Off-site gripes

Home Office Computing, July, 1998 by Lisa Goff

Telecommuting can be a lifesaver, a marriage-preserver, a career-booster. But just because you've followed your bliss all the way home, don't fool yourself into thinking that everybody feels the same as you. Chances are you're doing something that's irritating the folks black at the office. Indeed, the very solutions you've worked out for yourself may be driving them nuts.

"When there are [telecommuting] problems, it's usually an issue of process, how things get done," says Martha Haywood, a partner at the telenetworking consulting firm Management Strategies Inc. in San Francisco. "Telecommuters have to rethink the way they do everything."

As a homeworker, you need to take the lead and reimagine how your job--from attending meetings to filing expense accounts--gets done most effectively from a remote location. Of course, that would be a lot easier if you knew what most peeved and pleased your office compadres.

To that end, we talked to your supervisors and coworkers and asked them to list their biggest complaints about telecommuters. They jumped at the opportunity to vent; we boiled their responses down to the top 10. Eavesdrop on their beefs, and you can impress your own office-based colleagues by proposing some solutions before problems even start.

"Hey, slowpoke! How long can it take to plug in your computer?"

Sure, it looks simple. You buy a computer with a modem, an answering machine, maybe a fax machine, and presto, you're telecommuting. "The expectation at the office, and often on the part of the telecommuter, is that Joe's last day in the office will be Friday and by Monday he'll be up and running from home," says Ed Tynan, a senior program manager at Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector in Phoenix. Instead, Tynan's Motorola division has calculated that start-up-related problems cost on average one month of productivity per new telecommuter.

But you can short-circuit this kind of productivity loss by copying previous telecommuters' successes. Ask for the same hardware and software that worked well for previous telecommuting colleagues, rather than pioneering a new and riskier approach. If you're among the first wave of teleworkers for your firm, urge your company to devise templates: Every home-based worker gets the same PC and software, and all equipment gets configured the same way. If you telecommute for a huge company, you might suggest that it hire a third-party contractor to oversee technical setup and support. ACS Dataline Inc., for example, installs and test-drives all new equipment, and troubleshoots any problems for telecommuters in the Motorola semiconductor division.

"The key is to treat telecommuting like popcorn, and pop it the same way every time," says Tynan. Some companies, such as Nortel, even hand out identical desks and office chairs to home-based workers.

"Reach out and leave me alone!"

Remember that old joke that starts, "What's the shortest amount of time in the world?" Well, the original answer--"the time between the light turning green and the guy behind you blowing his horn"--could be replaced with, "the time between phone calls from telecommuters to the office staff."

If you're still (even subconsciously) fighting the misperception that you're not really working, you may be driving the office corps crazy with an endless barrage of phone calls and e-mails. The implicit message "I'm working! See how hard I'm working?!" loses its subtlety in a hurry.

When she started telecommuting from her new home in Buffalo, N.Y., Bonnie Cywinski admits she overdid communications. "I frantically called everybody at the office," says Cywinski, vice president of client services for ZenaComp, a Livonia, Mich., technology consulting firm. And her five direct reports back at headquarters had overly itchy dialing fingers too, "We were used to bopping in and out of each other's offices all day," says Cywinski, who was the first ZenaComp exec to telecommute. "It's a crutch, and we had lost it."

The solution: regularly scheduled conference calls with her staff and boss, ZenaComp CEO Mark Lichtman. Knowing they had a daily or weekly conference call coming up eliminated the static of frenzied dialing. An unexpected outcome was that staffers and Cywinski felt pressured to make better use of their meeting time, so they came to the teleconferences prepared and organized. Agendas were issued for all meetings, and everybody stayed on point.

"It was a behavioral change to realize we didn't always need instant gratification," says Lichtman. "Now, we're more efficient with our communication."

"If you want me to be flexible, bend a little In my direction every now and then."

Telecommuters are disciples in the religion of workplace flexibility. Most likely you had to lobby hard to convince your employer to let you work from home, so you should bend over backward to be malleable. Unfortunately, it doesn't always turn out that way. In fact, you may be driving your coworkers crazy by setting rigid downtime hours.

"I understand that from 3 to 5 p.m. you pick up your kids and distribute them to after-school activities, and that you make up the two hours elsewhere," says Burke Stinson, a public relations manager at AT&T headquarters in Basking Ridge, N.J. "But if I page you during that two-hour span, I expect you to get to a phone and call me back."