This resonated with me since these past weeks working from Mexico I've met quite a few entrepreneurs that have sparked great business ideas for me, including adopting better work processes, new PR/branding ideas, and long-term business strategies. I even got a few terrific leads for travel writers I'm hiring. Had I been back in Chicago, I wouldn't have met these people or gotten these ideas. Period. I attend great networking events with tech people and small business owners, but I don't often meet writers and risk-takers like I met here. And I didn't meet these folks at a networking event, we were hiking together in Central Mexico, and getting a bit dirty I might add.
Hiking with great thinkers in Guanajuato, Mexico. Photo by Warren Talbot, Married with Luggage.
As someone who works from home, and from various locales, the news frustrated me last week when the new Yahoo! CEO reversed their corporate policy last week that allowed staff to work from home. Best Buy also made a similar announcement that despite some 4,000 employees working from home, they're reversing their policy. These policy shifts insinuate that productivity & success are strained by allowing staff to work from home. Yahoo's CEO made the decision after studying data about her work-from-home staff, and seeing that productivity waned. What about reprimanding those that abused their policy or incentivizing better practices. To me, a lack of success in these policies are a failure in management and training rather than an employee's failure to produce. Could you imagine the shift in your organization to lose such a privilege?
As a small business owner & traveler that's run my business from different countries around the globe, I'm aggravated by the negative wrap these decisions place on business success. It's an archaic opinion that businesses can't be successfully run from home offices with employees in remote places. Sure, the social side of me feels a bit isolated working from a home office or from cafes, but I also have far fewer interruptions, and feel extremely lucky to have the higher quality of life that a flexible workspace provides, ie, having more time to exercise, eat well, and work from Mexico.
Let's not forget, the magic of the internet to merge remote "offices" around the globe - international communication is a huge industry with great innovations, or need I remind Yahoo & Best Buy. Free video chat around the world makes it possible for me to hire a graphic designer in Asia, writers in Europe, and me in North America to merge these into a great product. I can interview clients and sell my products to people in other timezones without hopping on a plane. It's utter nonsense that businesses would back-track these sorts of policies, although that's why I don't work for them.
So what do you think? What are the pros & cons of working remotely? Would you stay in a job that reversed your work from home policy?
After 4+ years around the globe, Bessie & Kyle are rediscovering home in Chicago.
March 09, 2013
Andi of My Beautiful Adventures
March 11, 2013
Bessie
March 11, 2013
lauren
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/opinion/in-defense-of-telecommuting.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&smid=fb-share, "It's About the Work, Not the Office."
As an employee in an office where the majority of people worked from home at least once a week, the big question I think needs to be solved is the burden it places on other employees who are physically present. Inevitably, issues arise that the telecommuter should be responsible for, but require someone in the office to deal with immediately. When the telecommuter is unavailable (in our office, telecommuting meant flexing – working early and late and spending 9–5 with the kids – and I imagine that means the same thing in many other offices), it puts other employees in uncomfortable situations dealing with things that are often over their responsibility levels and at the very least, takes away from the time to do their own work. Perhaps a problem that could be solved on a company by company basis, but a very real problem that doesn't seem to be addressed often!
March 20, 2013
Bessie
What an interesting point you bring up. Inevitably there are issues that arise that might need to be resolved IN the workplace or out of the hours someone is working, especially if you're a company with on-site services or where clients pop in. If it's something urgent, it definitely puts others in an awkward situation, unless the person is on-call.
I've also worked for an organization where we trained each other to fill in for us. We all flexed time because we'd share working the night & weekend shifts, and covering for each other became the norm. Certain things we'd have to call the other person or ask the client to wait 24 hrs for a response, but often we could cover for each other.
Thanks for that perspective!
June 18, 2013
Shannon J