What are your experiences with telecommuting and what is the best way to get into it?

2017-02-19T11:42:30-05:00

I'm currently unable to travel far for employment and have become immensely interested in telecommuting. I know a couple people that have worked from home and they seemed to enjoy it. I have tried using several telecommute job finders, like Virtual Vocations, to no avail.

I have a strong resume, but I think not having telecommuted prior might be holding me back.

Response by Lt Col Jim Coe made Feb 19 at 2017 12:14 PM

2017-02-19T12:14:03-05:00

I have telecommuted when it was necessary to support my family. I wasn't a fan because I was a supervisor and couldn't make daily, face-to-face contact with my employees. They were great and trustworthy people, but I was old-school enough to miss the personal contact.

Some of the things I did when telecommuting:
-ensure my boss and employees understood I was at work even when I was only available by phone or e-mail
-ensured the employees and my boss knew who was "second in command" if they couldn't reach me; empowered my deputy to make time-critical decisions in my absence
-used teleconference to attend meetings with my boss and his other staffers
-set up my government-provided laptop with a VPN so I could access all the files and e-mail like I was at the office (this is critical to telecommuting and one of the great uses of technology)
-checked e-mail frequently and tried to respond with the same professionalism and timeliness I would have if I was in the office
-had a short teleconference with my employees near the end of the normal duty day to ensure they were progressing on work assignments
-we didn't use electronic meeting software often because it proved to be unreliable at the time (2011-2013) and often more trouble than it was worth compared to a teleconference

Response by CAPT Kevin B. made Feb 19 at 2017 2:02 PM

2017-02-19T14:02:32-05:00

I was on the Fed/MIL side when telecommuting became a "requirement". Up to that point, the dinosaurs pretty much tamped it down. First prerequisite is trust between the employee and supervisor. Second is a job that can be done from home. So we had project managers, contract specialists, engineers, environmental types, etc. do it. By the time I left, I'd say about 30% telecommuted 2-4 days a week. That allowed hot racking some desks. We also had some pretty stringent criteria for what's at home. No high speed internet, forget it. We moved telecommuters into NMCI laptops and they just used them at home with their CAC cards. They forwarded their work phone to the home number and it didn't make a difference. You really don't care where they are at so long as they pick up the phone when you call and the work is being done. We'd see an overall productivity jump as telecommuters were less bugged by walk by BS at work. Supervisors sometimes telecommute if they're locked up on some investigation, board report, etc. We had a pretty extensive ad-hoc program that provided for it.

So what holds you back? It's likely trying to be 100% sight unseen telecommuter material. People hire employees to work for them and have varying comfort levels with telecommuting. So that means a routine day or so at work for designated meetings. People don't go to your house. So take a look at your expectation level.

Response by SPC Erich Guenther made Feb 19 at 2017 8:31 PM

2017-02-19T20:31:01-05:00

I have telecommuted for three years so far and love it. You have like 2 extra hours a day without having to deal with automobile commute. Each morning I skype in with the rest of the team and every other month I fly in for a week to work onsite. Depends on the company. This is the second company I have telecommuted with. The first was paranoid and always checking in on me. The second is more trusting and gives me the benefit of the doubt. Your best bet is to find a recruiter which can be done via LinkedIn that is looking for folks that want or have telecommuted. Your probably going to run into a slight issue and that is most telecomutting jobs want to see that you have done it before or are capable of working without supervision. Here is the drawback, they measure by output so sometimes you need to put in the extra hours to make up time due to circumstances no fault of your own (power outage, network outage due to ISP, etc). Overall there are more benefits that drawbacks.

With Skype for business everyone on the network including your boss can see when you on your PC as it lights up a green light next to your name, if your away from your PC more than 3-4 min that light turns to yellow and the message says away. So using that and output of assigned items they can tell if your shamming.

My employer mailed me piece by piece (cha-ching$$$) a virtual office setup at home including IP phone that is secure and requires a Federal CAC type card to login. I have a password vault type application with about 30 passwords, some of which I need a higher up level of authorization to sign out. Very James Bondish but I love it. The Virtual Office is really cool people can call my office phone at work and it rings on my desk at home or if I am out running an errand I can forward to my cell phone. It's a very locked down environment so I don't want to go into too much detail on security. Also had to go through a very extensive Federal Background Investigation which included interviews with family, friends, past managers/coworkers, and next door neighbors. Was interviewed myself and had to provide fingerprints, thumb scanner print ( a lot of data centers use facepoint ID and Thumb scans now for security)......whole process took 3.5 months.

Response by MAJ Raúl Rovira made Feb 25 at 2017 7:14 PM

2017-02-25T19:14:37-05:00

I am a Freelancer working mainly from home. I do make it to coffee bars to work depending on my activities for the day. I love the flexibility, and I enjoy the three big gigs that I do. All of my Telework/Freelance gigs I got through my personal networks in Anchorage. After 100+ bids through on-line freelance website I got nothing. I know it takes time to crack that code.
Some of thous websites are Freelancer.com, UpWork.com, FlexJobs. Recently I discovered and currently testing CloudPeeps.