When I am managing remote workers, I asses their work the same as I do someone in the office. When I assign a task, I have a general idea of how long it should take. I discus it with the person and make sure we are in agreement. Then I leave them alone to get the task done. “leave them alone” is relative. I don’t ping them every day and ask for a status report. I do ping them a couple of times a day just to make sure things are going well. Similar to the way I would walk by their desk if they were in the office and say hi.

It is important that they are treated like other employees so yes, leave policies apply to them too. Working from home is not generally an open invitation to run errands all day. Unless you work out a different arrangement, it is important for the process that remote employees adhere to the office rules and norms. 9i.e. if work begins at 8:00 AM then they need to be at their desk and working at 8:00 AM, not sitting down with their first cup of coffee and reading their email before going up to shower and change.

For workers that are near the office, arranging for a day a week in the office is not un-reasonable. For long distance workers, a policy of regular visits helps keep the employee connected to the company. When I worked for Zend, I traveled to the office 3-5 times a year. Many times it was when I was out on the West Coast anyhow for a conference but if I wasn’t planning on being in the office for more than 2 months, I usually got a request to come visit.

Telecommuting can be either a part-time affair or a full time affair. I started telecommuting when I was moonlighting as a contract programmer but have had both FT and PT gigs at this point.

Thanks for the comment!

=C=

I noticed that one of the posts on your website is about telecommuting. I’m Rick Dane, the creator of a new telecommute web community where users can review and rate employers, find jobs, and network with others using our site’s social network. The site is free to use for all members and we are hoping to get the word our to people who may be interested. Unfortunately there are a lot of dead ends and scams in the work from home / telecommute employment field so the goal of our site is to be a reliable source for those interested in this.

If you like our site or think it has any potential and want to post on your site about it send us a link and we will post it on the “Media Coverage”: (http://telecommutereview.com/content/media-coverage) section of our site. Thanks and have a nice day.

Sincerely,
Rick Dane
http://telecommutereview.com

I would like to provide you a few major benefits for employers on this matter:

1. The biggest advantage is that you need less or no office space to rent or buy.

2. Your employees are in general more productive then in the office and often work (a little) longer, because they don’t have to commute, even if they during the day for shopping or personal appointments.

3. As a company you can say you think about the environment by having (almost all) of your employees working from home. These days it is cool to be green, so that’s an extra benefit.

4. You can get very good deals on hardware and internet connections for telecommuting employees, where the benefit is that you can use their support facilities to cope with hardware and/or connection issues at the employees home. This can reduce the IT overhead between 5% to 15%.

5. It’s now a good argument to attract new employees, because most of them already lost interest in the common benefits like a company car or cell phone. Telecommuting is becoming an exceptional benefit that your competition can’t provide yet.

There are more things you can add to this list, but I think this is already a good start. I know there are several studies made on this subject, so maybe someone can point you to these studies where example costs were compared to the conventional employee environment.

Hope this helped a bit,

Michelangelo

Thanks!

I’ve got Central-London style salary for an out-of-city rent, and no transport costs. While finding good people that can work independently isn’t easy (and we are still working on that), it’s good to be able to offer other Grade-One-Geek’s a chance to work in their own favourite environment – right there in front of their own PC, and if they want to work 6am – 3pm instead of my 9:30-6, I’ve not got a problem with that.

I’ve also got a guy working with me that took a £7,000 paycut (call it $14K) – but will save at least that much in transport costs, to say nothing of 4+ hr per day! commute into central London, or to have the ability to be right there at home with his 1 year old baby when they have a fever. No amount of money could buy that.

We talk almost every day via Skype, and a face to face every couple of weeks has also been useful. Next week – a BBQ at his place while we plan the next big set of features and site upgrades (including moving to Zend Framework).

I do know you’d have to pay me a ridiculous amount to have me commute any serious distance again – if you could convince me at all.

1. It’s a topic in the ‘near finished’ PHP job book. (ideally out in the next few weeks). And as usual, there’s only so much you can cover in a book – the experiences here go in to more depth than I was able to in the book, but also validate and echo a lot of the issues raised there.

2. I’m currently transitioning to what will likely be a phase of telecommuting on a number of projects. Over the last year I’ve talked to a number of employers who were eager to have me on board, but all backed out at the last minute because of the telecommuting issue. They were ‘not ready for’ not ‘comfortable with’ telecommuting. In some ways I understood their hesitation, but you also don’t get better at something without trying it. I’m not trying to go out of my way to be someone’s test case(!), but I ended up having to develop a “it’s them, not me” mindset (which I think was/is mostly justified), but it still is a downer to realize how ‘behind the curve’ so many companies are. I will also say that I 100% agree that face to face is great, having group meetings, and being in the same room whiteboarding is a vital experience, and really adds something to many, if not all, teams. But in some (many?) situations having strong people on the team who aren’t in the same room 100% of the time will outweigh having less talented people sitting in the same room.

Great and timely topic Cal!

It was a great job aside from that, enough so that it made the commute worth it to me personally, but it was obviously a big opportunity missed. At least I did build a very large audio book collection… that’s something I actually miss about the commute, now that I’m only 7 miles from my office. Even now I’d prefer to telecommute, solely for the cost/CO2 savings, but still no option is allowed aside from emergency/occasional. It does seem sad to me, though, that I’m trying to find a way to bike to work rather than drive when my work is so obviously 100% remote-capable.

One day… one day the fully remote option will find me :)

I finally checked out your blog; I have been meaning to for some time. I am very impressed – you have been at it for a while and it really shows in the consistency and the subject matter. I look forward to examining it more closely later.

Hope to see you at the geek breakfast tomorrow!

Have a fantastic day and stay dry.