The Great Telecommute Debate
Submitted by Taran Rampersad on Sat, 03/02/2013 - 08:08
Marissa Mayers, CEO of Yahoo, recently made the news when she yanked telecommuting away from Yahoo employees. A lot of sites came to the defense of telecommuting, with good reason and undeniable passion. 'Marissa Mayers Has Made a Terrible Mistake' starts a circular reference for and against telecommuting.
Anyone who only takes one side of the debate doesn't really understand telecommuting. I've been increasingly telecommuting since the mid-90s since my time at Honeywell - I was still required to be at the office but I'd earned the ability to do some work at home through the VPN. When I first started doing that, I developed a routine so that I could get to work - I'd go out, have coffee and come back so that I could switch modes and avoid distractions.
Working at home has distractions even if you live alone. The television. The capacity to play games. The nearness of the coffee pot. The refrigerator. The noisy neighbor. The knock on the door. The idiot parked in front with his subwoofer set to more decibels than his IQ. It's not all working in pyjamas.
In fact, I can't work in pyjamas. Shorts and a t-shirt, yes. I'm wearing that right now.
It's Different For Everyone
There are issues of separating work time from leisure as well. There are issues of working too much - something that seems ingrained in my father's side of the family, where my grandfather started a business from bringing work home back in the 1920s - and building an entire workshop in the backyard. The printery I eventually managed growing up had its office in my old room - the first victim of the home business was my room. The leisure I had, growing up, was not being home.
It's different for everyone. But sitting in front of a computer all day and getting paid? My own father didn't understand how I could transfer 1s and 0s across the internet and someone would pay me.
Managing Expectations
The point here is that there's a cultural shift on an individual level as well as a societal level. Family and friends might think that because you work at home that you're 'on call' for their needs - my strategy has simply been to make the rules known up front: if you need me to do something, ask me at least a day in advance. Emergencies are emergencies, but because I'm at home doesn't mean that I'm available.
The person or company paying you for work needs to understand boundaries as well. Because you work at home doesn't necessarily mean that they can call you at 3 a.m. to tell you about their dreams - unless, of course, they're paying you a sufficient amount to do so. So you need to manage the expectations of your employer when it comes to your availability or you may quickly find yourself in a place where you cannot breath - and an angry employer/client.
It's Not All Great.
It really isn't. I was giving a talk about telecommuting, small businesses and so on for CARIRI in Trinidad and Tobago around 2004/2005 when I made the point that while people were out in the street enjoying Trinidad and Tobago Carnival a few hundred yards away, I was at a desk whipping out some code for a client in the U.S. The client needed to get something done. A national holiday in another country didn't mean much to the client (getting back to the U.S. has straightened that out!) - but there are sacrifices one makes when telecommuting. This goes back to boundaries and managing expectations - but the key to telecommuting is being productive. If you're not productive, you won't be working long.
The 'Getting Paid For Nothing' Issue.
Employers often make the argument that people sit around and do nothing while telecommuting. Images of workers in pyjamas playing solitaire flit across their minds - an odd fetish, if you ask me - and they make an unarguable case that they may not be getting as much productivity as they pay for. There's no debate against that argument because it's really a fear. Is it well founded? I can't speak for everyone. Everyone is different.
What I can say is that if you're worried about someone charging you hours for when they didn't work, maybe your problem is that you're paying them hourly. Some people goof off in the office all the time while appearing productive, and even tracking their internet access at this point is antiquated: Smartphones trump that.
Some people aren't as productive as others when unsupervised.Pay someone by the hour and they become glued to the clock. Pay someone by their work instead and the clock isn't as much of an issue, is it?
...And sometimes you can't.
I worked a contract recently where I had to work in an office 60 miles away, in Madison. After years of telecommuting - probably a decade! - I was back in an office with a cubicle and everything. It was a good company I was doing some work for - a startup - but it struck me toward the end, after driving through snow for 60 miles a few times and getting stuck in Madison traffic, that it was a pretty long drive to sit in a cubicle where there was minimal social interaction with others. In fact, the two people who I worked with most closely were telecommuting.
I understood why telecommuting wasn't an option for me, and in the shoes of those running things I probably would have done the same. It's about trust. While they hired me for being able to spell Visual Studio and C++ and no one else really could be a sounding board, they needed to see me working. I was an investment. They wanted to watch their investment.
I was new to them. Toward the end I telecommuted a little because I earned their trust. I'd produced results.
Was Marissa Meyers Wrong?
I have no idea about Yahoo's culture. I have no idea about the sort of people who were telecommuting. I know that the perception of working at home has changed drastically over the past decade - I'd like to think I've helped that in my own small part - so there is much hand-wringing about it because we telecommuters - I include myself - don't want to lose the progress that we have made in the perception of telecommuting. We're invested in the concept.
In the end, I suppose it falls down to trust. For whatever reason, good or bad, the CEO of Yahoo thinks that the employees of the company will be more productive in the same physical space. As much as we might think otherwise, she might have a point - it's not as if Yahoo's name is spoken at the dinner table as much while a competitor's name has become synonymous with web searching.
I don't know about what Yahoo's doing and I can't agree or disagree. It's not really my business. My business is being productive and, as recently, sometimes earning the right to telecommute with a client.
Any relationship is built on trust. In telecommuting, trust is much more important.
Image at top left courtesy TylerIngram through this Creative Commons License.