> -----Original Message----- > From: Scott Stewart [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2007 12:06 PM > To: CF-Community > Subject: ...grumble..... why are so many organizations adverse to > telecommuting > > Why are there so few companies that will entertain the idea of > telecommuting? There's not a lot of opportunities in Raleigh, but > everyone > wants me to relocate
I think there's two flavors here. Full, long-distance telecommuting and partial, hybrid arrangements. In my experience most companies (at least large companies) are very willing to consider work-at-home arrangements but NOT complete, long distance telecommuting. In other words they want you close enough to do face-to-face meetings and have at least some regular time in the office. My company (a fortune 50) provides the technology (VPN, hard tokens, laptops, etc) but allows site managers to make their own rules regarding what they call "flex time arrangements". My last manager was very free with them - several people worked five days a week from home (I did three). My new management is less accepting but also less formal: you (unofficially) get to work from home one day a week. In all cases the employee has a cube/desk in an office and is assigned resources at that office (mail box, admin person, laptop docking station, etc). There are generally two ways to look at this: 1) It's a perk. I get to work from home! I don't have to take a personal day to wait for the cable guy or UPS. My wife can make a doctor's appointment easier since I can be home for the kids. 2) It's an extension of the leash. I can work from home so I can work when I'm sick, when the weather's bad, at 2am and so forth. The company definitely gains more work hours by putting in the infrastructure. I think that outsourcing (which is often, in effect, a telecommuting arrangement) has made companies both more accepting of telecommuting and less so in some ways. More so because (if things are working) they can see definite gains and savings from it... but also less so in that they need to give up some measure of control. In the same vein there seems to be a willingness to allow telecommuting/outsourcing for less skilled jobs while managers seem to want to keep their top people "at hand". Finally I think that time of huge, centralized offices is also coming quickly to an end. We used to have a very small number of IT-related offices with hundreds of people in each, now we have many offices with perhaps 30-50 in each. There's some ebb and flow but it's abundantly clear that leasing office space for 700 people in downtown Manhattan or Boston is going to cost more than leasing space in Scranton, Somerset, Tampa, Oklahoma City and others. I know... I'm rambling. But I still think that pure telecommuting gigs will be thin on the ground for a long time to come but partial telecommuting gigs attached to satellite offices will become more and more common. Jim Davis ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Download the latest ColdFusion 8 utilities including Report Builder, plug-ins for Eclipse and Dreamweaver updates. http;//www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs%5adobecf8%5Fbeta Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/message.cfm/messageid:247784 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.5
