Who Works at Home, Why, and How You Can Join Them How ...

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Talk Fast and Go Home
Would you like to work at home? It may be easier
than you think. Some employers are quite perceptive
about the benefits of working at home, and will grant
you considerable freedom. But if you're unsure of
success, you should prepare carefully. The following
may provide the wedge you need.
Plan ahead. Before you broach the suggestion,
establish your reliability. Employers naturally worry
that the home worker will spend part of the day
gazing at the TV, laboring on personal projects, or
otherwise exploiting the deal. George Morrow, for
merly president of Morrow, Inc., a computer firm, had
to make many such decisions, and looked foremost
to dependability. "If I had confidence in someone's
productivity, I didn't care where the person worked.
That was the biggest problem: the person's
productivity."
In addition, make sure you possess the tools.
"The best lever you can have is to be equipped at
home," Morrow says. "If you're going to sell yourself
as a work-at-home professional, it helps if the em
ployer doesn't have to pony up the equipment."
Seize the moment. The best time to ask is
probably when you have a project with a tight time
line. Since working at home saves a commute and
yields greater concentration, it bodes well for com
pleting the project. It may also partly relieve the
supervisor of responsibility for the arrangement: Ne
cessity can dictate it. Finally, a close deadline is its
own time clock. Meeting it proves you've been work
ing
hard.
Stress the pragmatics. Though your argument
can only succeed if it allays the concerns of your
supervisor, whatever they may be, you
especially want to emphasize the
economic benefits of your
longer work day, better focus,
and greater efficiency.
If you want to work full-time at home, you might also
observe that it will reduce company floor space and
electric bills. Ultimately, your strongest argument lies
here, and you should keep it before your boss.
Prepare for counterarguments. Employers
have concerns other than productivity. Some fret
about maintaining communication, a term which em
braces the circulation of new knowledge, cross-fertil
ization of ideas, and one's immediate availability for
questions or assignments. Others feel that letting
employees work at home increases the chance that
they will go independent. You can take two tacks to
these responses. First, you can counter them. Em
phasize that you will remain in constant phone con
tact with people at work, and suppress or, if neces
sary, deny any hint of going independent. The second,
better approach is to contrast these objections with
the profit to the firm from your working at home. Your
at-home productivity can have immediate, tangible
benefit for the company, and the firm should not
sacrifice it to considerations which are subtle, uncer
tain, and in some cases even unascertainable.
Heed the psychological factors. Some super
visors rate the value of their oversight rather highly
and may feel threatened or suspicious when an
employee wanders beyond range of the managerial
eye. They may also worry about an atomizing effect:
If I let you do it, soon everyone will want to; the
company will wind up dispersed in tiny units across
town. Such fears can have you facing the blank wall
of company policy or the need to maintain the corpo
rate culture. You stand a better chance if you can
make supervisors feel they are showing their
shrewdness and enlightenment by letting you work at
home—as indeed they are. You can also point out
that working at home will spur you to greater efforts
since it forces you to prove your good faith, and that if
your request truly does provoke an avalanche, the
firm can halt or limit the practice at any time.
Don't overreach. Move into this territory step by
step. The less you ask of your employer at any one
time, the better the chance you'll get it. For instance, if
you have already been working on the computer in
the evening or on weekends, you have established
precedent. You can use it to advance your case for
working at home in an emergency. Once that experi
ment succeeds a few times, you can ask for an
explicit trial run to work a few days at home on
normal business. From there, you may be set.
— DM & PF
20 COMPUTE