Working from Home

Do you have a job that lets you work from home? If so, do you work from home part-time, or full-time? Do you permit your staff to work from home?

Why I Ask

Editing, writing, and design can easily be done at home. All you need is a computer with the right software, plus an internet connection to send and receive files.

These jobs also make it easy for employers to track employees' work. Work-from-home employees can be told, "Edit/write/lay out X number of documents per day," and then either they produce the work or they don't.

Being a writer/editor/designer, I've had several jobs where I could have performed my work from home easily, saving myself the significant time, expense, and hassle of commuting. I've also had jobs where I could have allowed my direct reports to perform their work at home and saved THEM the hassle of commuting. Yet my employer said no.

What Holds Companies Back?

It's not uncommon for an employee's work-from-home request to be denied. Employers give a variety of reasons for saying no. I will discuss some of those reasons here.

1. Technology and/or security. An employer might say that the infrastructure does not exist for an employee to be able to access company files from home without compromising data security.
   
   News flash: The technology DOES exist. In fact, it has existed for so long that it's not even very expensive anymore. If a company tells you that the technology does not exist, that's code for either, "We don't want to pay for it," or, "Technology/security is not the real issue, but that's our story and we're sticking to it."
   
   
2. Tracking/logistics. With some jobs, performance can be evaluated on a quota-type system: employees are responsible for completing X number of tasks per day. Other jobs do not lend themselves to quotas, making them much more difficult for a boss to evaluate what work-from-home employees do or how productive they are.
   
   Some jobs simply cannot be performed at home because they require an employee to be on site (for example, in-person tech support). Fair enough.
   
   
3. Trust. This is the biggest issue for most companies, I think. Many bosses believe that employees inevitably goof off more and work less when they don't have a supervisor literally breathing down their necks.
   
   In my opinion, if you're hiring employees that you don't trust, you have bigger problems than your employees' physical location, and you'd be better off addressing the real problems instead.
   
   
4. Rank/seniority. At some companies, working from home is a privilege reserved only for the elite. Some companies confer this privilege on senior staff or C-level staff only.
   
   At one company, I was told that the technology did not exist to allow us to access the company's database from home. Later, I learned that the technology DID exist. In fact full-time staff worked from home all the time. But I was a contractor, and the privilege of working from home was not extended to contractors.
   

It Goes Beyond Saving Gas Money

Commuting is expensive, no doubt about it. Car payments, repairs, and insurance are expensive. Gasoline costs a fortune (upwards of $4.50 a gallon in the Chicago area this week). Even riding public transportation gets costlier all the time.

Working from home also saves time, which is invaluable. It also eases many of life's daily stresses (for example, being able to sign for a UPS package or let the cable guy in).

What Employees Hear

I wonder if employers realize how it sounds to employees when they are told, "You may not work from home, even though your job could be done from home very easily."

Employees hear one or all of the following:

• We don't trust you.
• Your time is not valuable to us.
  
• We have no problems wasting your money.
  
• We are deliberately denying something that could make your life better (sometimes for no good reason).
  

Employers, I'm not going to screw around here. Your employees are not stupid, especially in this increasingly tech-savvy age. If you deny employees' requests to work from home and you provide no logical reason, you can expect to lose valuable and talented staff to companies that do allow it. When the pendulum swings back and it becomes an employee's market again, it would behoove you to either revisit your policies or budget for turnover.