consider Merrill Lynch, which started a telework program in 1995, primarily as a tool to recruit and retain techies, says Janice Miholics, the investment firm’s vice president of global work-life strategies and a teleworker.

But the genie wouldn’t stay in the bottle. Now, anyone in the company can propose to work at home and the decision is left to his or her boss. About 3,000 employees telework to some extent, and about half of these are managers, Miholics estimates. For Miholics, the benefits of telework were starkly demonstrated in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. On September 11, having just returned from a vacation, she was visiting Merrill Lynch’s New York City headquarters at the World Financial Centre, across the street from the World Trade Centre. In the panic during the area’s evacuation, she was trampled and suffered a broken collarbone and separated shoulder. For weeks afterward, she couldn’t drive and worked exclusively from home (she usually telecommutes three days a week).

Further, having a large telework force enabled Merrill to get back into operation quicker. “That flexibility to resume business instantly was so critical to all of us,” she says. Still, career questions remain. How do you succeed in this new work environment? Can you maintain your career momentum, or now that you’re out of sight, will you quickly be out of mind? So, herewith are some rules for the road, whether that be the road out of town or the path from your bedroom to your home office.

Start slowly: Prospective remote workers must understand that many of their bosses remain sceptics. Make sure you’ve read the tea leaves accurately. If nobody else in the organis ation is telecommuting, find out why before pushing the issue. “Your first proposal might be to work at home one day a week for a month,” Gordon says. You can then see how you take to it, and how comfortable your bosses are with it. “It’s always better to increase with success than jump in with both feet and find you’ve caused more problems,” Gordon says. Look hard in the mirror.

Are you suited for telework? Obviously, you have to be a disciplined self-starter, but there are other issues to consider. Can you deal with the silence? Does your family understand that you aren’t available to them while you’re working, even if you’re in the next room? Do you work well with teams of people you can’t see? “If you’re a good collaborator and communicator, you’ll be successful wherever you are,” Miholics says.

You also must be more organised than ever. Miholics is more diligent about starting and ending meetings on time, for instance. “I have a healthy respect for other people’s time now,” she says. With two work places, she always carries along with her papers and tools, so she has something to work on and with. Because she had office papers and a laptop with her September 11, she was able to continue working in her hospital room.

Define expectations: Before you start, define what would constitute success. “You have to have a conversation with your boss about what the expectations are, what the deliverables are,” Miholics says.

Keep your enemies close and your staff closer: A virtual manager must be even more engaged with staff members than an office-bound chief. Without frequent and effective communication with staffers, it’s easy for goals and deadlines and entire projects to get off track. Whenever she has a staff conference call, Miholics follows up with two or three participants, checking to see whether they all interpreted things the same way and whether there are other issues they think should be addressed. “It’s like performance feedback,” she says.

Bone up on your computer knowledge: “Before I started working from home, I learned how to set up my computer,” Miholics says. That helped her be successful from the start. And without technicians down the hall, she can do some of her own diagnostic work, or at least be effective as the “eyes and ears” of the technician on the other end of the phone line, she says.

Reach out and touch everyone: Without the benefits of so-called “face time,” teleworkers must work extra hard to maintain the contacts and information networks needed to keep their careers on track. Miholics carefully chooses the days she goes to the office. She’s always there for celebrations of achievement and staff town-hall meetings, where she can reestablish contact with key people. “When I’m in the office, I’m really networking,” she says. Likewise, if she has critical news to deliver to her staff, she tries to do that in person. For instance, discussions of pending layoffs, a major worry for Merrill employees of late, must be done face-to-face. For such discussions, employees need to read their boss’s facial expressions and body language, and managers need to read theirs. Issues like this require trust both ways and trust is one of the hardest things to establish remotely. “They need to see how I feel, how I see it,” she says.

Don’t be a tech slave: Dow Chemical employs a dial-in dictation system. You call in, punch in your employee ID, dictate, and viola, a typewritten letter arrives the next day. That’s the most efficient way to write a letter, but is it always the best? “Maybe a hand-written note would mean more to someone,” says Bob Long, global manager for field-sales systems support for Dow Chemical Company. “You have to know your customer.”

Keep the customers smiling: Increasingly, your career may be in their hands. In a remote work environment, you probably see them more than you do the top executives at your home office. And many companies are incorporating customer feedback into their performance evaluation systems. “If you want to get 360-degree feedback and not share it with your boss, you can do that,” Long says. “But you can’t be surprised then if good things don’t happen to you.” Identify which tasks can be better done at home and which must be done in the office.

Gordon says people are motivated to work at home because they’re more efficient away from the ringing phones and needy colleagues in the office. “The office is a terrible place to do office work,” he says. “Today’s knowledge worker increasingly has tasks that benefit from long periods of concentration and getting away from distractions.” Then again, managers with inexperienced staff may find work-at-home opportunities limited. “Part of a manager’s job is training and coaching, and there’s a limit to how much of that can be one over the wire,” Gordon says. In the end, it boils down to working where you perform at your best and being flexible. Don’t lock yourself into a fixed schedule,” Gordon advises. “As you look at your calendar for the coming week,” he says, “ask yourself, ‘where can I add the most value today?’”

—www.careerjournal.com