Jan

11

Welcome to the 21st century workforce

January 11, 2008 |

A lot of people seem to have trouble working from home.

Our research (and personal experience) on working at home - which closely echos the research of others and the information in the article - indicates 4 major issues/problems come with working at home: (1) loneliness; (2) a feeling of being “out of the loop”; (3) lack of support and back up; (4) issues around procrastination, focus and distractions.

Now, what I find interesting about this and especially about the quote from the New York Times article that Steve included in his post is the oft-stated assumption that the problems people have working from home are a function of where they are, as opposed to how they do.

Parenthetically, I’d also be interested in knowing how the research breaks out for people who telecommute for remote bosses, as opposed to people who work from home on their own businesses.

Some of the so-called problems attached to working from home seem to me to be a direct result of people who expect the home-based worker to function exactly like an office-based worker, only from home. The home-based workers evidently share this expectation but, if you stop and think about it, isn’t it just a tad unreasonable?

Does it really makes sense to expect either a remote employee or a home-based business owner to tune out their home surroundings and practice some sort of draconian self-isolation during so-called business hours?

In some ways, it reminds me of the way people normally react when you tell them you are (or plan on) homeschooling your kids. Most people immediately say, “But what about socialization?”

To which I used to respond (back when I was homeschooling my kids), “I’m going to teach them at home. I’m not going to lock them in a closet.”

If you are working from home and you start feeling the need for company, there are any number of ways to fix that. You can go to the library, or the coffee shop, you can visit your kids’ school, you can go to the local Mart (K or Wal) or Target or Costco to buy a box of pencils. If there are people at home at that time of day in your neighborhood, you can go visit one of them.

But of course, you only give yourself permission to take care of yourself in these perfectly reasonable ways if you are not so unreasonable as to think your at-home work behavior and time management should be an exact mirror of what you would be doing if you were back at the office.

And what about the work you are supposed to be at home doing? Well, you’ll do it when you get back. One can always arrange for blocks of time during the day (like, say, when kids are at school, when the spouse is at work or out doing stuff, or later in the evening between family time and bed) when one has fewer distractions.

Is that procrastination or is that simply rearranging things so that you are working in ways and at times that work better for you as a home-based employee?

As long as the job gets done, how anal do we really have to be about what hours that remote employee or home business owner is working?

All of this would require a bit of a paradigm shift in the way we think about the employer/employee transaction and what said employer is buying with that paycheck. For as long as remote employers continue to believe they are buying their employee’s time (as opposed to buying their services), unreasonable expectations will continue to make home-based employment more difficult than it needs to be.

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Comments

4 Comments so far

  1. Mary Schmidt on January 11, 2008 4:20 pm

    I’ve worked from home for years - even when I had “real jobs.” Never felt isolated or how out of the loop. You do have to learn to work (and interact) a bit differently. But combining email with the good ol’ telephone goes a long way to alleviating that problem.

    And, when I had people reporting to me - I told them I didn’t care when or where they worked, as long as they got the job done. Managers have to get over “seeing is believing” - just because someone is sitting at their desk doesn’t mean they’re working. And just because someone took time to go to a soccer game doesn’t mean the job won’t get done.

    These days thanks to blogging and all the social media “stuff” I’m more connected than ever!

    I believe there is also considerable difference between employees working at home and home-based biz. Sure, I love to procrastinate but if I don’t work I don’t get a paycheck. Great motivator.

  2. Carnival Of Small Business Issues - Edition 33 : Atlantic Canada’s Small Business Blog - IQI Strategic Management Inc. on January 15, 2008 5:23 am

    […] Rivers Baker presents Welcome to the 21st century workforce posted at The Journal Blog, saying, “Much has been written about why working from home is a […]

  3. Anita Campbell on January 15, 2008 4:33 pm

    I agree with Mary that today, I’m more connected than ever, working from a home office. Networking and connecting online is so efficient that you can touch a tremendous number of people

    And I’ve never had a problem with focusing on the things I love to do. If I don’t like doing something, I can be as big a procrastinator in a big office as in a home office. :)

  4. The Journal Blogger on January 15, 2008 5:18 pm

    You know, I really do think the issue is exactly as Mary said - learning to do things a bit differently.

    I’m not prepared to invalidate anybody else’s experiences but I really do believe that the problems people say they have with working from home have less to do with being at home than they have to do with a failure to adjust to being at home.

    If the 21st century workplace gives us nothing else, I expect it will teach us flexibility.

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