Working remotely for an incredible company, clad in your stretchy yoga apparel or sweatpants, with your pooch nestled at your feet or your cat sauntering around your desktop, is appealing to many of us. The reality of a great pajama job, however, can be different than you visualize.
Here are eight myths I want to debunk straightaway:
There are a few reasons for this requirement. Some companies want or need to see you in person from time to time. These in-office meetings might be to connect with clients, or take a training workshop, or launch a new initiative or project with co-workers.
There can also be accounting, legal, licensing, and tax particulars that require a firm to hire employees who live in specific states or countries.
The fact is employers who hire remote workers are hip to the out-of-sight need to trust their employees to do their work on time and put in the necessary hours. They usually put up some guard rails in terms of “office hours” to have the assurance that customers, supervisors, and teammates can easily contact the tele-working employees.
Some jobs may be a hybrid where you must be available front and center for a specific time frame (say, 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. Eastern Time) but can adjust your additional hours to suit your needs.
A set schedule can be in your best interest. My advice is that you design a daily work schedule with your boss and let your colleagues know what it is. Otherwise, you could be inviting phone calls and emails late at night and on weekends It's easy to get sucked into being free to work any time, any day. And if you love your work, like I do, you might lose track of time.
I clearly recall how difficult it was to get myself to the office in time for a 9 a.m. mandatory staff meeting every morning when I worked an office job. These days, though, I start the day by 6 a.m., seven days a week. I work many more hours than when I toiled in-house—and that's by choice. But, in truth, for the sake of my psychological well-being, I could use someone to tug me away from my laptop sometimes.
If you work for one company, try to set clear work hours to prevent phone calls, emails, and texts without boundaries on your personal time. From my experience, to work from home on a regular basis, you must be well-organized, have time management skills, and be a self-starter. If a company hires you as a remote worker, this is non-negotiable. Bear with my repetition on this point: I can't repeat this mantra enough as essential to your success as a remote worker.
Some employers have a hard time getting their head around the notion that you can manage others when you work from home. And managing often goes hand-in-hand with a promotion to a higher level on the corporate ladder.
That said, when it comes to getting promoted (and the heftier pay that goes with it), you may still get tripped up in the out-of-sight, out-of-mind manager mentality—even if the promotion doesn't require managing. Your boss may just want to have more access to you. So keep this in mind and do whatever you can to be visible in other ways. The solution: regular, steady communication.
The bad news is that if you work from home and aren't proactive about seeking promotions, your salary can flatline, which can have a nasty impact on your ability to save for retirement. When your income doesn't rise, it's tougher to ramp up the amount you put into your 401(k) or a similar employer-sponsored savings plan every year. Your employer's match will be stuck as a result, too.
In full disclosure, you might be fine with not getting pushed up the line. I've passed on promotions to climb the editors' ranks because I knew it would be hard to be a manager while working from home. I'm not disappointed about this. That's because my meaning of career success isn't taking on more responsibility and being a boss. Plus, it wouldn't jive with my temperament.
Your best argument for earning more pay, of course, is a great performance—wherever you do your work.
Do that at your own peril. You probably can't avoid going into work altogether or the human connection. As I discussed above, if you want your career to progress and develop, you do need to stay connected with colleagues and managers.
To combat that, I recommend you make a conscientious effort to show up on a regular basis for meetings (some of these may be virtual for a while, but in time in-person office gatherings will return) and essential check-ins, providing, of course, you live near the employer's headquarters or a branch.
That said, you need a dollop of people-time. Loners will be sorry. You will regret it if you don't dig down and push yourself to get out of the house from time to time, and squeeze in an out-of-the-office lunch, or coffee with colleagues and bosses, providing they're in commuting distance. And the effort might take on extra meaning because in-office co-workers may have a chip on their shoulder that you have the luxury of remote working, and bad blood can develop. With a little oomph, though, you can dodge the lingering resentment that can be a potential stumbling block down the road.
At the very least, periodically pick up the phone and connect voice-to-voice in real time with an office-bound mate. Every so often, say no to text or email, and make that call. This can zap some precious time. I know this because, since I work solitary so much of the time, I personally find that I start jabbering away once I start a phone conversation. I barely realize my thirst for someone to talk to until the conversation gets rolling.
I hang up energized. That time genuinely builds fellowship and friendship and keeps you in the loop with office happenings in a way a typed note simply can't.
I fancy myself a borderline introvert (although friends disagree). I enjoy the quiet of my home and my own company (with Zena, my dog), but I admit I miss the connecting, friendships, and chances to meet new people in an office—those things rarely happen when you work from home. Even when you go in for meetings, you never quite get that.
You can convince your boss that it's time for them to join the trend and let you, too, work from home. Here's how:
First, you may have already been working remotely due to the COVID-19 stay-at-home mandate where you live. So have some mojo. Take stock of your previous telecommuting performance and recognize that you're solidly prepared for the arrangement.
Show, don't tell. When you're out of sight, your boss wants to know he or she can trust you. If you've been working from home the last few months, pull together a record of your projects completed on time, or ahead of schedule. List new business landed, say, or any other measure that allows your boss to get a bead on how you met the challenges of working remotely and the results.
Tout your digital communication skills. You must have a good handle on all aspects of communicating to managers, clients, and your team of co-workers via video chats and file sharing. Whether it's Slack messaging, Zoom, Skype video meetings, or a using a collaboration app like Google Docs, seamless communication is expected.
Have employees from your company worked from home in the past? Did they work partially or fully remotely? Is your job appropriate for remote work? These answers are essential to find out before you start plotting out your plan. If no one from your company has ever worked remotely, you might have a more challenging sell to your boss.
If you know colleagues who work from home, ask them how it's going, and what challenges they have with it. What's the upside? How did they ask the boss if they could work from home either full-time or part-time?
Don't wing it. Write out a precise proposal beforehand that covers every nitty-gritty detail of how you'll telecommute, including the number of hours you'll work from home, when you'll be in the office to work or attend meetings, and how you'll factor in unanticipated overtime.
You must be able to articulate how having the flexibility to work from home will make you more efficient. It will remove a long commute, for example, and allow you more time on the job. Increased productivity is one reason employers are often eager to let employees work remotely.
You might slip in your request to your manager during a routine performance review or a scheduled meeting about your career objectives. But, in my opinion, it deserves its own standalone meeting.
And that takes some preparation. It's hard to know in advance when your boss will be having a decent day (and potentially be more open to contemplating your proposal). But there are classic clues to when it's a good time to have the “work from home conversation,” and when it isn't—it just takes some research. For instance, is your department facing cutbacks? Is your boss's boss putting on pressure to raise the bar on their game, or is there a big project nearing a deadline? If so, you might need to cool your heels and wait until things are less stressful.
Don't put your appeal in terms of how you will benefit from working from home. (I'll be less stressed, I can spend less time commuting, I can spend more time with family.) Even though these are all essential to bring up at some stage, as I mentioned previously, the crux of the conversation must be about how it will be an advantage to your boss and how your employer will profit. You'll be a more productive worker, for example, or there will be more time for you to work on nights and weekends if the position demands that.
Your opening salvo to your boss: “I'd like to explore the opportunity to work from home and how you and the department can benefit.”
Once workers have returned to the office, having an employee ask if they can work from home may be new terrain for your boss. And their gut reaction is often that you might not work as hard, might be less accessible, or might be unable to collaborate with your team on the spur of the moment. By nature, bosses tend to worry about not being able to control what you do with your time and to keep tabs on your whereabouts. This feeling of powerlessness may be subconscious, but that reaction is simply human nature.
It's your job to be able to quash these qualms. Rather than asking if you can immediately transition to fully remote work, take it one step at a time. This could be through a three- to six-month trial period, or through a shift to working from home one or two days per week. After this probationary period, you can go back and assess how working from home is going for both of you.
During that trial period, interaction and communication will be the key to your success, so you need to stay connected and open about any obstacles, either on your part or from your boss's perspective, that need to be dealt with immediately. The pilot period is a precarious one. So use that time to show your boss that you're up to the task of working from home—and that as you previously told him or her, it will make you more productive.
For me, my friends, and colleagues who also work at home, deciding when to get our jobs done—whether it's 5 a.m. or 10 p.m.—makes us feel more in charge, more alive, and more engaged.
Show, don't tell.
There may be a gap between when you make the first ask to your boss and when you fully change over into the work-from-home schedule that you have in mind. Many compromises and tweaks may need to be made along the way. So take things one step at a time. Your best argument for working from home, of course, is a great performance—wherever you do your work.
Not surprisingly, there are career coaches who offer this subset of training. Virtual Work Insider (virtualworkinsider.com), for instance, is a firm started by Sacha Connor, who pioneered virtual work at The Clorox Company. While Connor's firm primarily works with companies to build strategies and personalized coaching to train their managers to lead remote teams, the firm also provides coaching to help workers create a plan to convince managers to let them work remotely.
Negotiating tip: In a recent study by Stanford University, researchers found that when employees worked from home, their productivity significantly increased. The time they usually spent chitchatting with co-workers, commuting to and from work, and taking breaks was now used to embrace a focused, full workday. You might mention this finding to your manager.
More subtly, you can't read body language during a conference meeting if you're calling in from a remote location. Just seeing your colleagues virtually may prevent you from understanding what's really going on.
But you really don't have to be alone. And thanks to advancements in technology, that's rapidly changing, with audio and visual Gotomeeting, Skype, Zoom, and Google chats taking over as the preferred way to have virtual meetings. Plus, the almost-like-being-there workplace instant messaging through Slack really does help you feel the love of being part of a team.
What people tend to miss most about working in an office are spur-of-the-moment poke-your-head-in visits. Smart use of technology like the apps mentioned above makes up some of that difference, though. I know one remote manager, for example, who recently ran a “virtual baby shower” for one of her team members.
And again, the phone really doesn't weigh a ton. “I often opt for a phone call rather than an email,” says a pal who's a telecommuting IBM sales executive. “I know not everyone appreciates the time zap, but I preface it by saying: ‘It's a quick question.’” She thinks phone calls result in more honest responses than she'd get with emails. I agree with her.