Telecommuting is supposed to be everywhere: it’s the dawn of a new age, where almost everyone works from home, reducing costs to employers and skyrocketing productivity. But is this actually the case? And where are all these work-for-your-company-from-home-ers, not self-employed yet still enjoying the flexibility and freedom that telecommuting permits?

I’ve worked for several large companies over the years, enjoying the benefits that the corporate environment provides, but I’ve never found an environment better than that provided by telecommuting. Interestingly, however, my only experience with permanent telecommuting was in the last 6 months of my previous job, when my wife was severely ill and I had to stay home to look after her while also working full-time. My boss commented that I was as productive as ever, and the fact that I often worked sporadic hours, sometimes through the night, had no effect on the running of the business - my work was being done when it needed to be done (as we provided support across several timezones), I was involved in conference calls and I could still talk directly with others I was working with via IM or the phone.

As my wife recovered, however, I was told that the company could allow perhaps “two to three days” per week of telecommuting. Despite a track record of several months where not only did I continue to meet expectations, I exceeded them. Despite the drawbacks of going into the office. Despite the extra cost to the company of maintaining an extra desk with an extra chair in an extra office. I couldn’t understand it.

I also frequently get contacted by recruiters (sometimes from agencies, often directly from companies) with job offers - and even though some of these companies are big-name and renowned for being different, flexible and quirky, telecommuting is never an option. They clearly like my work, my history, my skill-set and my abilities, yet the idea of telecommuting is too much for them to handle, and I get politely told that “no, sorry, we do not offer telecommuting for this position”. Apart from meetings, my job has never involved more than token interaction with other people - almost all of the servers I’ve ever administered have been located on the opposite side of the world, yet for some reason I can’t telecommute to an office 20km away. Furthermore, the nature of my work as a system administrator or technical lead has for a long time involved being on-call - waking up at 3am to fix a server in a different continent, speaking to somebody who lives in a part of the world that’s awake while everyone in my house is asleep - and yet nobody has thought that perhaps by having the role open to telecommuting, I could naturally be awake at those hours and probably deal with the problem more effectively (or possibly prevent it althogether). I spent many months starting at 4am, working with a US-based project team, and drove a project across the line meeting all its deadlines and technical objectives - and then some. Everyone who worked on the project was extremely happy with my work, and commented that without my “odd-hours support” the project never would have succeeded.

Telecommuting offers so many benefits to both employers and employees, and very few drawbacks. When my first two daughters were young, I had very little time to spend with them - I worked 9 to 5, leaving before they woke and getting home around the time they were getting ready for bed. My ex-wife wasn’t working, and spent most of her time looking after them, so being at home wouldn’t have interrupted my work - but still, I had no other option, and missed out a lot of them growing up. My wife now is pregnant with our first child together, and I’m determined not to miss out. Staying at home with her since her illness at the start of the pregnancy didn’t affect my productivity, and now that I’m self-employed I still find that I can work as much - if not more - than I did in the office. When I need a break I can go and make a coffee, sit down with her, run some errands, or just chill out - and if I want to work from 11am straight through to 7pm, I know that I don’t have to worry about going out to buy lunch or dinner, or getting stuck in peak-hour traffic, or only seeing her for an hour or two, because I can combine both work and my personal life. She spends a lot of her time helping me out with tokiwinter.com, too (although obviously this wouldn’t apply if I wasn’t self-employed), and being able to chat with her throughout the day makes the work day less tiring. On top of the personal benefits, this paper asserts that telecommuting can also be of financial benefit to telecommuters - in some countries, tax deductions do apply for transport to and from work, but in a lot this is a cost the employee takes on him or herself.

One of the things I hated most about the office was the interaction with other people; I’m not exactly sociable by nature, and I found the small talk, the “how was your weekend?”s and the half-hour chats just outside the lunch room only slowed down my working day and distracted me from what I wanted to be doing. A quick coffee run could take half an hour, and lunch easily an hour or more. While I got along well with my co-workers, I found that we decreased each others’ productivity, and because I’m the sort of person that likes to just sit down and work (headphones in, head down, work hard), this became a real frustration. This doesn’t apply to all IT workers - a lot of people enjoy the interaction of the office, the social climate, and the chance to talk about both work and personal issues with people they see every day - but I am not one of them.

If telecommuting were widely available, the individual could come to find an in-office period that suited them. For some, that might be five days a week - for others, none. For a lot of employees, having the balance of a few days working from home and a few days in the office would probably be optimum. It would encourage parents to stay in the workforce because they would balance a career and family without compromising either one, and for those with erratic sleep schedules or who liked to take longer breaks, the office day could work with them instead of against them.

One of the biggest drawbacks to telecommuting, of course, is the worry about lack of productivity. If you send all your workers home, how do you know they are actually working? Well, how do you know they’re working in the first place? Having a screen up and looking busy don’t necessarily equate to productivity - indeed, there are applications for those who like to use social networking sites and then have them disappear the second their boss works by. The solution - for in-office and telecommuting workers - is the same: hire good employees. A good employee will take pride in their work, enjoy doing their job, and produce results. They may take two-hour lunch breaks, but work diligently for the other six-hours, or they might plod away for eight hours but only take a twenty-minute break to grab something to eat. The rigid nine-to-five schedule doesn’t force employees to work hard - it’s simply a means to regulate their work so that it’s easier to monitor them. A good employee doesn’t need this - they will produce whether they work from 1am to 5am or 9am to 1pm. A study run in association with Stanford University even showed that working from home was associated with a performance increase of 13% - although not all participants chose to continue telecommuting after the trial was over.

A lot of workers in IT - coders, architects, administrators, etc. - tend to have more sporadic waking hours than in other industries. Perhaps it’s because we got into computers early and as teens would stay up into the wee hours furiously trying to solve some problem on a black-and-green screen, well after we were supposed to be in bed. Perhaps it’s because we enjoy problems, and a good problem doesn’t leave your head once the clock strikes five - it must be worked on until it is solved. Perhaps we’re just a different breed. At any rate, the very nature of IT and its workers lends itself best to telecommuting - and there’s little reason it shouldn’t.

We have enormous amounts of technology to allow us to commute with anyone, anywhere, at any time - why must we sit in a meeting room in a suit and tie to discuss something that would be just as easily (or in some cases, more easily) discussed via IM, where screenshots or snippets of code might help us explain out point better? Why can’t we have a five-minute phone call instead of a five-minute desk-chat that turns into a discussion about something completely irrelevant? We have the technology, and we have plenty of reasons, to push telecommuting to the forefront of workplace environments.

My only explanation as to why it isn’t is that companies are too scared to move into a realm where they don’t have direct interaction with their employees on a daily basis - that perhaps if they can’t see and monitor people at their desks, they can’t be sure they’re working. The problem is, there are so many benefits to telecommuting that if they only opened up the opportunity, if even for those more senior workers with proven skills and experience, they’ve realise what they’d been missing out on.

For other articles (and studies) on the benefits of telecommuting, see:

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