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Can anyone point me to resources to guide me in setting up telecommuting for one of my DRs?

I have a direct, an individual contributor, who's decided to go back to school full time, in Chicago (2 hours down the road), but she proposed continuing to work for us remotely part time. It's a job that would lend itself to that and I hate to lose her, she's been an ideal employee!

Long story short, it's been approved for a 90-day trial. I've been directed to create a position description "to include communication, work assignment, work evaluation, feedback, office visits. Quality control of work, time sheets, etc."

This is a new thing for this company... up to now the CEO has been categorically against the concept, so it's a bit of a coup for me. :) (I like to think that stopping by his office personally to talk to him about it, answer his questions etc, helped.)

I definitely need to pick the brain of our director of HR too -- he has been telling me how much he'd like to go this direction, so he must have some ideas. And I thought I'd ask you all too. Besides, I've been away too long! [startups of new planes... a good kind of busy, but still busy]

jhack's picture

The core of remote work is measurable outputs:  work product created, calls made, deals closed, code written, designs on paper.   

"You can't manage what you can't measure"   And you can't prove to your CEO it works if you can't measure it, either.  

Listen to the virtual teams podcast:  http://www.manager-tools.com/2005/10/virtual-teams 

John Hack

terrih's picture

Forgot about that episode... thanks for the reminder!

ashdenver's picture

Terri,

Our company has a telecommuting agreement which both the manager & DR sign to confirm understanding of expectations.  As John mentioned, it's all about the measurables.  In our world, it's based on survey score, productivity and client escalations.  You start to suck in any of those areas and you lose days of remote capabilities until you ultimately lose your privileges.  The survey scores are measured and tracked monthly by person by our corporate office which makes it fairly easy to monitor.  Productivity is reported locally but is also system generated so therefore easy to monitor as well. 

The client escalation piece is where things aren't quite so easy to track.  If you're dealing with something like that (not system generated as a measurement of performance) you'll just want to make sure that you're keeping fair and accurate track of things across the entire team.  Marking down "Jane had 15 client escalations this month but only 3 last month" won't be nearly as helpful to you and might even land you in hot water if applied unevenly.  If you're also tracking everyone's escalations in the same manner as you're tracking the remote's escalations, you might see that everyone had a five-fold spike in escalations this month which might point to a market condition or sales issue or similar external force rather than poor performance because of telecommuting availability.  When it comes to performance metrics for the purpose of telecommuting priveliges, I would definitely want to compare to the rest of the team.  Certainly if the system generated metrics aren't there, it's a performance issue no matter what and should be dealt with accordingly.

Now, to be fair, this generally applies to employees who would otherwise be working in the office but don't want to come in as often.  At first, they get a one-day-per-week remote trial period and can increase to two-days-per-week remote when they show they are able to work effectively at home without disruption to the clients or internal business partners. 

We also have homeshored individuals who never ever come into the office (or anyone who's regularly scheduled to work remotely three days per week or more.)  There are different concessions made for homeshore folks - like the company will reimburse for long-distance, office supplies, etc.  (Telecommuting folks don't get any financial offsets as the privilege to work from home is considered perk enough!)

This is more on the administrative side of things and the cast on Virtual Teams (as I recall) is more on the management side of things.  Hopefully you have resources available to assist with the technical side of things. With the right techical setup, it shouldn't make much of a difference whether your DR is co-located or remote.  

I hope some of my ramblings have been helpful.

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terrih's picture

Ash, you brought up some points that I hadn't thought of and will want to consider. Even though my department serves only internal customers.

We do have some experience as a company with people working remotely, though mostly it's mechanics at stations, and pilots and flight attendants of course. Not so much with the office workers like us. In that respect I have to sort of blaze the trail.

Thanks for the ideas.

terrih's picture

I've re-listened to the Virtual Teams podcast. Is it a deal-breaker if she can't come to the office? She's selling her car.

And public transportation from Chicago to Rockford is... almost, but not quite.

Not that I can't think of a work-around or two. Especially with the company paying for it (I should hope!)

I'm asking the question mainly to get a feel for how much to insist with whom. :)