| Blog Entry - Saturday, January 20th, 2007 | Add / Read (4) |
I worked at home for almost a decade. For some of that I was completely self-employed, working contract training and consulting jobs, doing freelance writing and editing, and making training videos. During other times, I was either completely or partially employed by a single company or client.
I had very mixed feelings about working from home. On the one hand, it did give me the potential flexibility in my schedule that could be very useful for going for a lunch-time run or a morning yoga class, or to finish up a grad school paper, or to have lunch with a friend, or to work from anywhere in the world. On the other hand, I hardly ever took advantage of those things because I was always so worried that I would be perceived as not working diligently enough - regardless of the number of hours I actually put in.
eWeek has an article that show many executives think that telecommuting is or will hold back a career. I think I agree. There's not much substitute for face-time with the people in your office. Even when being in an office is less conducive to getting all your work done or when it throws your work-life balance out of whack... Well, you're there for the water-cooler conversations. Now, with IBM and others touting the possibilities of "knowledge collisions" in Second Life that particular issue may begin to resolve itself. Still, the old adage of "out of sight, out of mind" is somewhat pertinent. I can't count the number of times I'd get a phone call about a decision that had been made by the folks in the office without consulting me - not out of any rancor or desire to cut me out of the decision, but just because that's who was on hand to decide. While we have phones, video, email, second life, IM and so many other pieces of technology that can help us to communicate from a distance, many people still put the highest value and priority on the face-to-face communication.
Author: Libby Ingrassia
Posted at: 09:08:09 AM
