The reason why working from home DOES NOT WORK.

It doesn’t work because people don’t know how to do it. Companies who just decide to allow it in bad weather or possibly by manager within an organization and don’t have policies and plans are bound to fail.  Failure includes people not working or taking advantage of the situation. Once that happens then leadership will have a bad taste in their collective organizational mouth and will discourage it.

The sinister background story!

My experience with WFH (as well called it) as a manager of teams was not… shall we say stellar.  In the past I was in charge of a hardware technical group. We never worked (initially) at home. It was difficult to do and we were not prepared.  We supported infrastructure (help desk and 2nd level technical support) for large company and a lot of work was remote. This meant that we needed to be on our phones with headphones multitasking work and having good devices to be able to accomplish things.  The techs would try to remotely image a device (having the image on a stick with someone 2k miles away ) and remoting into another machine to download updates and another to update video drivers. They frankly preferred to come in and work. We always did go in and then the new CIO decided we would try working from home.  We outfited the larger department with soft phones and ensured everyone had a portable device (they just had moved to laptops from desktop a few years earlier so it’s not inconceivable!). The experience I had was that we never had a discussion about the expectations and what was needed. In this position I had people who didn’t actually have WiFi at home (they got it soon after the first or time bad weather kept us home).  Some indicated that they were not actually working and kept the mouse moving around ! (really!!!???!!). Some indicated frustration because their home WiFi was not fast enough to be productive. Just trying to remote into one machine was maddening. The final straw was that the devices that the service desk first and second level used were about 4 gig of ram. They were barely usable in the best of circumstances. They team was frustrated by the lack of response and inability to move more quickly especially in the less than ideal circumstances.

I more recently led a technical department in the software side and while they were much more capable of doing their job remotely, we still did not have a plan.  One team member did come rolling into the system at 10 am – we started texting her earlier and she announced she had “overslept”. Not sure that was a stellar moment either.  

Ultimately I wrote a work at home plan for our company.  The company needs to set ground rules with expectations. It would need to cover at least in part:

• The expectations for each person.  A ‘rules of conduct’ or agreed upon rules.  
• Creating a plan  – equipment/time/place etc to be able to do be successful.  
  • My sons company actually sent home dual monitors/keyboard.mouse and docking station to support his working at home.  (Our company did not provide that)
  • Working means checking in more often. Have an employee that hates IM’s ? (Sometimes I do) well as a leader you need to respect it but they need to make it successful.
  • Give them suggestions for how to succeed – create a schedule expected (with slack if there is family needs or appointments that need to be tended to with the understanding that the time should be accounted for).  Suggest that they plan accordingly for meals and take breaks often. Make sure they know how to attend meetings and ensure all software and hardware is working.

 

Success Story!  

I had an employee who was sick and needed to work from home for two weeks.  She could not drive to work but she could work. So I told my manager I would setup a process to make this successful.  Since she is an engineer it would be ill advised to hit her up whenever I felt like it but we agreed first thing to check in and make sure goals were being reviewed and updated.  Kan ban was done remotely. She was included in meetings and she was able to present work she had accomplished to the team. At the end of the two week period we were able to show evidence of her success and completion of the tasks assigned.  She felt included and our team was successful.

Working at home can work if you plan well!

Without a plan even the best team members tended to wander off.  The goal is to be successful. Remember that people are very different.  What works well for one person might not work well for others. If some people need to get together then perhaps they can work with others close to home in a satellite office.  The goal is flexibility and people working together to be successful. And in the effort to reducing the carbon footprint , reducing the commute and gas used is also a good  point to make.