photo credit: lissalou66
Whether you are a boss or just another employee, many people would agree that the ideal employee would possess the following characteristics:
- Displays results and not busyness
- Highly effective and can complete important tasks quickly
- Highly independent and can work alone or with minimal outside assistance
- Is a problem solver due to needing to work alone most of the time
- Is mobile and can work from virtually anywhere with a laptop and high speed internet
- Can carry out tasks effectively with minimal back and forth communication
- Driven to complete work quickly whilst maintaining quality
In order to become an effective full time teleworker, these are the characteristics you will need to possess. Note that I said effective; a lot of people could become full time teleworkers with some courage and discipline.
However, you will want to maximize your performance as a teleworker in order maximize your free time. To do this, you will need to try to possess as many of the above characteristics as you can.
If some of you are freaking out at this point, don’t. Becoming effective is easier than it sounds and is a process of eliminating and streamlining tasks so that you end up doing much LESS than what you are already doing.
In order to achieve the above characteristics, you only need to remember the following whenever you are working on a task:
- Focus only on the important task in front of you, performing it in the fastest way possible from start to finish without distraction, without sacrificing acceptable quality
Think of the teleworker as being a specialist employee, like a commando in the army. They are working entirely alone most of the time, must be capable of solving problems and making decisions on the fly and ultimately be able to complete a mission successfully all on their own without backup.
Now imagine if your company consisted of army of commandos as opposed to a company of regular foot soldiers. Imagine if you pit them against one another, who do you think would win?
Envision this scenario:
All the employees in your company are working on their laptops. All of a sudden, an explosion occurs and the building is suddenly on the verge of collapse. Everyone begins running out of the building with laptops in hand and they sit on the lawn while they watch the building that was once their company crumble to the ground.
Luckily for the CEO, about two months prior he took the initiative to implement a virtual working infrastructure in order to prepare the company for such an event. The server which resided in the company walls was now backed up on a secure external server. All employeeshad been given laptops that had VPN access allowing the access the server anywhere at any time.
Whilst the company may have lost a lot of chairs, tables and printers, the company’s core infrastructure was still intact allowing the employees to continue working even though the company had literally gone boom.
Managers who know how to manage virtual teams would quickly get their teams back up and running to handle the crisis whilst core independently running sections of the organization would know precisely what each of them needed to do in order to get back up and running.
The teleworker is a specialist who knows the ins and outs of their work to complete it in the best and fastest way possible, is able to handle problems and crisis’s independently and can communicate effectively with their key team members.
If you’re not a teleworker, you should become one.
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Yasuo Long believes that all employees should have the right to design their lifestyle according to their needs in order to maintain their health, their relationships and their happiness. In pursuit of this, he quit the 9-to-5 and became a telecommuter to give himself the time and mental freedom to discover what it really means to live with direction and purpose.
