The article by Linda Carroll explains that the very employees who may desire the flexibility to work remotely the most actually appear to suffer a higher risk of burnout when their wish is granted and they start working from home. Why? Carroll explains:

That’s because when job and family are in the same place, some workers feel there is no chance for downtime —no respite or time to relax, said Timothy Golden, an associate professor of management at the Lally School of Management and Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

“A teleworker may feel conflict more because you’re being constantly reminded of your home role: whether it’s what you need to do as a parent or household chores,” Golden said. “And that can make exhaustion worse.”

The study surveyed the relatively modest number of 316 employees at a computer firm that allowed telecommuting, asking them to rate their level of job-family conflict and exhaustion. When the researchers crunched the numbers, they discovered that while those with low levels of work-life conflict got a ton out of working from home, those that were already finding the balancing act hard found it even more difficult when working remotely.

Besides telecommuting parents failing to set appropriate boundaries between work and home, another possible explanation for this increase in burnout among some parents who telecommute could be the mistaken belief that working from home is a good opportunity to cut back on child care. With additional family responsibilities and, in reality, the same amount of work as in the office, these parents could quickly reach the breaking point.

What do you think: Does the freedom to telecommute ever make the work-life juggle psychologically harder?

At Net:Work, we will explore the challenges of avoiding burnout and policing work-life boundaries. The event will be held in San Francisco on Dec. 8.

Image courtesy of Flickr use skeddy in NYC

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Total myth, argues BNET blogger Laura Vanderkam in a post this week calling the need to trim your babysitting bill the worst reason to work from home. Vanderkam cites FlexJobs.com CEO Sara Sutton Fell as support for the claim: “If you have a professional job, something you take pride in and want to keep, absolutely do not be trying to watch your children at the same time.” Why? Vanderkam elaborates for those with less experience of childcare:

The vast majority of us who have small kids and work from home know from hard experience that even the most independent 2-year-old is going to give you a grand total of 10 minutes of concentration at a time unless someone else is running interference. While it’s incredibly tempting to skimp on childcare if your kid is a good napper — why pay a sitter to watch TV? — the reality is that even a sleeping baby can turn, unexpectedly, into an awake baby. It is inevitably the day you have an important presentation you’re giving on a conference call at 1:30PM that your child who naps religiously at 1PM decides not to.

While working for home to cover an occasional childcare emergency is probably par for the course, better not bet on being able to do professional work and keep your kid out of trouble at the same time, concludes the post. “Childcare is an investment in your career,” Sutton Fell tells Vanderkam, so don’t skimp.

Of course, with rough economic times come tough choices and the WSJ Juggle blog reported an uptick in those trying to mix professional and parental duties at home a few years back. The gist of the post, however, was the difficulties in making these sorts of arrangements work for both parents and kids, including time spent constructing “byzantine work schedules around their child’s sleep time or their spouse’s time at home” and “‘craft packs’ of art and puppetry materials” the night before to keep kids occupied. In short, saving money usually means putting in longer hours to make it work.

How do you work from home parents out there make it work– is your child always out of your care when you’re in professional mode or do you sometimes mix kid-time with work?  

Image courtesy of Flickr user Bethany L King.

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Mike Gunderloy just did a post in which he suggested working at a stand-up desk might be a reasonable way to keep your work out of the reach of children. He also did a great post last year, discussing how to manage having kids at home.

We all agree that, as web workers, we’re incredibly fortunate to be able to participate in the discovery years. But you also have to admit that sometimes it’s impossible to work with a toddler or preschooler around.

If you have children, they probably have a lot to do with your lifestyle choice, so I imagine you don’t want to send your tiny tot off to daycare every day. But to get serious work done, you sometimes need a few hours to a few days a week without kid distractions.

Childcare Options

You could get creative with nanny sharing. if you have schedule flexibility, you could start or join a childcare co-op in your area, or find other at-home parents and do some informal kid sharing.

A few co-working centers that offer on-site childcare have come and gone (TwoRooms in NY, Gate 3 Work Club in Emeryville, CA). Neil Goldberg of WorkClub, which ran Gate 3, says there is lots of action in the co-working arena, and that the topic of childcare always comes up. He pointed out that liability is a major factor when it comes to adding a kid space.

Now there’s a new co-working center called CubesAndCrayons, which Imran Ali discussed just the other day. This one might just survive, due to its location in Silicon Valley. As Imran pointed out, It’s a fully equipped work center that offers professional childcare for kids from three months to five years old. It has all the amenities you’d expect and one I didn’t: a workout room. Nothing like a few minutes on a treadmill to clear your head.

The Bigger Picture: Get Organized

What we really need is a village. We need to be able to coordinate with each other through a site where we could group ourselves and network according to our very specific needs and interests.

CafeMom, the most popular social network for women, has 500 groups for work-at-home moms. I browsed through some of them, but their emphasis seems to be on finding ways to work at home, rather than coordinating or dealing with childcare or other challenges faced by web-working families.

I also went to LinkedIn to see if anyone had created a group for web workers. I looked under “Professional Groups” and “Networking Groups” and didn’t find one. Lots of you belong to LinkedIn, I’m sure. Anyone feel like creating a web worker group there?

Or someone could launch a social network for the web-worker niche. They’re saying that small is the new big; people are starting to gravitate towards social networks that are built around particular interests. It’s relatively easy to do and there are many options available, one of which Mike Gunderloy reviewed not long ago. Someone named Larry started one at Ning, but he’s the only member so far…

There are more of us web workers out there every day. If we were organized, we might even be able to do important things like influence government policy to improve our lot. Right now we’re all like Whos on Horton’s dust speck. We are here!

ed: If you’re interested in any of these ideas, say so in the comments. We’ll see what we can do to make it happen.

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I have colleagues and collaborators who, despite the fact they’re self-employed and work largely from a home office, still need to employ childcare. Some may see this as an unnecessary overhead, but it’s actually desperately needed in order to provide focus whilst working from home.

Enter Cubes & Crayons in Menlo Park, CA, self-described as ‘full-time childcare and office space’; think of it as coworking + creche! Cube & Crayons was profiled recently (along with New York’s TwoRooms) in a Springwise article exploring emerging trends in ‘More Work Spaces for Parents‘.

At Cubes & Crayons, the usual connectivity, office equipment, conference rooms and work spaces exist alongside facilities for kids ranging from just a few months old to pre-schoolers. Like most coworking plans, there’s a lot of flexibility in choosing drop-in, pay-as-you-go and pay-monthly options, with discounts to regular members.

Interestingly, Cubes & Crayons not only encourages members to contribute, but writes it into their agreements; for every 20 hours or use, parents/members are expected to contribute 4 hours of voluntary time, perhaps to help care for the children in the facilities. Rather than being an onerous requirement, I believe this kind of quid-pro-quo can help to bring cohesion to a community and actually deepen ties between people sharing the space. If I have to trust you with my child, I’ll make damn sure I get to know you well!

The addition of childcare facilities to coworking spaces is as inevitable a development of coworking as coworking was to freelancers and web workers. Coworking is a lifestyle choice – we choose to exercise control and freedom over our working patterns and our children are as fundamental a part of these lifestyle choices as any other working environment.

In a previous post on the future of coworking, we speculated on how human resources and enterprise structures would accomodate coworkers into their cultures. However, issues such as childcare speak to wider issues on how we approach cultural, corporate and urban design.

If coworking breaks into the mainstream can we imagine…

• cities becoming more diffuse, as office campuses and downtown areas give way to hundreds of coworking hubs – perhaps jointly funded by large corporates.
• homes becoming larger as families accomodate more than one home-worker, perhaps even hosting friends and colleagues in coworking areas of their homes?
• a decline in commuter traffic as people work closer to their homes, or indeed from them.

Of course, such notions have long been explored as telecommuting found its way from labs to reality, but perhaps coworking represents an opening to reimagine how we live and work more broadly; regardless, I believe childcare will be as integral a part of coworking as connectivity.

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