“Knowledge must come through action; you can have no test, which is not fanciful; save by trial”
~Sophocles
If you’ve ever had to work from home before, you know the problems. You get lazy and think you’re on holiday so you think you can slack until the end of the week since nobody is watching you. Here is a possible scenario depicting how doing this can have a potentially negative effect:
The alarm clock rings, its 8am Monday morning and you’re suppose to start work at 8:30am. In panic thinking that you’re going to be late, you jump out of bed and rush to the bathroom to shave (or put on makeup if you’re a lady) and brush your teeth only to realize that you’re working from home today. You decide that work can wait and you jump back into bed to get a few extra hours of sleep. Its midday now and you decide to check your email to see if anyone has sent you anything from work. Quite surprisingly, no one has tried to contact you and you turn off your computer.
After cooking yourself lunch, you plop down in front of the television to prepare for 5 hours of movie madness. The clock goes past 5 o’clock and you rest easy knowing that nobody is going to contact you as office hours are over. The next day you repeat the cycle and by Thursday you still have not gotten any work done. You think with all your effectiveness strategies and streamlining of communication, you can get your work done in half a day. It’s Friday and you finally decide to get down to business. You turn on your computer at 9:00am and suddenly your phone rings. You pick it up and it is your boss on the other line telling you that the deadline has been pushed forward from Monday and that he needs your work right now.
He says it doesn’t matter if it is incomplete but he needs 90% of it sent through to him immediately. Not in an hour, not later, right NOW. Starting to get a little squeamish, you reluctantly tell your boss that you haven’t done anything. Monday morning comes and you’re back in the office with no future hopes of ever teleworking in any degree for at least another 5 years.
It is important to realize that teleworking does come with responsibilities. You will be responsible for your time and your effort since nobody will be actively watching you. Independence comes at a price, and you have to make sure you are willing to pay it if you want to telework.
To ensure you do not mess up teleworking in the long run, it is best to take trial runs for two reasons:
- To get used to being independent and identifying all the potential problems of teleworking
- To prove that you work more productively when you are outside of the office
Trial runs are easy to achieve and can be done with the following methods:
- Take sick leave and work
- Take annual leave and work
- Request to telework temporarily to handle something at home eg. Baby, sick wife, renovation, plumbing, etc.
The first two methods are my preferred method as they do not give you pressure and you can take the chance to see how productive you can be while working from home and not worry about looking like a slacker should you be unable to handle the independence of working from home in the early stages.
Also, if you happen to do any work whatsoever (making sure your boss knows about it through emails and CC’s), your boss will be impressed and this will reinforce the idea in his mind that you are a hardworking and proactive employee.
After several trial runs and you are confident that you are able to handle teleworking, with sufficient proof to back up your claims of increased productivity, it is time to push for a part time teleworking agreement of 1 to 2 days per week. Attempt to do this for about a month before moving on to the next exercise.
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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.
