Wednesday, December 3, 2008

You Would Never Slack, Right?

Just like every employee, a telecommuter can slack off by doing all the things that all your other employees do to goof off: surfing, yakking, smoking, long lunches, in-cube sabbaticals. But managers often worry more about their telecommuting employees because they can't actually see them working or not working.

And everyone is secretly really worried that you're just vacuuming your house all day. (Or napping. Or watching television. Or out shopping. Or whatever.)

Rest assured, dear managers: there is only so much that people can really vacuum (and I'm a little bit obsessive about this kind of thing, so I should know!). You'll see that the person is kicking out the jams or isn't kicking out the jams. If you're still worried, check out this BNet blog post that includes some ingenious suggestions for detecting the hard core slackers out there in slipper land.

Or if you're a telecommuter looking to slack off, here are some good tips that you can use to try to disguise your ne'erdowell nature.

It works both ways! Now that's a blog post!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I work from home two days a week. I've never been accused of slacking because we use video conferencing. When my co-workers see me live (and dressed) they know I'm actually working. We've also started to use the software to review proposals and customer presentations. I'm trying to convince my boss to extend my work from home days based on my productivity. I beleive that hving the right tools and being able to be physically seen is key. We use a service call Nefsis (http://go.nefsis.com) but I've been told by my techno geek buds that there are many products that can do the same thing.

Stella Commute said...

Thanks for reading Rick. We use a bunch of free stuff to handle presence -- Skype is good to let people on my team know that I'm here and working. Mostly the secret is to crank out work. That works the best.