Remote Working AntoinetteO

For me one advantage of working across timezones is that you can get to be part of what is going on in different offices and in different cultures.

In a previous job at Sun Microsystems, I worked with Asia a lot. One day I rang an Indian colleague on his mobile and he was out grabbing something for lunch. The amazing noise of mayhem and bustle going on in the background really struck me. But I was not sure what I thought of it at the time. It was like an open question - a question I had to get an answer to.

I normally don't like noisy places, preferring holidays in out of the way spots with no Internet connectivity or mobile coverage. I have however since spent some time in India and the open question was answered. I came to love or even feel an addiction to that constant and intoxicating buzz - mayhem meets industrious creative people at an immensely crowded and colourful crossroads.

An advantage of working from home is that I frequently have the time to prepare a nice dinner. However, since my prime phone time is 6-9pm (9-12 noon Pacific Time), and dinner time here is 8pm, I am often working when it comes to cooking or putting out the meal.

So the recipes I use on week days are ones I can prepare in advance or that can cook autonomously while I am on the phone.

During the summer, many of these recipes use what our grows in our garden.

Here is such a recipe:

Baked Risotto with Lemon, Courgette and Basil
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1 onion, diced
1 garlic clove, chopped
500g courgette sliced or diced
500g risotto rice (e.g. arboria)
2 lemon, juiced and zested
1 small bunch of basil
1.2l hot vegatable stock
100g Parmesan, grated

Heat oven to 180C or gas4.
Microwave the chopped onion for 2 mins in an ovenproof disk, then add garlic and microwave for 1 min. Add courgettes and microwave for a few minutes.
Add the rice, juice, hot stock, and cheese - put in preheated over for 30 mins.
Serve sprinkled with basil and lemon zest.

The downsides of working from home will of course depend on your personal preferences.

For me a major hitch I run into is if I encounter a technical problem - I am completely on my own.

Whether the problem is with my PC software or hardware, Internet connection, wireless network, phone, I am a non-techy so even a small problem has the potential to really hold me up. And of course these  technical glitches inevitably happen on the run up to some major meeting or deliverable.

My only solution to this is to have no fear of asking the stupid questions of any work or personal contacts that can help you resolve the problem.

My boss and I joke that having an engineer as a partner or spouse should be a requirement for all non-techies thinking of working from home

The advantages to the employee working from home really differ from person to person. What is an advantage to one person might make no big difference to another.

For me the advantages are:

Travel Considerations
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- Reduced petrol consumption and car usage
- Dramatic saving on the time to get to my desk

Working the Timezones
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- Free to vary my hours of work to match the timezones I work with
- Not having to drive home at unsociable hours when my road-vigilance skills are not at their optimum

Improve Work Practices
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- Being saved from the distractions of the company offices
- Having something in common with my colleagues across the globe who work from home.

Quality of Life
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- Being able to use short breaks to advance personal projects from gardening, picking fruit, preparing a nice meal, shopping, domestic tasks (but must admit I'm not so hot on these) rather than spending the time drinking a bad coffee you didn't even want
- Being home to receive packages, deliveries, of if someone decides to offer me some apples from their garden, ...
- Developing relationships locally by shopping in our local area, chat to neighbours, ...
- Clearing your head with a short walk up and down the local scenic and peaceful lanes rather than two tours of the company office building
- Our house feels more like a home. Being a workaholic, if working in company offices, I would probably rarely see the house or my husband 

We are all different so you will surely have other advantages that play to your life and family style

As we are all into writing and reading blogs then we have all taken at least one step into the world of social networking. And social networking becomes particularly important when you are working remotely.

I recently had an unpleasant surprise on my linkedin network. I invited an old friend and university colleague to join my network. On the email telling me that she had accepted my invitation I clicked on See X's Profile. However, I discovered not my friend's profile but that of her husband!

The people on my network are people I would recommend for something from a professional perspective. I am told that I met my friend's husband 20 odd years ago at parties but do not have any distinct memory of this person. And so I certainly would not be able to recommend him for anything.

There has been lots written on social networking etiquette, for example: - http://radar.oreilly.com/2007/09/social-networking-invitation-e.html

http://www.disruptiveconversations.com/2007/07/updating-netiqu.html

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article2039665.ece

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article2039665.ece

Most of these articles speak about whether to accept an invitation but now I have someone on my network I did not even invite.

Should it be possible for someone to impersonate someone else to get invitations?

I presume this guy has added his wife's email address to his profile as an additional address. Does this seem appropriate?

We all have to define our own idea of what is appropriate behaviour in our social networking but as with any sort of personal interaction - we are not in it on our own!

In my previous entry, I covered some of the monetary costs to you if you work from home. They were:
- Lighting
- Heating
- Electricity for equipment

Now I will look at:
- Space
- Office furniture
- Computer equipment
- Internet connectivity
- Phone

Space:
You will need a space where you can isolate yourself from family and personal distractions to keep your materials confidential, you mind concentrated, and to be able to hear and be heard on those phone conferences.

Luckily there is plenty of space in my house so I chose a room that has plenty of natural light. This is good for moral, and keeps the lighting and heating bills down. You should also take into account the electric lighting - do you need a desk lamp?

Office Furniture:
Initially I did not pay much attention to the desk question. My company (Sun Microsystems) would supply me with a desk but I thought I would just choose from different tables/desks hanging around the house. My first choices were not wise ones because I did not pay enough attention to having furniture that would provide me with the correct posture for those long hours in front of the screen. I would advise you to take this into consideration from day one. You need good support for your elbows, screen at right height, good support from your chair and a leg rest (if you use one).

Computer Equipment:
Initially I used my own computer and when I definitely make the decision to be a full-time work from home employee got a computer from Sun that is dedicated to work. I also took a large screen to make reading presentations/spreadsheets easier.

I work fairly much paper free so I don't need filing cabinets. But if your have confidential documents this will be a consideration.

And you might need printer and fax facilities. I hardly ever use a fax and so have not got one in my house. I have a printer, which is my personal printer. But since I work "paper-free" I do not use it enough to consider it a work-expense. Again, this is something you will have to decide for yourself.

If you are dealing with a lot of confidential paper based material, you should also consider a shredder. In my paper-free environment, this is not necessary. 

Internet Connectivity:
Our house already has a wireless network with ADSL. You have to decide if you want a work dedicated Internet connection but for my purposes, one connection does just fine - so no extra cost here. Some of my colleagues debate over taking the cheapest option possible for their Internet connectivity but it is up to you to decide how important a reliable connection is for your personal and professional communication. I have low tolerance for unreliable connections and so we had opted for the established national operator for our personal connection - and so it is also my professional connection.

Phone:
And then there is the phone. I took a separate phoneline for work. Since most of my calls are international, I can reduce the cost by going through a Sun system which feeds me towards work phone extensions but sometimes this is not feasible because I need to call people directly or dial in to phone conferences which do not work off our extensions. With the largely transatlantic nature of my calls, this would be a huge cost, which I could expense to my company. To reduce the expense overall, I looked for the best option from the established national operator and found a limitless call option for 39 euros a month. This is an expense covered my company.

I made one investment and that was to get a really good phone. To me this translates to one on which I can be heard and hear easily. There was a model available from my company but I choose to splash out to get the best sound quality possible. I speak quietly and am frequently on multi-party calls so this was essential. Also, there might be a preconception among some people that phone connections in other countries are inherently worse than theirs, so if you have a bad phone your colleagues might put this down to you being on a "bad-line". This would diminish your credibility and effectiveness.

If you are going to be on the phone a lot, you might also need a headset. Many times I find colleagues working "hands free" difficult to hear so again, take this into account during your calls. If you are the "distant employee" then you must do everything to diminish anything that can be perceived as a barrier between you and your colleagues.

There are also day-to-day expenses such as stationary. This is something you might be able to pick up at your nearest company office. In my largely paper-free environment, this is not a significant consideration.

In response to some specific questions: How do you figure the extra expenses of using your home as an office: Power for computer use all day, air conditioning in summer, and heating in winter?

What is the cost/saving to you of working from home?

- You save on travel time, petrol cost, and wear and tear on your car (presuming you were driving to work
- You also save time by matching your work hours to the timezones you need to connect with.

But what of the costs - lighting, heating, electricity for equipment.

I have been working from home, full-time, for the past 2 years and part-time before that.

We looked at our home electricity bills this weekend and they are still lower than the expected usage for our house and family size. So I am not concerned that working from home increases our electricity bills significantly. The only additional equipment I have because I am working at home are a 19inch computer screen, increased computer usage, and increased usage of lighting.

Around the same time as I started working from home, we became much more conscious of our carbon foot print so I always turn off my screen if I am not using it, only have lights on in rooms in use at the time, and have energy saving bulbs.

There is no cost for air conditioning because I am in Europe and we don't do air conditioning so much over here. In fact that is one of the reasons I wanted to work from home; there is air conditioning in the company offices due to the large number of computers and I find it difficult to have to handle the change in temperature. I love the heat in the summer (25-35+ degrees Celsius) but am not so keen on the cold.

Which brings me the cost of heating. Again, in our drive to reduce our carbon footprint, we had decided to use wood as much as possible. Our house has oil central heating fitted. In addition  we have a large wood burning fire which just happens to be in my office. So I heat my office with the wood burning fire. The oil heating is triggered if the temperature goes to low but in fact our oil consumption is lower than when I used to go into the office because heating part of the house by the wood burning reduces the number of hours the oil is used to heat the house.

So to sum up - compared to when I used to work in the company office, I do not think we pay significantly more for electricity, our heating bill has gone down, my car costs have gone down.

My home insurance covers my office equipment.

If you are working across timezones and doing conference calls, you need to ensure that you have a reasonable phone option. 

Working from home is not for everyone. 

My advise to people considering this mode of work would be to ask:

- Do you need face to face contact with colleagues every day?
- Do you need to be physically in the office to access systems or facilities to do your job?
- Do you need to be in the office to see customers face-to-face every day? 

If the answer to these questions is NO, then you could consider working from home.

But there are other factors to take into account.

- Will you personally, or your team's effectiveness suffer from lack of face to face contact?
- Will your relationship with your management hierarchy suffer if you are not physically in the office every day?

If the answer to these questions is YES, then you are not an ideal candidate work working at home.

And even if the answers to all the above questions seem to favour working outside your company's office, you have to take into account your own ability to self-motivate.

Initially, I found it difficult to concentrate on my work tasks while at home because I was distracted by the personal activities I could engage in. Also, I was distracted by the lack of noise. I know this sounds odd, and might be a personal thing, but the lack of background office noise led to my looking for distraction.

My advise to anyone interested in working from home is to go into it slowly, if you can. Start by trying out this option one afternoon per week, one day per week, then a couple of days per week, and gradually building it up. This is so you can get used to working in this new environment without loosing the option of working on your company's site.

You also need to consider your work systems. If you convert to being a full-time work from home employee in one go, you do not have the time to test how the different work systems you need to do your job will work in this new environment. This could be as simple as the need for a printer or a fax, to have a reliable internet connection, to have an affordable and reliable phone connection, ...

By encountering and overcoming the possible problems gradually, you can do so (hopefully) without negatively affecting your work output.

So consider "Working from Home" through the following questions:

- Is it adapted to your job function?
- Does it suit your personality?
- Is it allowed and supported in your company and by your management?
- Is it technically possible?
- Can you do plenty of trial runs?
- What information sources are available to support you in this transisition
- How will the different work systems you will need to use in your new work environment function

And overall - can you take it Slowly and experiment with adapting your work-from-home environment to suit you (I work with some source of noise on in the background)

Managers might find it a challenge to consider having employees work from home if they feel that they will loose control or if it is not an option that they would consider personally.  If you have an employee who has difficulty motivating themselves, then perhaps this is not a solution for them. But consider that a happy employee can be a more productive employee and if providing flexible work options might give your employee a more balanced and so happier work-home equilibrium, then this is certainly an option to investigate.

If I had been asked 10 years ago if I could organize meetings, projects and programs from a home office, I would have not known what to answer. If I had been asked if I could organize meetings, projects, and programs at a distance of 1000s of kilometres I would surely have said no. But I would have been wrong :)

Be open minded - but remain realistic

And overall, remain flexible.

Recently when visiting friends in their new house, they made the comment that they had bought a garden with a house rather than a house with a garden.

It is true that the garden can be the focus of a living space and can be particularly important when you work from home and so need need to learn to prioritise professional and personal life.

It is all about quality of life - I work in a very nice setting, not only because I live in the foothills of the French Alps and can see them out my office window but because I can take a few minutes off now and then to spot the latest arrivals in the garden.

This morning I got an email from a friend who is off to the hospital today to get the prognosis on a brain tumour; not an easy situation. But her email was to order jam, she had a list of jam she wanted me to put aside for her over the coming months. This email filled me with an unexpected happy feeling - my little garden was a source of future planning for someone who had decided to continue no matter what.

Our garden is not only a source of relaxation for me when I take a few minutes away from the computer but helps put everything into perspective. The joy I get as I wander around on my daily inspection is just renewed every day. Today I picked the first round courgette of the season. In fact the first round courgette I have ever held in my hand. I spotted the first little green beans which have magically appeared overnight.  I picked and podded some peas and dug up some new potatoes for dinner to be served with mint and chives.

And in fact the jam is underway. I made gooseberry jam yesterday, and with nearly 10kg of red and white currants picked, jelly and sorbet making are probably for later this week. However, what all our friends are waiting for is the blackberries that should start weighing heavily off their natural green arches any week now. And so life continues, and renews itself and gives us all these little moments of joy.

"European Perceptions of Remote and Flexible Work", http://www.flexibility.co.uk/flexwork/general/nextra2001.htm, cites the European countries where the highest number of people work at least one day a week from home. 

France is not even listed - but here I am.

The report identifies barriers to remote/flexible working:

- lack of prioritizing from management

- inadequate and corporate IT systems

- corporate expenditure issues

- technophobic employees or end users

- poor implementation of new products and solutions

I was surprised not to see "reduced social interaction" on this list. I know a lot of my colleagues in Sun France take advantage of the flexible work practices to be able to connect to work from home during the evenings or early mornings and so facilitate communication with other timezones.

However, France is a country where social interaction at work is very important and so I believe French workers would be slower to work full time from home for fear of missing those coffee-time and lunch-time conversations.

These social interactions are of course important for innovation and cross pollination of technology as well as the obvious benefits of chatting to like minded, friendly folks.

But I'm an unsocial workaholic and so work from home :)

There is another type of social interaction available in the virtual world I work in but that is a subject for another day. 

Now that I am in marketing, I need to worry about the look-n-feel of my blog. That will be great fun learning and tweaking.

But keeping true to myself - I first want to check that I have something to sell.

What will I be talking about in this blog - well I would like to talk to you about Remote Work - because that is what I do!

I might also talk about other stuff that filters into my daily life - garden, friends, and COOKING. But since I am a self-confessed workaholic, it'll be mostly work - Remote Work.

So what is Remote Work to me.

Well it comprises three facets:

- Working at a location which is distant from head-office

- Working across timezones

- Working at a location which is not an office run and maintained by your company

And I do all of these things.

I work in France where is more than a hop, skip, and a jump from California so I am definitely working at a distance from the head office.

Being in France I am in the Central European time zone. San Francisco is in Pacific Time (CET minus 9hrs), my boss Diane in the Mountain timezone (CET minus 8hrs) and I have a team mate Doreen in the Eastern timezone (CET minus 6). In my previous job at Sun, I also worked with India, China and Eastern Europe so that was more fun timezone calculations for me. But in my current position I work solely with the US so I talk to everyone using Pacific Time as a reference. Unfortunately, this everyone nearly also includes my husband sometimes - but I just manage to stop myself. It would be a bit odd telling him that dinner will be ready at 11 (am PT) when I really mean 8pm proper time!

And I definitely don't work in an office run and maintained by Sun. I work from home - which is a work choice that Sun Microsystems does a great job of making possible. I work from a home office with those mountains in view, my garden just at hand, and the birds chirping all around.

Well - all of the above is what I will talk about in this blog (unless of course I change my mind).

Catch ya next time

First entry on this Blog: It recently occurred to me that physical location is less and less relevant for many of our jobs.

In the past, as part of a professional profile I always cited "company", "job title", "duration", "achievements", or "job description". I would also have included "location". But now my location is misleading.

When I tell friends/family/acquaintances that I am based in Grenoble (France), they immediately presume that my work is completely based in France, with French people and French work systems. In reality I work completely with US offices, US employees and mostly US work systems.

When I tell colleagues that I am based in Grenoble (still in France :) ), people immediately apologize for contacting me so late, but in reality I work largely US hours - sometimes eastern, sometimes pacific.

So how is location important in todays world of work.

The great advantage of working for a company that lets people work to their potential is that if you can do your job, where you do it from is not important. In my case, this work environment is provided by Sun Microsystems.

The great advantage of being able to choose your location is that you can choose the location that makes you the most productive - i.e. personally happy.

My office is in my home in the foothills of the Alps. My office window looks out on these sometime snowy mountains. So for a personal wellbeing, location is all-important.

From a professional perspective, depending on the job, and your flexibility, location can be less and less important.