Working from home worries: Trusting people when you can't see them

Slow Leadership picks up on an article in the Glasgow Herald on “Employees fear working from home may damage careers”.

I tend to work from home these days – so do I fear that is damages my career?

Fear is definitely too strong a word for starters, but I do have concerns about it.

My employer is very flexible and I work from home because it makes sense. I do a lot of collaboration work with teams where it is impossible for the team to physically meet on a regular basis. These teams often span continents and it’s just not practical to have everyone flying around all the time.

There are a couple of office locally and I could go and work in them, but that takes away my flexibility to work when it’s appropriate to work. I regularly receive calls early and have teleconferences late. Being able to work flexibly also means that I treat my home time flexibly too, I treat bloging in a similar way.

So what do I worry about? I worry that I’m not visible.

I don’t think it’s a good thing to be invisible at work. I never want to be in the position where someone is asking the question “what does Graham do all day?” I am trustworthy, I do work hard, I do put in the hours, but is that visible? My role is primarily consultative and advisory so I don’t actually produce very much physical evidence of my productivity and that concerns me. If I was in an office people would be able to see how much consultation and advice I provide, at home it’s invisible. As the consultation is often via IM, email and voice it’s difficult to provide quantitative measures of productivity.

The issue of visibility is largely my issue though. I have to make special efforts to make sure I remain visible. I have to make make special efforts to have those ‘water cooler’ conversations in some other way. When attending teleconference I have to make a special effort to add value and to be ‘seen’. I consciously make more phone calls because I know that anything written can be interpreted wrongly.

My ‘need’ to be visible need to be balanced though. I don’t feel the need to be online all of the time. I don’t get stressed about missing a call out-of-hours that I wasn’t expecting, but I am very conscious of responding to almost every call.

But, yes, I worry.

As we move to a world of self-directed innovators this is something that we are going to have to get used to though.