How many work from home?

SixPapaCharlie said:
And are employees of a company?

My company lets us work from home 2-3 days a week and I am starting to wonder how common it is. I came into the office today. it is 9:20 on a Thursday and there are 3 people here in a room that seats around 300

I am starting to wonder if the office is even necessary anymore.
Our servers are in a co-location so other than raiding Laura's candy drawer I am not sure there is a reason to be here. 2 hours in the car a day that is eliminated when WFH.

If you are an employee of a company do you have a WFH policy? Curious how common it is getting. Wondering if we we'll soon see companies that have no common building at all.
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we have several full time employees who work from home. If I were el honcho, I wouldn't allow it.
 
When I started at my current company, we didn't even have an office. You were either on site at a client, or you worked from home. If we had a meeting or needed to work together or something, we went to this office that said "Panera" over the door. :rofl:

Then, about a year ago, we got an office and I started coming in about once a week, when I knew the people I worked closest with would be there generally.

Sooner or later, there was no more work from home - Now, we have to be here or at a client every day. Most recently, we stopped being able to dress casually. :(

It's still a great place to work. Having people in the office is nice, it makes it much easier to ask questions and help each other out. I think we do that more now, even though we had the technology to be able to before. (It's a lot easier to tell now whether someone is engrossed in something and you'd be bothering them by asking.)

The main drawback is that now I waste ~5 hours a week in the car, plus the associated gas money. That'll get cut in half in about 7 weeks, though... :)
 
We can work two days a week from home, if we want to. I prefer not to work from home and to go into the office, but I appreciate the opportunity. And I live close to the office - it's only a 12 minutes drive...
 
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When I took the reins as a director of an analytics group in a big ad agency I was preceded in the job by a boss who did not allow WFH. I shocked everybody by immediately implementing a "don't care at all" where anyone wanted to work. If anyone wanted to WFH on any day I didn't even care if they told me about it. My only condition was that anybody working remotely would be available by email, IM and phone. After the novelty wore off within just a few weeks, everybody started coming into the office to work again. My policy was the most liberal in the company and other directors fielded many complaints from their folks about how unfair it was. The bottom line was that my division had the happiest employees and were more productive as a result.
 
I had worked at home for times when I was working for a company and for the federal government. It was never really a primary thing. I've certainly worked (and do work) now work from home as an independent contractor even for jobs which require 40+ hours a week.
 
Mrs. SixPapaCharlie said:
6PC already knows this, but I don't get to WFH. I run a non-profit counseling agency, so during the day, I have to be available to answer phones and schedule appointments. That being said, there is some flexibility just because I'm the boss and can come in late or something if I need to. And our kids can come to work with me and hang out in the play therapy room before clients come if we are short on childcare. So not too many complaints about the situation.
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Answering phones? My last employer had 3000+ people working from home doing that. Scheduling appointments? You should get Mr. 6PC to set y'all up a calendar system accessible from anywhere.

Last job was mostly WFH. New job they kinda like us there but I'm also fixing the is completely hopeless VPN which pretty much made it impossible for them to WFH anyway.

So we'll work on it. They're not quite getting just how bad the performance is of their network overall, yet. ;)
 
denverpilot said:
Answering phones? My last employer had 3000+ people working from home doing that. Scheduling appointments? You should get Mr. 6PC to set y'all up a calendar system accessible from anywhere.
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I know. We're a non-profit though and low-budget. I'm working on that, and some things will have to change within the next year, as I plan on opening up our second office.

Right now we have one hand-written appointment book, so we have to be there to literally answer the phones and right the info in the book. We're old school. When we have 2 offices to schedule for, though, I'll have to have something online. Waiting till next year's budget kicks in to pay for that though.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
And are employees of a company?
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I am an employee and have worked from home for 12 years. Some random travel to company locations when necessary, often in my plane. Middle of the night calls not as common as they used to be due to updated and redundant equipment.
 
I own my own CPA firm. Work at home on occasion. Miss the 4 monitors at office sometimes. Only have 2 at home.
 
Mrs. SixPapaCharlie said:
I know. We're a non-profit though and low-budget. I'm working on that, and some things will have to change within the next year, as I plan on opening up our second office.

Right now we have one hand-written appointment book, so we have to be there to literally answer the phones and right the info in the book. We're old school. When we have 2 offices to schedule for, though, I'll have to have something online. Waiting till next year's budget kicks in to pay for that though.
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Google Calendar is free. Heh.
 
Interesting thread guys. Anyone care to speculate what industry/career is the "perfect" WFH scenario ?
 
B350ATP said:
Interesting thread guys. Anyone care to speculate what industry/career is the "perfect" WFH scenario ?
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IT. Particularly infrastructure support. You work long hours and weekends so can negotiate a lot of flexibility.
 
warthog1984 said:
If Fed rules don't allow telework, there are going to be a lot of surprised high-grade folks at our next IG audit.

Which agency do you work for?
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We have a ton of people who do that, and a VPN to support it. And the obnoxious data-at-rest rules, regardless of whether or not there is SBU data on it.

But, have you considered that perhaps he's doing classified work? That's a whole 'nother ball of wax.

Personally, I've been allowed to work at home for years, on a government project. I choose not to because I'm mostly working out problems, and I find this works a whole lot better in person. It generally involves drawing a lot of diagrams, which I can scribble out on a notepad in seconds, but it takes many minutes to do it with computer tools.

We're at three different sites, so we are set up for the teleconferencing thing…and we use it regularly. Things get solved many times faster in person.
 
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B350ATP said:
Interesting thread guys. Anyone care to speculate what industry/career is the "perfect" WFH scenario ?
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My wife is a consultant representing a Napa winery. Her office is in our house, and drinking wine is part of her "office atmosphere." While she does a lot of work from home, she does go out and do wine tastings, events, sales meetings with customers, etc, so she isn't always working from home I guess.
 
Maxmosbey said:
My wife is a consultant representing a Napa winery. Her office is in our house, and drinking wine is part of her "office atmosphere." While she does a lot of work from home, she does go out and do wine tastings, events, sales meetings with customers, etc, so she isn't always working from home I guess.
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What a coincidence.
Drinking wine is a part of my atmosphere :D

I wish I could work it into my office atmosphere.
 
B350ATP said:
Interesting thread guys. Anyone care to speculate what industry/career is the "perfect" WFH scenario ?
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ScottM said:
Housewife.
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My wife did that until the kids were established in elementary school. "Stay at home mom" worked great for her. Our daughter is not getting started in that mode (the twins came home from the hospital on Saturday after just over 3 weeks in the ICU). I know you meant this in a different manner, but it does work for some.

I'm part of the overall group that includes manufacturing. "Copy exactly" is the rule in this organization. WFH no more than 1 day a week. Takes special approval to work from home more than that, even if you are recovering from surgery. Took two levels above my manager to approve it 6 years ago after cancer surgery and we're getting the ball rolling to do it again after having my back worked out (someday, come on insurance company!). Gotta love bureaucracy.
 
ChrisK said:
IT. Particularly infrastructure support. You work long hours and weekends so can negotiate a lot of flexibility.
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In my opinion, There are very few people with the motivation and ability to pull off a work from home IT job in any sort of company with more than a few IT guys. Through the years I can't think of a single person who was remote, that I'd hire to work remotely. I've worked in IT shops from size 3 to hundreds. We have 2 in my group right now, they're good and they work hard but it's still difficult to communicate with them because they're simple not in the middle of the action, everything requires 3 times the explanation because they haven't heard all the detailed chatter because I don't set up a conference call every time someone walks up to my desk.
 
Mrs. SixPapaCharlie said:
But probably not HIPAA compliant. :(
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Depends. Most calendar entries don't contain HIPAA protected material. Name and a date and a Doc's name are all outside of the scope of protected data. Put in there "meeting to discuss failed drug test", you've crossed the line. Put "meeting for test results", no problem at all.
 
denverpilot said:
Depends. Most calendar entries don't contain HIPAA protected material. Name and a date and a Doc's name are all outside of the scope of protected data. Put in there "meeting to discuss failed drug test", you've crossed the line. Put "meeting for test results", no problem at all.
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No dude I have seen her calendar it is all like

"Crazy B!tch: 2:00 Monday"
"Weirdo Fetish Dude: Wed 3:45"
"Mommy issues: Friday 8:00 AM"
"Nut Job that smells bad Thursday 4:00"
"BartMC "sausage king of Chicago" Monday 3:00" :)

She draws sketches of them all over it and prints pictures of their house from Google Maps and clips them to the entries.

So. yeah, it needs to be locked down.
 
My bro-in-law is in IT management at Microsoft and manages a team of about 13 or so people spread all over North America....and has done it from his sunroom for at least the last six to eight years. He doesn't have an "office" anywhere, other than at home.
 
bartmc said:
In my opinion, There are very few people with the motivation and ability to pull off a work from home IT job in any sort of company with more than a few IT guys. Through the years I can't think of a single person who was remote, that I'd hire to work remotely. I've worked in IT shops from size 3 to hundreds. We have 2 in my group right now, they're good and they work hard but it's still difficult to communicate with them because they're simple not in the middle of the action, everything requires 3 times the explanation because they haven't heard all the detailed chatter because I don't set up a conference call every time someone walks up to my desk.
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We found that rotating one person through the office to handle all the "drive bys" from people who couldn't follow procedure and open a ticket, was enough...

And the rest of the IT staff off-site got a lot more measurably done by all objective measures once we got the drive by problem solved by taking away the temptation to "just go ask IT".

You're correct that a solid conference system you run and know works every time is a requirement for out of band emergency escalations though. We had an "IT911" bridge that was NOT given to anyone other than authorized interface staff between departments.

Worked really well. You HAD to have objective goals and measurements as a manager however, but that's something a manager should be doing anyway. In fact, it's the only way to counteract the human tendency to whine that "IT isn't doing anything!", and is required even when people are in the office.

Other than that the other mandatory item was all staff on IM whenever on duty and teeth behind the phrase "only IT management tasks IT staff with work other than the on-call person for each discipline."

Bottom line, it took a lot of discipline on the part of management. The staff didn't need anything but a network connection, and a solid VPN.

Having seen it and lived it I no longer believe the many excuses thrown out by lazy managers who don't want to build a proper process or metrics that tie to objective business goals.

As time goes on and more people live it, keep in mind it'll become a significant drag on finding quality staff. The good ones will actively hunt for W@H and you'll get the unmanageable and unmotivated ones, creating a perpetual problem you can't solve with the staff you end up with.

There were other minor but obvious rules... Your Internet is down today? Get your butt in your car and drive in. Internet works here. Of course, we had a day or two where the opposite was true, since our VPN went to the hardened data center (where the real work connectivity was needed) and not the offices, and the data centers were directly interconnected and not done on a hub and spoke network through the venerable office networks. So there's some infrastructure work and design thought that has to go into it, too.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
No dude I have seen her calendar it is all like

"Crazy B!tch: 2:00 Monday"
"Weirdo Fetish Dude: Wed 3:45"
"Mommy issues: Friday 8:00 AM"
"Nut Job that smells bad Thursday 4:00"
"BartMC "sausage king of Chicago" Monday 3:00" :)

She draws sketches of them all over it and prints pictures of their house from Google Maps and clips them to the entries.

So. yeah, it needs to be locked down.
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ROFL. You should post a screenshot to Reddit. ;)
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
No dude I have seen her calendar it is all like

"Crazy B!tch: 2:00 Monday"
"Weirdo Fetish Dude: Wed 3:45"
"Mommy issues: Friday 8:00 AM"
"Nut Job that smells bad Thursday 4:00"
"BartMC "sausage king of Chicago" Monday 3:00" :)

She draws sketches of them all over it and prints pictures of their house from Google Maps and clips them to the entries.

So. yeah, it needs to be locked down.
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I wrote a dispatch system for wildfires. This information was require to be public information. But it's unfiltered and entered real time. The firefighters would put comments in like "dumbass farmer started a brush fire in high winds, 100 degree temps and a drought....****ing idiot. Or, kids lit phone book on fire, parents seemed drunk. So we put up all this serious looking security infrastructure to deter people from looking and made the instructions for gaining access seem cumbersome.....Al you had to do was request access and we had to grant it.

I drove through Chicago once, won't make that mistake again.
 
By the way, that "solid conference bridge" was Asterisk on a Dell 1950 that didn't even utilize 5% of it's CPU to handle 3000 simultaneous calls. Fed via carrier SIP trunk direct. Worked flawlessly for years. Didn't even have a backup machine, we could rebuild it inside of an hour from a simple backup on just about any commodity server hardware with a solid Gig-E port.

We laughed that our parent company actually still payed AT&T for conferencing. Waste of money. Massive waste of money. They did it because AT&T was also a customer. Backscratching costing them a small fortune monthly.
 
I work from home quite regularly and while it is nice to not have to travel to the office (which is 300 miles from home), the challenge I have is often working more than the 8-10 hrs a day.

I can shut it down some days, but more often than not I find myself putting in 12+ a day. And, to top it off I am a salaried employee, so no overtime. Instead I will compensate myself with taking a half day here and there as needed.
 
warthog1984 said:
For $5/month, it can be. https://support.google.com/a/answer/3407054?hl=en
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Wow, thanks for this. I'll look into it more soon. Got a huge fundraiser on Saturday (yet another fun part of the non-profit world), so I'm only thinking about that right now.

SixPapaCharlie said:
No dude I have seen her calendar it is all like

"Crazy B!tch: 2:00 Monday"
"Weirdo Fetish Dude: Wed 3:45"
"Mommy issues: Friday 8:00 AM"
"Nut Job that smells bad Thursday 4:00"
"BartMC "sausage king of Chicago" Monday 3:00" :)

She draws sketches of them all over it and prints pictures of their house from Google Maps and clips them to the entries.

So. yeah, it needs to be locked down.
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How else would keep everyone straight? :rofl:
 
Heh. You need to work for a greedier "non-profit". I don't suppose the Komen Foundation is hiring? They're never at a loss for budget. ;)
 
denverpilot said:
Depends. Most calendar entries don't contain HIPAA protected material. Name and a date and a Doc's name are all outside of the scope of protected data. Put in there "meeting to discuss failed drug test", you've crossed the line. Put "meeting for test results", no problem at all.
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I think that is a HIPAA violation to put the patient name and the physician name in the clear. Just knowing that much information is enough to jump to some conclusions about the patient.

For example, Dr. A specializes in gender reassignment and Patient B has had 75 appointments with Dr. A. What is happening here?
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
No dude I have seen her calendar it is all like

"Crazy B!tch: 2:00 Monday"
"Weirdo Fetish Dude: Wed 3:45"
"Mommy issues: Friday 8:00 AM"
"Nut Job that smells bad Thursday 4:00"
"BartMC "sausage king of Chicago" Monday 3:00" :)

She draws sketches of them all over it and prints pictures of their house from Google Maps and clips them to the entries.

So. yeah, it needs to be locked down.
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This is probably OK according to HIPAA. No names.

I remember once we were looking at some X-Rays (for testing reasons) that had the patient name in the clear with names like "Sam Jackson" and "Mike Jackson" and the compliance guy got bent out of shape. Even when we showed him the x-rays and said that no person's rights were violated. We had to rename them "Kari's Cat Sam" and "Kari's Cat Mike".
 
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Hubby has almost completed his at-home office and workstation.

I haven't moved my work station out of the great room and into the office, yet.
 

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