Working from home

The whole concept of working from home has been getting some discussion lately due to newly appointed CEO Marissa Mayer pulling the plug on it for Yahoo employees. There has been talk for and against, but since I have been telecommuting for several months now, I thought I would weigh in.

The pros of telecommuting as our company had found were that oeprating expenses go down while employee satisfaction goes up, making it a win-win. Add the benefit to the environment by removing commuters, and it seems like a really good deal.

Well, it is if you get a higher or equal level of productivity from the workers (because greater worker satisfaction does not automatically translate to higher productivity) or that if there is a decrease in productivity it is slight enough that it will be offset by the reduced operating expenses.

Our conversion was not done lightly. There were pilot groups, as groups rolled out it was done in stages, and before they even got to planning that we all took tests that predicted whether we would do well in the home environment or not.

For our team it seems to have gone pretty well. That has been common with many companies, though it sounds like it was not the case with Yahoo. We all had pretty good work ethics all along. When we were less productive it was usually because a conversation got started and went on a tangent and pulled multiple people in. Based on that, we are probably more productive now. Numbers seem to bear that out.

In my case, I got back over two hours a day that was spent in transit, which leaves me better rested, and with more time to give to my personal life. That is helpful. It is certainly a money-saver, because even though it should be really easy to pack a lunch, I was always forgetting or running out of time. Our bus pass was partially subsidized but not all. We may use slightly more electricity at home now, but it has not been noticeable. The financial benefits are fairly small compared to the time benefits, but they are still there.

The biggest gain is the relative freedom. I generally did not have specific things to do on my breaks, so I would go to the bathroom, fill up my water bottle, and it wasn’t particularly restful. Here I may get some laundry going, or start dinner, or even lie down on my bed for fifteen minutes. Plus, at random points during the day, dogs come up and nuzzle me, and some day breaks will involve petting kitties again. All of those things are more of a boost.

Also, we no longer pass germs around.

There is a downside, such as it is, in that I am less engaged with the team. I have been thinking about that recently because it came up in my review with my supervisor. That has not been caused by the change to working from home, though it helped. What happened was that I started getting sick of my coworkers.

Actually, it was only three. There are coworkers I like a lot, and when we have on-site meetings, seeing them is great. There were just three that bugged me. One is very needy, and she really thinks she is cute in this, but she is not. She is not a bad person, but it gets tiresome. Another is friends with my sister, and so at times she would mention something she had heard from my sister, or my sister would mention things she had heard from the coworker, and I did not like that. Still, the biggest problem was the third one.

I had noticed that she seemed to have some social anxiety, I guess, or possibly that she hated us all, but we started this new process for contacting people if we found that they had made mistakes. I hit a run where I forgot an exception that could happen with one business line that I had not worked with much, and I forgot it at a time when we hit an unusually high number of incidences of that exception. This allowed me to notice how amazingly passive aggressive she could be. Like, I thought she had social anxiety, and all along it was really borderline personality disorder.

I have since learned that she does this to everyone, so I don’t feel like it is personal, exactly, but it doesn’t warm me up to her either. I have gotten some others that have been about things that were not wrong, but she would have done them differently. (Bully for her.) Still, this was the first time her issues came up for me, and no matter how clear her own issues were, they coincided with a real failure on my part, which I am not used to in a job situation.

This affected my feelings for this coworker, but it also dealt a huge blow to my confidence. I am used to being good at my job. For a while there I was feeling very vulnerable and insecure, and I just didn’t want to be doing it anymore. I started really getting into gear on my writing on my own time, and ultimately, that’s what I want to do. I don’t want to advance within the company. I want to establish myself as a writer and leave the company.

It hasn’t changed everything. I still have good output, in terms of both quantity and quality. I will never forget Idaho ERISA rules again. That one is burned in my soul. At the same time, I am not as engaged. I don’t chat as much. If I were still in the office, I know I would find myself pulled in more easily. At home it is easy to be more reclusive. My life satisfaction is higher, but it is less intertwined with my job. I think that’s healthy, but I could probably be more balanced. I am going to try and participate more.

So there is a definite risk to sending people out of the office. You can lose that esprit de corps. We did great things with the toy drive in previous years that were just not matched this year. I mean, I think we still won, but just the fact that I am not sure shows that it was less of an issue. There are people for whom losing that sense of belonging could seriously reduce their motivation to work. There are people for whom there are too many distractions at home. Those issues need to be looked at.

Reducing our dependence on fossil fuels alone is reason enough to look at a wider implementation of telecommuting. The potential personal and economic benefits are good reasons for looking at it too. The risks to productivity and team spirit also need to be weighed. Okay, I don’t feel a strong need to be connected to my job and all of my coworkers, but it may be important for management, and I do understand the need to feel connected to society at large, and for some people their job might be the biggest part of that.

So, those are some of the things to think about. I can only tell you my own experience, and now I have. Your mileage may vary.