By Serena Beck | Senior Member
Getting into your car, sitting in rush hour traffic, and then arriving at the office an hour later may soon be an antiquated way to work. The trend of companies allowing employees to telework is slowly increasing in popularity. Telework may include working from home or a location outside your central office or home, for example, a coffee shop or another office in a different city than your usual central office. In the United States, “the percentage of workers who worked the majority of the work week at home increased from 3.6% to 4.3% of the population between 2005 and 2010, according to the American Community Survey” (www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p70-132.pdf). In Canada, “in 2008, 11.2% of employees worked at home, one percentage point more than in 2000” (www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2011001/article/11366-eng.pdf).
I have been a teleworker for three years. The team I work on consists of seven technical writers. Five of us work from home most of the time while two of us work from home one day per week. Two writers live in Canada and five writers live in the United States. We have weekly meetings using desktop sharing and a conference line. We try to all meet in person once per year at our head office.
There are benefits and challenges to adapting to being a teleworker. There are many things to consider, including communication challenges, socializing, work-life balance, productivity levels and distractions, and the cost benefit.
Communication Challenges
Christen Williams is a technical writer at Haemonetics. Her biggest challenge in communicating remotely is “remembering where people are physically in the world.” In order to set up meetings with team members, you need to be mindful of their time zones. Sometimes time zones can work to your advantage. You might be able to email a question late in the day your time and receive an answer by the following morning. Some days I schedule meetings during my lunch time to accommodate coworkers.
When you are working with people internationally, language can be a barrier. If you have a poor phone connection and you can’t hear or don’t understand how someone pronounces a word, then you might misinterpret a message. One solution is to have a visual of the person and the material through video conferencing and desktop sharing. Another effective way to solve this issue is to have meeting attendees review meeting minutes, or if you aren’t sure about a requirement, send an email to clarify details.
Liz Tricco and Hanna Hyde are technical writers at Haemonetics who work from home one day per week. Liz says that a disadvantage of working from home is that you cannot “run into someone in the hallway and find out information that you didn’t know.” Hanna states that another challenge can be “getting information people aren’t willing to put in writing.” Jenny Nelson, a technical writer at Haemonetics who mostly works from home, says it is “faster to get information in person. It takes longer at home.” Learning and using your coworkers preferred communication methods—email, phone, or in person—might speed up the process.
Socializing
When you aren’t face-to-face with your coworkers and you’re at home busily working the day away, it can be hard to make time to socialize with your coworkers. Hanna uses Instant Messaging (IM) to have “informal conversations with people and build relationships.” It’s also convenient to use IM to ask someone a quick question or ask them what time to phone or have a meeting.
When I contact my coworkers, I try to connect on a personal level. For example, if I email or phone someone, I ask a non-work-related question first (e.g., how is your family do you have any vacation plans?) and then ask my work-related question. Some people like this and others don’t; you really need to cater to individuals’ needs. To keep your team engaged, get together in person for company activities and meetings. I find it helps if I have met everyone I work with in person at least once. However, if you’re new to a team and can’t meet in person, sending a photo or using video conferencing might be useful. The next time you’re on a call, you can at least match a face to a voice. This is especially useful if you cannot distinguish individual voices during calls.
Work-Life Balance
Depending on your company’s policies, you might be able to work flexible hours so you can, for example, watch your daughter’s recital during the day and then make up those hours in the evening. You might be able to set your own hours that work best for you and your team’s schedule and time zones. As long as deadlines are met, it might not matter what time of day the work is completed as long as you get in your hours for the week. Colin Beck has managed to find a balance. He works from home full-time as a project manager for Telus and goes into the office once per month for large team meetings. He says, “working from home has had a huge positive impact on my life. It’s given me the balance between work and family that I’ve been looking for.”
It might not always be easy to find a balance if emergencies arise or people need to call you outside your set working hours. It can be tempting to always be “on” if you work from home because it’s easy to monitor email from multiple devices 24/7. In Canada, “among full-time employees who said they were dissatisfied with their work-life balance, 54% of those who worked at home attributed their dissatisfaction to spending too much time working. For employees who never worked at home, the proportion was 44%” (www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2011001/article/11366-eng.htm).
If you do need to work overtime, Warren Chamberlain, a technical writer at Haemonetics, has found a good solution for finding a balance. “During crunch times, when I’m working later into the evening, I like that I can start a document build (which can take 30 to 45 minutes) and hang out with my family until it’s done. It’s nicer than sitting in a cube waiting for it to finish so you can go home.”
Productivity and Distractions
For Jenny, whether she is working in the office or at home, her “productivity is the same in both places and one environment isn’t better than the other.” This might not be the case for all workers, but hopefully you can adapt to be self-motivated and self-disciplined to successfully work from home.
I had a hard time adapting in the office. I used to sit in a cubicle next to the customer support center and they were often on calls. Depending on what I was working on, I often preferred to work with complete silence. This is often possible at home but wasn’t in the office unless I moved to another area. Depending on the space and distractions in your home environment, you may need to work in an office outside your home. For example, if your children are home, they may be a big distraction to your work day.
Cost Benefits
Working from home can save employees and companies a lot of money on commuting and renting office space. Companies often pay for teleworkers’ equipment, Internet, and phone bills. However, teleworkers are usually responsible for providing the office space and heating in their homes. In 2011, my company started an optional telecommute program which many people chose. As office space was reduced at some locations, most teams continued to work from home. If you wanted to go into the office, there were still a few cubicles available to use.
According to Global Workplace Analytics and the Telework Research Network, “The Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the entire five-year cost of implementing telework throughout government ($30 million) is less than a third of the cost of lost productivity from a single day shut down of federal offices in Washington, DC, due to snow ($100 million).” A business could save “$11,000 per person per year” and teleworkers could save “between $2,000 and $7,000 a year” (www.globalworkplaceanalytics.com/telecommuting-statistics).
Being a teleworker has many benefits for you and your company especially when you consider the money that you could both save. It may take some adapting to become a teleworker. There are challenges to solve and you might need to learn to socialize in different ways. It might take a while to equalize your work-life balance. Some days it might be hard to stay productive and avoid distractions. Since I’ve had the privilege of working from home and in an office, I prefer to work from home. However, I would find it hard to go back to commuting to the office on a full-time basis again.
Serena Beck (Serenabeck.com) has been a technical writer for 10 years at Haemonetics Corporation, a blood management solutions company. In 2012, she received her CPTC. She lives in Victoria, BC, Canada, with her husband and two children. She enjoys traveling with her family and writing magazine articles.
