Microsoft is not a name particularly associated with remote web work. And yet, some people within the company happily telecommute. One notable example is Chris Sells, a Program Manager in the Distributed Systems Group. Chris recently posted a series of articles to his blog detailing some of the challenges he’s faced in his years of working remotely for Microsoft, and the strategies that he’s used to overcome them. The whole makes fascinating (and instructive) reading for any corporate web worker.
While some of the points in this series are specific to Microsoft’s own peculiar corporate culture, others are more widely applicable. He starts by identifying the #1 issue for telecommuters as whether you can focus on work at home. This agrees with my own experience; some people are naturals at balancing the competing pressures of working in the same space with family and other distractions, while it drives others crazy. If you can’t get over this hurdle, all the fancy technology and email tricks in the world won’t save you.
Effective communication is the backbone of the telecommuter’s life, and Chris has a lot of valuable advice to share here. Among his key points:
- Over-communicate: if you’re not there in person, you miss out on all the informal hallway and lunch conversation, so you need to make up for that by sending more short notes and messages.
- Offer to take the meeting notes. That way, if you have to ask for repeats and clarifications, you’re doing it to get good notes, not because you’re an annoying remote person.
- Keep your emails short, with good subjects and summaries
- Get everyone on your team using IM
Chris also has a balanced view of telecommuting. In the Microsoft corporate culture, he does see it as a barrier to promotions; he’s willing to balance this off against the dual freedom to spend more time with his family and to avoid picking up some tasks that would only end up on his plate to look good at review time. That’s the sort of decision that each telecommuter needs to make, based on their own needs, desires, and workplace culture. Also interesting is his final conclusion: even in a company as soaked in technology as Microsoft, he thinks working remotely “is about 50% as good as being there.” Clearly there are many people and companies working to up that number, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement.
We’ve offered advice before on how to convince your boss to allow telecommuting. If you’re unsure whether you actually want to push for that result, reading this set of articles might convince you one way or the other.
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