September 11th 2008 06:04
Work is something you do, not something you travel to.
Do you really need to go to work every day to achieve your work targets? Do workers achieve their best work only between 9.00am and 5pm?
Teleworker is one name for people who work remotely from home, usually by Internet, while employed by an organisation with full scale office facilities. In Australia organisations such as Telstra commenced trials of having some their workers teleworking a few days a week as far back as the mid 1990s. Even the Australian Stock Exchange allows some of their workers to do some of their work from home.
Teleworking, telecommuting, e-commuting, e-work, telework, working at home (WAH), or working from home (WFH) is a work arrangement in which employees enjoy flexibility in working location and hours. The daily commute to a central place of work is replaced by telecommunication links.
Telework is a broader term, referring to substituting telecommunications for any form of work-related travel, thereby eliminating the distance restrictions of telecommuting.
What if your office building had major damage from a storm or was undergoing renovations: could your workers do some or all of their work from home by teleworking ? What if there was a transport strike or a worker was incapacitated in such a way they could not commute to the work place; would they be able to do some or all of their work from home by tele-working?
In recent times advances in laptop technology, mobile phones and broadband have made remote working even more feasible.
A major upside of working remotely can be the lack of interruptions compared to the normal workplace and subsequent productivity gains. There are no work acquaintances dropping by for a chat or gossip and no lingering coffee and lunch breaks for motivated remote workers. And no office politics to deal with, though remote workers might create some issues for office politics.
A major further advantage is remote workers commencing work without the stress and hassle of a commute. Those with a long commute have even more to gain as well as significant savings in transport costs.
Not surprisingly one of the biggest obstacles to organisations having their staff work from home is the mindset of their managers. Can managers trust people to work diligently from home and not become side-tracked without any supervision?
A successful telecommuting program requires a management style which is based on results and not on close scrutiny of individual employees - management by objectives as opposed to management by observation.
If you would like to try working remotely you will need to convince your manager. Ask for a trial of one or two days a week and make a point of recording your performance and productivity gains. Measure the client outcomes, pages created, documents created, revenue generated or whatever key performance indicator (KPI) applies.
Once you are able to demonstrate success at working remotely you may be able to convince your manager to extend your remote working to three, four or even five days a week.
Successful teleworkers like to remind us "work is something you do, not something you travel to".
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