April 26, 2011 at 7:22 am
WolforthJ (4/26/2011)
Yes, unfortunately it is the employee who is in the position of giving something for the "privilege" of telecommuting.I worked at a place that allowed telecommuting. One day we had the belt-tightening meeting because the company was having some financial troubles. The first statement from management was that all telecommuting agreements were cancelled. In other words, they saw no financial advantage for it. Which could explain their financial difficulties.
Ya it's our fault that you can't make sales or control expanses... here's my 2 weeks notice... and btw I have 9 days of holiday left :w00t:.
No I'd never leave someone short-handed like that but it's nice to dream a little ;-).
April 26, 2011 at 7:28 am
I must agree with a previous poster that wonders why we should take a pay cut for the "privilege" of working from home. It saves the company a great deal of money, provides a better working environment, makes employees much more productive and happier, thus reducing turnover....
The list is rather extensive. Admittedly, it takes the right mentality to be successful when working from home but the benefits to a company if the right conditions are met are huge. No reason to take a pay cut at all.
Regards,
Michael Lato
April 26, 2011 at 7:37 am
Michael Lato (4/26/2011)
I must agree with a previous poster that wonders why we should take a pay cut for the "privilege" of working from home. It saves the company a great deal of money, provides a better working environment, makes employees much more productive and happier, thus reducing turnover....The list is rather extensive. Admittedly, it takes the right mentality to be successful when working from home but the benefits to a company if the right conditions are met are huge. No reason to take a pay cut at all.
Or let's turn it around. Here's the proof I can do the work from home (easy-ish to prove in my case). Here's what you're costing in time, car expanses and the likes. So I'm giving you the priviliege of not giving me a raise accordingly to those expanses :-P.
P.P.S. ALL our circulation and infrastructures problems would be solved here if only 5-10% of the population stayed home every given day.
That's only 1 day a week PER employee to flush the circulation issue with all the stress and polution that comes with it!
Oh and BTW that's also a 25 Billion bill you won't have to pay to rebuild all the darn roads around here 50 years earlier than expected... which comes to a whopping 25 000$ per regular user!!
April 26, 2011 at 7:47 am
Grant Fritchey (4/26/2011)
nico van niekerk (4/26/2011)
One can understand that employers would be reluctant to allow someone with whom they have no trust-relationship to work at home. There are a multitude of distractions at home, such as being closer to the refrigerator, the couch for frequent naps, and doing outside work on the side. This is especially true if the project is of such a nature that benchmarks and deliverables are not clearly quantifiable.At least the employer knows that the likelihood of moonlighting, excessive private calls, or frequent trips for household chores are far less likely if the employee sits right there in an open office. Cutting a couple of bucks off the payroll won't make that suspicion go away.
It takes time for a trust-relationship to develop and I have found a much lower stress-level at the employer if I work longer hours with measurable results. Granted, I am not a W2 employee, but an hourly-billing contractor and giving clients more than they pay for is just a solid investment in job security. A W2 employee suffers more from the perception of "having to be there" than an independent contractor does.
Predictably, my client's stress-level about remote working lowered considerably when we successfully negotiated a weekly flat rate with my undertaking to immerse myself in the project. Although that works both ways it still took almost a year before relationships were strong enough to make that change to the contract. But, they still demanded that I frequently show my face around the office in spite of state-of-the-art communications and video technology.
I cannot see a large W2-crowd working from home any time soon, exactly because of the suspicion-factor. It's common to the relationship.
So they don't trust me to work from home, but they give me the keys to the kingdom for the enterprise data, and probably the HR & Finance data. Oh, and in the middle of the night, I'm perfectly entrusted, encouraged even, to jump on to work and fix any problems, remotely. I'm also good for doing remote maintenance on weekends. I'm "trusted" all those times, but that 9-5 period, I'm just out to rip off the company... This is my fundamental problem with this approach. If you trust me enough to give me control over your databases, then I think you can also trust me to work from home.
I disagree, and think you're using a different meaning of "trust".
The kind of trust the original poster was talking about was the hard-to-quantify trust that you have a good employee. When you've got somebody who is working remotely it is often difficult to quantify their performance. Are they solid workers, or are they just phoning it in? It's also essential to build working relationships and interpersonal trust, which is harder to do remotely.
I don't think anybody is implying a lack of trust in the sense of criminal activity. If an employer thought you were going to rip off their financial data or loot the server room they wouldn't hire you in any capacity.
Often, it takes a period of face-to-face interaction before you know how - or if - a new relationship is going to work out. These are the kinds of things that you just can't learn in an interview or orientation. That's what you're building trust in.
April 26, 2011 at 7:56 am
Grant Fritchey (4/26/2011)
So they don't trust me to work from home, but they give me the keys to the kingdom for the enterprise data, and probably the HR & Finance data. Oh, and in the middle of the night, I'm perfectly entrusted, encouraged even, to jump on to work and fix any problems, remotely. I'm also good for doing remote maintenance on weekends. I'm "trusted" all those times, but that 9-5 period, I'm just out to rip off the company... This is my fundamental problem with this approach. If you trust me enough to give me control over your databases, then I think you can also trust me to work from home.
There was a huge push for this in the mid Ninties at several Tech companies.
IMHO: It died becuase outsourcing to another country gives the same result and gives you a Federal Tax reduction. To quote a VP that works at a large online Pharmacy, "I'm not buying you guys another round. The money I save will pay for two more developers on the outsource team for the next year."
How do you sell paying people less to work more from thier house, when that work can be outsourced offshore for less money, more workers, and a tax cut?
Until we get rid of these and a few other Bush era corperate tax cuts it will be fiscaly difficult for larger companies to adopt a work at home policy and not outsourcing. Unless of course they are using that as a test to see if having an offshore or out of office team will work.
April 26, 2011 at 7:58 am
There is no reason that someone working from home should be making less money just because they are working from home. It makes it seem that they are somehow less valuable, and I don’t think that is the case. There are mutual benefits to both employerer and employee.
I had a remote DBA on my team who was both the most productive and the highest paid. They lived three time zones away and we actually met in person only three times, so missing face-to-face interaction was not a huge problem.
April 26, 2011 at 8:00 am
Michael Valentine Jones (4/26/2011)
There is no reason that someone working from home should be making less money just because they are working from home. It makes it seem that they are somehow less valuable, and I don’t think that is the case. There are mutual benefits to both employerer and employee.I had a remote DBA on my team who was both the most productive and the highest paid. They lived three time zones away and we actually met in person only three times, so missing face-to-face interaction was not a huge problem.
That's the ironic part for me here. I take my laptop from home, ride 90 minutes. Use my laptop all day to PLUG in the dev machine. Then the phone when e-mail is not enough.
Waste another 90 minutes to go back home. Yet I'm the one who's not productive :-P.
Tell me what part of what I just described is not possible from home??
April 26, 2011 at 8:30 am
Most people are addressing the telecommute part of the editorial and doing a fine job. They must be, because I agree with most of it. 🙂
I have a different problem. I'd like an extra week (or 2!) of paid vacation. I'd like a 32-hour, 4-day work week. I know what the direct costs are for the extra vacation and I know what the direct savings would be for the shorter work week. My employer is willing to listen to me when I talk about those things, but refuses to consider them. I'm even willing to forgo the annual raise for 1 year even though it shouldn't be necessary (1 day off per week is about 3 weeks of saved wages, more than enough to pay for an extra 2 weeks of vacation). Yes, they lose access to my services for that extra time, but if my services that valuable, then they're not paying me nearly enough right now. At present, once I leave the office I'm no longer available for any reason and I'd even be willing to change that rule as part of the other changes. Still no go.
April 26, 2011 at 8:31 am
I've been telecommuting two days of each week with every other Friday off so it ends up being 1/2 time telecommuting. The experience has taught me quite a lot about what it takes to be an effective telecommuter. My office is in Colorado but my company 'customers' are in Oklahoma, Ohio, and Utah. This would not have been very successful five years ago before some of the telecommuting tools had matured. I'm sure I only use a small part of the tools available to me. My job has many facets; managing servers, building SQL Server databases, updating data, designing and developing .NET applications so my tools include NetMeeting, Remote Desktop, Instant Messenger, Skype, SnagIt, Outlook, Web Meeting and SharePoint but the most important tool I have are my self motivation and communication skills. If I take on a task that requires support from another developer in Ohio I lead the task to make sure things move along.
The time for telecommuting has arrived but I'm not in agreement with taking a pay cut to do the same job at home that I do in the office. The company gets the benefits of reducing overhead dramatically but still get the same production. Their oversignt can be reduced quality assurance, program management, and management oversight.
April 26, 2011 at 8:31 am
Grant Fritchey (4/26/2011)
nico van niekerk (4/26/2011)
One can understand that employers would be reluctant to allow someone with whom they have no trust-relationship to work at home. There are a multitude of distractions at home, such as being closer to the refrigerator, the couch for frequent naps, and doing outside work on the side. This is especially true if the project is of such a nature that benchmarks and deliverables are not clearly quantifiable.At least the employer knows that the likelihood of moonlighting, excessive private calls, or frequent trips for household chores are far less likely if the employee sits right there in an open office. Cutting a couple of bucks off the payroll won't make that suspicion go away.
It takes time for a trust-relationship to develop and I have found a much lower stress-level at the employer if I work longer hours with measurable results. Granted, I am not a W2 employee, but an hourly-billing contractor and giving clients more than they pay for is just a solid investment in job security. A W2 employee suffers more from the perception of "having to be there" than an independent contractor does.
Predictably, my client's stress-level about remote working lowered considerably when we successfully negotiated a weekly flat rate with my undertaking to immerse myself in the project. Although that works both ways it still took almost a year before relationships were strong enough to make that change to the contract. But, they still demanded that I frequently show my face around the office in spite of state-of-the-art communications and video technology.
I cannot see a large W2-crowd working from home any time soon, exactly because of the suspicion-factor. It's common to the relationship.
So they don't trust me to work from home, but they give me the keys to the kingdom for the enterprise data, and probably the HR & Finance data. Oh, and in the middle of the night, I'm perfectly entrusted, encouraged even, to jump on to work and fix any problems, remotely. I'm also good for doing remote maintenance on weekends. I'm "trusted" all those times, but that 9-5 period, I'm just out to rip off the company... This is my fundamental problem with this approach. If you trust me enough to give me control over your databases, then I think you can also trust me to work from home.
+1
One of my current clients happily gave me domain admin first week there. VPN access second week. They phone and email whenever on days that I'm not supposed to be working on their stuff and expect response immediately. However I am prohibited from doing any work away from the office, if I do they will refuse to pay for it.
How sensible does that sound?
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
April 26, 2011 at 8:33 am
nlaslett (4/26/2011)
I disagree, and think you're using a different meaning of "trust".The kind of trust the original poster was talking about was the hard-to-quantify trust that you have a good employee.
In most people's minds there's a difference between trashing a DB or selling data and taking care of a few things on work time. And it's a lot easier to want to take care of things that aren't work related when you're at home. The last place I worked we had pretty free reign to work from home whenever. Including picking my wife up from her part time job and finishing the day from home. It started as one day a week and worked it's way from there.
I just started at a new place three weeks ago and wouldn't even consider asking if I can work from home yet. Even if my new boss doesn't feel this way, I feel like I need to show that I can be trusted first. Not to mention I want to make sure I get a good feel for the place and the best place to do that is in the office.
April 26, 2011 at 8:35 am
scking (4/26/2011)
I've been telecommuting two days of each week with every other Friday off so it ends up being 1/2 time telecommuting. The experience has taught me quite a lot about what it takes to be an effective telecommuter. My office is in Colorado but my company 'customers' are in Oklahoma, Ohio, and Utah. This would not have been very successful five years ago before some of the telecommuting tools had matured. I'm sure I only use a small part of the tools available to me. My job has many facets; managing servers, building SQL Server databases, updating data, designing and developing .NET applications so my tools include NetMeeting, Remote Desktop, Instant Messenger, Skype, SnagIt, Outlook, Web Meeting and SharePoint but the most important tool I have are my self motivation and communication skills. If I take on a task that requires support from another developer in Ohio I lead the task to make sure things move along.The time for telecommuting has arrived but I'm not in agreement with taking a pay cut to do the same job at home that I do in the office. The company gets the benefits of reducing overhead dramatically but still get the same production. Their oversignt can be reduced quality assurance, program management, and management oversight.
Been there, fired their asses. I had no remote access except for emergencies (24 / 7) and then overtime was not compensated (I actually had access from home but I was not paid if I worked). Some people either just don't get it or are abusing their staff. It was more the latter with them, even if only at an unconsious level...
April 26, 2011 at 8:47 am
GilaMonster (4/26/2011)
One of my current clients happily gave me domain admin first week there. VPN access second week. They phone and email whenever on days that I'm not supposed to be working on their stuff and expect response immediately. However I am prohibited from doing any work away from the office, if I do they will refuse to pay for it.How sensible does that sound?
Now that's just ridiculous. I at least expect consistency from organizations. If they're asking you questions off-hours and want a quick response that's implicit permission to work off hours and not paying you for that is wrong. And may also be illegal. Depending on how important the relationship with that client is it may be worth pushing that point. I know my wife suspects that her boss nixed hours worked from home off her time card this week and working from home is something they had previously discussed as being okay. If he did she's going to be completely inaccessible when she's not at work.
April 26, 2011 at 8:51 am
I thing time in the telecommute arena is a good way to show a complete history of SLA's you've had with previous contracts is a plus as well. I have been working from home since 2001, and my first contract job was a previous customer I had working in-house as W2 consultant (employee from a well known database company). I was basically a traveling consultant doing database and application installs. I kept a card of every client I went to, I transitioned to another company as a System Architect, then manager. When I decided to go back to a 'consultant' role, I called the old clients and got my first contract. Eventually, with the expansion of my family, I presented the option of telecommute, and with no change in pay they took it. Since then I have been able to persuade some on-site jobs/projects to try the telecommute, and when they did they were very happy. True not every one is ready, but time in the telecommute field with proven results, solid recommendations is BIG PLUS.
April 26, 2011 at 8:54 am
nico van niekerk (4/26/2011)
One can understand that employers would be reluctant to allow someone with whom they have no trust-relationship to work at home. There are a multitude of distractions at home, such as being closer to the refrigerator, the couch for frequent naps, and doing outside work on the side. This is especially true if the project is of such a nature that benchmarks and deliverables are not clearly quantifiable.
I'm not sure there's a lot of rationality in this argument. Having worked in many offices, there are always plenty of people that surf the Internet, hang out in the break room, walk in circles around the office, or do any number of things to avoid work.
There's also subtle pressure from the perception that you are being trusted to do work that compels most people to get more done.
If they don't, then pull them back to the office. Starting out with the idea that I don't think you can handle it strikes me as a fundamentally poor way to approach the situation.
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