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Getting Out of the Home Office
As a manager for a consulting services organization who works from home, I occasionally need to get out of the home office and actually meet with humans face-to-face. Although the rigors of the airport ritual make me wince when I think about traveling, I enjoy getting out of the house and into a real office talking with people in the flesh.
Leading customer meetings in-person is much more demanding mentally and physically than conducting them via phone. If you don’t get out there once in a while, you get out of practice and your skills start to decline.
If you’ve been home-bound for too long, I recommend getting out there and creating a reason to get into an office. Meet with your coworkers or your customer in-person. Doing so could prove to be rejuvenatinating if you feel that the working from home pattern has been repeating itself for too long.
If you manage a team of telecommuters, find a way to get an in-person team meeting at least once a year. Over the years, I’ve encountered budgetary resistance to holding these but it is critical that these be held. The team bonding is one of the biggest reasons for it. It’s hard for people to feel like a team if they’re geographically dispersed and never see each other in person.
Telecommuting full time has it’s benefits but staying locked up in your home with no outside stimulation is not healthy over the long term.
Bad Seafood and Customers Don't Mix
I remember my first “real day” on the job of my first WFH position. I had just taken a consulting position for a hot pre-IPO software company and I really felt like I had taken my career up a notch. My pay was up 75% over my previous job and everyone I knew that worked for this company was poised and scary smart. As a result, I felt immense pressure for my first days and weeks to be performed at my best.
It was primarily a travel job – I worked from home and flew to customer sites on a weekly basis. Unfortunately, my very first customer visit in the new position didn’t transpire as I would have liked.
I traveled on Sunday night for a Monday early start. It was probably a large insurance company having issues with their software implementation and I was to parachute in and save the day. Those were some of my favorite engagements: the customer could be losing millions of dollars a day with a non-performing system and you had hours to turn around major improvements. I was always rather good at it.
My flight in was uneventful and I made it to the hotel without issue and proceeded to find a restaurant to grab some dinner. I located a major-chain Italian restaurant (small town options were limited) and ordered the seafood pasta dish. Dinner went fine and I went home to bed early so that I could be on top of my game for my first-ever customer.
I began throwing up around 3:00 AM and continued to do so for about 4 hours. I cursed the chain restaurant all night and vowed never to return to any of their locations as long as I lived (10 years later, I haven’t returned).
Nonetheless, I cleaned myself up and left sleep-deprived and dehydrated for the customer site with my suit and tie properly applied. I remember that the day went remarkably normal and nothing really came of my weakened state and I completed the engagement successfully.
It was just one of those times in life where you wonder to yourself if someone is pulling the strings, controlling your fate and trying to mess with you. I have this image of me as a marionette with an ethereal figure above me directing me to eat bad seafood and laughing an evil laugh: “Ha, ha, ha, let’s see how he handles this curve ball”. What are the odds that the only time I get food poisoning is the night before one of the most important professional days of my career at the time?
75% of U.S. Workforce "Mobile" by 2011
This article is stating that by 2011, there will be 1 billion mobile workers in the world and 75% of the U.S. workforce will be mobile. I take that as meaning telecommuters plus workers who travel heavily for their job.
The usual causes for the trend are outlined in the article (reduced corporate real estate costs, proliferation of wi-fi availability, etc.), but for the first time that I can recall, the article states that companies who embrace it will enjoy a competitive advantage, not just happy workers and reduced costs:
“Organizations deploying mobile solutions enjoy a strategic competitive advantage over their competitors who have not invested in integrating mobility into their cultural roadmap.”