Telecommuting as everything in life has its pros and cons.
See pros here.
For employees, the most important cons are:
- Lack of face to face human interaction – interaction with your peers, with your boss, with the world.
The more days a week you telelcommute, the less, with time, you will relate to alive people.Imagine yourself sitting in front of your pc every day for the next three years, five years, ten years.
Yup, you get more IMing, maybe more calls, certainly more calls if you are a call center rep working from home. You, however, in a bigger schema of things, do not need to dress up, especially if you live alone, you do not need to learn how to read emotions of others.
is not an emotion, it has become a dot at the end of a sentence. If people were laughing in life as often as they add “:)” to their written communications, the world would’ve been a better place.
You rarely need to master your speech making and how to impress others. Then, when you really need to impress (whether just one person or a public), you suddenly hear yourself talking and not recognizing your own voice.
- Lack of response to your ideas and to that cool thing you “just did!”
Your co-workers and boss on the other side of IM are working on their “cool things” and your IMing to them soon can be taken as annoyance or interruption.
- Lack of professional development and keeping up with ‘industry’
While you can learn a lot from blogs and Google, the real news and knowledge you often get only when learning from/with your peers and exchanging ideas in a conversation, or brainstorming where everything goes.
- Lack of recognition
If you are the one who thrives on recognition (and there is nothing wrong with that), you will find yourself in a weird place of silence. No matter what you have accomplished today, your spouse will appear more tired than you are (because he/she went to work!) (like you didn’t) and too tired to truly appreciate what you have done. Your boss will get to your report when he gets to your report and by that time it might be an old news and not as “recognizable”.
- Need to discipline yourself
Easy to say, not that easy to accomplish.
First you learn to fight the urge to eat more from a friendly (or not friendly) fridge, in parallel, you learn that the TV is your work time sucker, then that laundry and cooking really have to be done in non-work time. You will have to learn to wake up early regardless of the fact that there is no one to time you. At the end, it is only with yourself.
What is an RSS 2.0 feed. Please do not assume that we are all as up to date on the technology as you. In fact, that is a con to joining the telecommuting family. Having to master more techno things.
Thanks for your blog. Jim
As you can see from my previous entry . . I can’t spell! Another con is that the skills of typing, spelling and the mastery of grammer are required to feel confident in communicating. All places (like this feedback) should give the responder the ability to access tools like spell check directly without having to go some where else and cutting and pasting.
Peace, Jim
Yes, keeping up and dealing with advanced technologies, keeping their PCs clean and keeping information secure are among the things most telelcommuters have to do. But, then, every job and job situation has things that people need to learn and master. With the right attitude all is doable.
As to RSS feeds, not to complicate matters with technical terms,
RSS feed is an alternative means of accessing the information that now exists on the web. Instead of the user browsing websites for information of interest, the information is sent directly to the user.
Instead of coming to the same site every day to see if new info is published, readers can be notified via either email or a feed to their feed reader. A more extensive and authoritative essay can be found here http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/aboutrss.
In case of this particular blog, all readers need to do is to subscribe by entering their email in the field in the right upper corner, and they will receive automatic notifications when I have new posts.
Besides email subscriptions, they can add RSS feeds to their favorite RSS feed reader like I have mine on MyYahoo. For that, they need to click the orange button and they will see see full explanation on how to add feeds http://feeds.feedburner.com/OnTelecommuting. I learned the same way, clicked here, clicked there, read one more time, tried again, and it did work.
We have to face the fact that technological advances are being introduced, whether we want that or not. We can try them and embrace where they fit or can be in denial. Both are certainly personal choices. Am happy to help to learn where I can.