Telecommuting is a powerful benefit for Aquire employees and many thousands of others around the country. It is part of why Aquire has been named one of The Best Places to Work in Texas two years in a row by our employees. If you don’t already have telecommuting policies allowing your employees the flexibility to work from home or remotely already, then I highly recommend you implement them quickly. It really is invaluable to employee moral, productivity, and expense reduction on office real estate, and

45 million Americans already telecommute at least one day a week, according to a report just released by the American Electronics Association.

The best investment telecommuting builds into your company is it requires that you develop your managers beyond watching what employees are doing, to managing employees to accomplish goals. It can be very difficult to change people’s perspective about how work should be accomplished, and there are many sources of information to help you. A quick search on Google can provide you with an endless list of resources.

Here are a few tips from what we have learned at Aquire.

• Not all positions are conducive to telecommuting, but more knowledge positions than people would assume possible are well suited for remote work.  Some of our employees never telecommute, others telecommute 4 days a week while still living near the office. Some employees work remotely everyday, as they do not live in Dallas.
• Not everyone wants to be a remote worker. This can be due to the lack of home work environment, the need for social interaction, or their desire to separate their work from home lives. We do not require anyone to telecommute.
• Work must be well defined for each position, and deadlines, goals, and time frames must be agreed upon for each individual.
• Employees appreciate the faith you put in them when you let them telecommute.
• When some positions get to telecommute and others don’t, it can create jealousy and misunderstanding, so you must develop and communicate good justifications and reasoning for telecommuting.
• Telecommuting offers you the chance to provide flexibility in the usage of office space. We have the policy that if you telecommute more than 1 day a week then your office is subject to office sharing or hoteling. We can continue to grow rapidly without cramping our employees’ work environment.
• You MUST support telecommuting efforts with strong and reliable technology so that employees can access their systems remotely. I am writing this while sitting on the back deck of a Florida condo – while accessing computer files in our Texas office.
• For most positions we wait between 60 and 90 days before launching telecommuting for the majority of a week. This gives the new employee the opportunity to get to know the organization prior to working solo. It also gives the manager an opportunity to assess the new employee’s communication style and ability to take direction and meet goals.
• We use telecommuting as a benefit for our employees both during recruiting and ongoing retention.

Green is good!!! It is great to know that we are reducing the fuel consumption of our employees, reducing emissions from our cars, and congestion on our highways. Many of our employees appreciate these things and all of them that telecommute appreciate saving money on gas, as the price continues to climb.

Following are quotes from just two of Aquire’s telecommuters.

“I’m very grateful that Aquire encourages telecommuting. Working from home several days a week not only gives me the freedom to take care of personal business while still getting my job done, but I also save quite a bit on gas costs every week.”

“As a single mother, I’m so thankful for Aquire’s telecommuting policy. It allows me to be home when my daughter gets out of school. I’m able to help her with her homework while saving money on after-school care. My daughter is so happy about it that she says she wants to work at Aquire when she grows up!”

If you are working on proposals for expanding or introducing telecommuting to your office, looking up telecommuting on Wikipedia is not too bad a place to start.

Telecommuting 101 article
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/09/MN3C10KV8E.DTL&hw=telecommuting&sn=001&sc=1000

April 2008 Article regarding American Electronics Association Study
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/22/BUEC1087U5.DTL

*Leonhard, Woody, The Underground Guide to Telecommuting, Addison-Wesley 1995, ISBN 0-201-48343-2

Cheers,
Lois

Posted in HR Trends
Tags: telecommuting