Dodo Loves Marketing

• First, do your homework. Find out if anyone else in the organization is working — or has worked — from home. Your union as well as the personnel department may know. If so, arrange to have a drink or meeting with them, to find out how they tackled the subject, how the arrangement works or, if it has stopped, why it ended.

• When I decided to move to the Isle of Bute, in Scotland, I thought I’d have to leave the bank,’ says Kevin Attwood, Strategic Planning Development Officer for Nat West who now works two days from home, and three in London. ‘In fact, I kept the move so quiet that when I told my boss I’d moved to Scotland over the weekend, he was flabbergasted. When we had lunch I said flippantly, that if I’d got my act together I would have come up with a strategic plan for teleworking. He told me to come up with a proposal. I rung up people in the bank who were already working from home some of the time and talked to them extensively before coming up with my plans. Listening to their experiences helped me make a convincing proposal.’ ..more
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Even if you know that your job is 100 per cent suited to working from home, you still need to ask yourself some hard questions about whether your personality is suitable for homeworking. See the quiz or ask yourself briefly :

How suitable am I for homeworking? If you get a buzz from being with people, love to be in the thick of things and can remember just who’s dating who in which department, homeworking may not be right for you. The same applies if much of your social life is based around the office or your place in the hierarchy is very important to you. On the other hand, if you are a self-starter, enjoy your own company in limited doses and find it easy to concentrate, you may be well placed to work from home. Confidence in your ability, self-discipline, a good network of local social contacts and enough space to work are all vital for a homeworker. ‘I thought that I would spend more time working at home than I actually did,’ says Ken Davey, who initiated Mercury Communications flexible work project. ‘I used it for writing reports and initiating strategy, but I came to realize how much of my job depended on interacting with colleagues.’ ..more

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1 Is where you work an important part of the job?

If clients always expect to see you at your place of work, it may be difficult to transfer to homeworking. A doctor working in a casualty department, for instance, is unlikely to be able to work outside the hospital for any length of time, since patients expect to be treated at the hospital and that is also where support staff are based. On the other hand, if much of your work is location independent, i.e. can be done anywhere, you are much more likely to be able to work from home for some of the time. ..more

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Motivation is perhaps the single biggest factor in making the difference between success and failure in any business venture. Surveys have shown that poorly motivated employees, however hard they are worked, consistently produce poorer work than those who may work less hours but have better motivation.

But what gives us our motivation differs with our personalities. For some people, motivation is largely external. They work hard because they have external rewards to motivate them — a pay cheque, the approval of colleagues, or a boss breathing down their neck. However, when you work at home, you are largely out of sight — and possibly out of mind — of your boss. (This is the major reason cited by managers for their opposition to teleworking. In a recent Department of Trade and Industry study, many managers said that they did not approve of teleworking, because without a boss to manage employees their work would invariably decline.) Even more challenging, you may actually be your own boss. If you have been the sort of person who regards the boss’s holiday as a good reason to down tools yourself, you may well have problems working from home. ..more

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