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Nov 18, 2011 
I haven’t worked in non-home office in over two years. As most telecommuters will agree, the situation is a mixed bag. With working on my project, I’m a 9 hour drive away from our main office building. Learning to work remotely by yourself is a challenge. Learning to manage employees is a endeavor that is impossible to appreciate until you’ve done it. Not tooting my own horn, just reflecting on the task it has been.
What I’ve learned about working remotely:
- Have your own dedicated office space. Working from the couch in your living room where the kids play just isn’t productive. Thankfully I’m not a couch-working type of guy.
- Try to dress the part. While working remotely is stereotyped as working in your boxers, I wouldn’t advise it. When you dress lazy, you tend to work the same way.
- Get a good webcam and decent internet connection. You’ll want to video conference at least once a day to stay in the loop.
- If your main office doesn’t proactively try to support you working remotely, you’ll be the most miserable person in the group. I cannot emphasis this enough. Finding out about new hires, big features and news releases the day of isn’t enjoyable.
What I’ve learned about managing employees remotely:
- Following along with the last bullet point, you need to keep your employees in the loop just as much as you expect your team you work with to keep you in the loop. If you do not, they’ll either feel like they are not part of the team, or they’ll ask around the main office until they get in the loop. I’ve learned this point the hard way.
- Constant contact. You need to communicate with your team as much as possible throughout the day. This is something I still struggle with (terrible memory), but I know that things run much more smoothly when you talk as often as possible. This is the equivalent of stopping by their cube and asking how things are going
- That I don’t know all of the answers to this yet. I’m still finding ways to improve as I go.
I’m going to beat this point to death. If you work remotely, your team around you has to proactively work with you. They cannot skip talking to you about something just because they didn’t want to Skype you in. That takes just as much time and effort (arguably less) than to walk across the room and wait until you have a free moment to talk. If the team doesn’t see a Skype call as the same as walking over to your desk, or IM as the same as asking across the table, or email the same as, well, email, then you’ll run into major communication issues.
Does anyone else telecommute and have comments to share?
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