A few years ago when gas prices started to cross the $3.00 mark I had a number of employees come to me and ask about working remotely.  Their rational was that gas was getting expensive and their long commutes were hurting their budgets.  Some wanted extra compensation to set off the rise in gas prices or the flexibility to work from home a few days a week and some just wanted to work from home.

My answer then was a firm “no”.  I am not a fan of working remotely.  On the most part I simply don’t trust human nature.  It’s the rare person who will work as hard sitting in his den as he does sitting in his cube.  Add to that the associated challenges with communication, lack of team building and the security/insurance risks of having a telecommuting workforce and I have really never found the idea a promising one.

This week I had an employee come to me with the prospect of a three week trip to Egypt two of which would be telecommuting and one of which would be vacation.

So I did what any good manager does and said I’d get back to him, delaying the uncomfortable confrontation when I’d have to tell him no.   So while I pondered the easiest way to tell him he couldn’t go I also pondered my reaction to the request and came to realize that one of my biggest knocks against telecommuting was simply that I am an old dog and this is a pretty new trick.

I’ve come to realize that if telecommuting doesn’t work it’s the company’s fault and not the workers'.  If you don’t have the right policies, checks and balances and employees to succeed with a distributed workforce you probably don’t have the right policies, checks and balances and employees to succeed period.

Let’s start with the people.  If you have someone cheating the proverbial clock while working from home you can generally rest assured that they’re cheating that same clock one way or another at work.  And if you can’t trust your employees to work while the boss isn’t looking you need to examine your hiring process… somewhere along the way you’re hiring the wrong people.

As for productivity, if you can’t manage it when someone is working from home (or wherever) you probably aren’t tracking it appropriately to start with. 

Communication can be a challenge, but technology has pretty much bridged that gap: web cams, instant messaging, VOIP, video conferencing and a plethora of other mainstream technologies make keeping in touch pretty easy.

So in the next month we’ll be having our first trial run at supporting a virtual office of one as one of our team takes his VOIP phone, air card and laptop partway around the world and works from the land of the pharaohs.