Is Work At Home working?

To tell if you Work at Home program is working out, you ideally need measurements on how well the in-office situation was working out for comparison. Without these, most of your analysis of the situation will be based on conjecture and subjectivity. Not that conclusions cannot be made, but they won't have the WOW punch you're looking for.

Some measurements you should know about your team, regardless of your work location include:

• Engagement scores - Using some sort of periodic survey, through a 3rd party or your own, that measures how actively committed your associates are to your team, your product, your company, and your mission. 
• Sick days - Average number of unplanned time off for physical or mental health.
• Turnover - Average number of associates that leave your team in a given time period. Be careful with this measure! If an associate leaves because they received an internal promotion or opportunity based on their desired growth path and your support for them, that's not negative. Make sure you have a means to separate turnover into subcategories to tell those stories.
• Requisition Fulfillment Rate - Average length of time it takes to hire someone in to any open positions in your team.
• Diversity - This can be tricky. There's privacy issues involved. And you don't want to appear to be driven by a quota or some equal opportunity ratio. While you may not "measure" this, a diverse team is a stronger team, and worth bragging about. 
• Budget - Comparison of your actual spend to your budgeted cost, and how well you meet that budget (or hopefully come in under!)
• Delivery - Comparison of your actual delivery dates to your scheduled delivery dates, and how well you provide on-time service (or ahead of schedule).
• Quality - This can be two-fold. There are hard numbers, such as the number of incident tickets you receive, the amount of downtime, etc. But there are soft numbers, such as how well the service actual meets the customer's need, the ease of use, etc. Ideally, you would measure both.
• Net Promoter Scores - Customer loyalty metric, which basically assesses the likelihood that your customer would recommend your service.
• Customer Satisfaction Surveys - Other measures of how well you are meeting customer expectations, providing them with innovative solutions, being a trusted partner for their needs, and so on.

I'm sure you can think of more. For those thinking this doesn't apply because you don't sell a product or "face the public", I challenge you to open your minds a bit. Each of us is providing a service to someone else, a customer, or else you wouldn't have a job!

Now that you have all those numbers, what next? You should compare those numbers while you were in the office to the results after you have been at home for a while. Work at home should have a positive impact on at least one of those categories, while not negatively impacting any. If work at home is really working, you will see improvement in multiple categories and no setbacks. 

If you are seeing a little setback, you may be able to address this through education and support. Sometimes it takes a little while to get the hang of work at home, so don't be too quick to judge or overreact. But, if you are seeing multiple setbacks, or significant ones, it may be time to re-evaluate.

If everything is the same, where you've seen no setbacks but no gains, then it is still not working. Work at home should be driving something, or you wouldn't be doing it. You might as well stay in the office if you can't improve by being at home.

Don't you... forget about me

One of the questions I hear most often from associates considering working from home is "Aren't you afraid you will be forgotten?" My answer is always the same: NO. How could anyone forget about me?

But seriously, I don't worry about it. Why not? Because I manage my own PR (Public Relations) campaign, and I mean I really manage it. Whether you are in the office or hundreds of miles away, people will forget about you if you let them. It's up to you to own your brand and market yourself. This is increasingly important if the old adage of 'out of sight, out of mind' has any truth to it.

So how exactly does one do this? You start by putting yourself out there. Why do you think I have this blog? As you are reading my pearls of wisdom, you can't help but have a little seed planted about my awesomeness. This is one part of my overall strategy for keeping my name in the front of you even when my face is not.

Managing your PR campaign is not the same as doing your daily job. You do your daily job to do this to be paid today. Your PR is about your job tomorrow, next week, next year. For your daily job, it may be enough that only your boss knows you do quality work. But if you boss was gone tomorrow, what would you do? When you have a wider reputation for great things, you can use that street cred to help you through the unknown of tomorrow. That net you are casting will be there to catch you.

Here are some tips on ways to make your name known at your company:

• Teach a class to others on a topic in which you consider yourself an expert
• Write (and publish) a blog on similar topics
• Volunteer for pilot initiatives, special programs, and new ventures
• Be active in social media (internally and externally)
• Get engaged of member of a club or group
• Become a mentor or mentee
• Don't be afraid to put your name on your work and take credit for it

Since I have been work at home, I've received awards from my peers, expanded my team, increased my responsibilities, and been financially rewarded. In fact, I believe a far wider and diverse group of people recognize me now than ever before. Why? Because I own it.

Don't give people the opportunity to forget about you.

Stop drawing the line

I hear about so many people that want to "draw the line" between business and personal. They won't friend coworkers on Facebook. They don't hang out with coworkers after hours. They try not to share too much personal stuff in the office.

I have news for you - You ARE a person. And as a result, you cannot shut off the personal stuff!

More importantly, you shouldn't.

I am friends with someone on Facebook that I know from work. We've never met face-to-face. A few weeks ago he was posting about a family emergency. I wouldn't have known about it otherwise. But, our paths crossed at work again the next week and we were able to chat about it. I could let him know I cared, and he appreciated it. It wasn't faceless work, it was two people that support each other in all things life.

When you are in the office, it's easy to catch up on the casual stuff at the water cooler or walking down the hallway. It's convenient for someone to show you their phone with the latest pic of their kid doing whatever it is they are into now. When you get to know people as more than machine parts building the work widget, somehow building that work widget becomes easier. That's because we aren't machines!

When you are differently located, it's hard to get connected to those casual encounters. By being disconnected from them, you become disconnected from work, which may result in less productivity, less engagement, and less quality. That sense of belonging is a strong driver and must be supplemented.

So for me, I don't draw a line that says coworkers must stay in this box, and non-coworkers in that box. It's one big box. I don't turn on/off like a robot. I am not emotionless like a robot.

My work life is richer because I know (and care) about the people I work with. Allowing them into my personal space doesn't intrude on my life, it makes my work better, and therefore makes my non-work better.

I'm not saying you need to suddenly friend 50,000 people are share your innermost secrets. But consider taking down the wall a little.

Represent

Did you know that the entire future of Work-At-Home rests on your shoulders? YOUR shoulders? Well, it does.

Work at home employees are constantly under a microscope. We know that we have to work 150%+ compared to the average worker to "compensate" for our distance. But what happens when work at home goes wrong? Answer: You ruin it for everyone.

It's an unfair reality, but any misstep when you are remote is associated with the fact that you are remote. The same mistake could happen in the office, or be worse in the office, but the world is wearing local-colored glasses and only sees your demographics. Whatever happened, being at home is to blame.

Worse, when they blame home for the mistake, they cast a wide net and associate that mistake with everyone. You all remember Yahoo! pulling back, right? Whatever their issue was, it surely wasn't the entire company. Closer to home, I am getting questioned about my own remote work because it is failing in another area. I have news for you - My team has outstanding engagement scores, high productivity, great quality, and the best individual people you'll ever meet. Whatever *your* problem is, don't reflect it on me!

But that is what inevitably will happen. Remote work is a scapegoat for whatever the real problem is. And yet the opposite is not true. If you are a rockstar at home, you don't see a movement for everyone else to do it. It only happens when it goes belly up.

What does this mean for you? It means that you must realize that you represent the entire remote community. Your success is your success, but your failure is failure for us all. You have a huge burden to always shine, and you probably don't even realize it. So I'm here to tell you, on behalf of all the remote workers out there (and especially myself, but I LOVE working from home), you better wow your colleagues every day. If not, we're forming a posse...

To quote Spock, in honorable memory of Leonard Nimoy: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one."

Live long and prosper (from home).

Manage by measuring

Probably the most popular question I hear from managers about working at home is "How will I know my people are working if I don't see them?" To this my answer is always the same: "How do you know they are working now?"

If you are managing only based on the fact that you see someone's smiling face at their desk from 8-5, then you are a bad manager. Yes, I said it. The truth hurts sometimes.

Management should always be based on measurement. You should have a system in place that allows you to set goals and track progress towards those goals. Those goals should be SMART goals and have enough meat to really hold someone accountable for their work. They should focus on delivery, quality, effectiveness, customer satisfaction, and value-add.

I've seen associates do all sorts of things while in visible distance from their leaders. They spend all day on Facebook. They moonlight with a 2nd job. They daydream and wander aimlessly just collecting a paycheck. They may even be trying to do a good job, but may not be competent or need help. If you aren't measuring from multiple viewpoints along the way, you won't catch it until it is too late and you could, in fact, bring yourself down as a result.

So riddle me this - Would you rather

1. See your team members but have no idea if they are really performing, or
2. Never see your team members but have high confidence in their performance based on tangible measurements?

Hopefully you answered #2! If you are truly doing your job as a manager and have a measurement system in place, then physical location becomes inconsequential. 

Snow Day

Our local offices are closed today due to snow. Many of my work-at-home colleagues are bummed that they don't get the traditional "Snow Day". I get it... who wouldn't want the equivalent of a free vacation day? Sleep in, stay in your PJ's, watch trashy TV. It's almost nostalgic.

But I look at the Snow Day as a gift in a different sense. I'm thankful that I didn't have to listen to the weather this morning to determine if I was going to the office. Or worse, have it NOT be a snow day and have to drive in that mess! I'm thankful that every day I get to avoid traffic, not just on snow days. I'm thankful that I don't have to wear 7 layers of clothes to walk from my car to the office building. With the upcoming -30 wind chills later this week, those couple of city blocks are brutal!

Snow days for me are a gift. They remind me of how lucky I am to work from home. And, when the rest of the office is shoveling their driveway or making snowmen, I'm happy to be working without interruption and get a little caught up for a change. When they come back to work, they will feel days behind, and I'll feel a little ahead of the game.

Snow days help level the playing field, at least for a moment.

Get a backup plan

Random "hiccups" can happen whether you are at home or at work. The power can go out. The internet could go bump. Your phone could get cut off. All of these issues will prevent you from working as you usually do. In the office, everyone is there, so everyone knows. Being universally down is somehow more acceptable than being down at home. When you are at home, you are expected to be connected and never have these mishaps. So what happens when you do?

You have a much bigger responsibility to be prepared when you are at home. You need to be able to get a hold of your coworkers to let them know what is going on, and you need to find a way to work.

The easiest thing to do to prepare is to create your contact list. You should have the email addresses and phone numbers of your key contacts stored offline. This could be on paper, on your cell phone, on your personal PC, or whatever works for you. But consider all the options. If you lose power, you lose personal devices as well.

When you let people know you're situation, you have to let them know what you are doing about it. All of this will depend on your role and what you need to accomplish for the day. This can vary, so understanding all of your options under any situation is important.

• If you have power, but no internet, you may be able to work offline. If you have heads down work, you have materials locally you can work on, or your work is mostly by phone. You may be able to get by somewhat disconnected for a bit.
• If you have no power, working offline is going to be hard. Your battery will eventually die. You need to find another location to work such as a family member, physical office, or coffee shop.
• If you have both connections, but experience technical difficulties with your work connection only, you may have alternative connection options. Check to see if your company has a web mail client or an email app that will give you some means to connect.

If you are not prepared, it may cost you. You could lose face with your leader and peers, and you may even be out a vacation day because not working is not acceptable.