Trying to propose remote working where I work at. Opinions?

> Respond to any inquiry in up to 24 hours in working days

Acknowledge any inquiry within 5-10 minutes unless on a lunch break. Otherwise it means you are afk.

(edit) To elaborate - there are two issues involved with this. First is that you are unlikely to ever work on a fully self-contained task that doesn't require collaboration with other people. As such having shared work hours is required. Second issue is that of trust. In common tongue "working from home" means "sleeping in, sitting on a couch, going for two hour lunch breaks, etc". It's a way to slack while pretending to be working. I'm working from home, wink, wink, quote-unquote. In a perfect world you would be judged on deliverables and perfectly met deadlines. In real world, you will frequently need to prove that you've been working and that 1 page of code has indeed been a result of a week of research and numerous rewrites.

In my opinion, the first thing you need to do for this to work is to have a rock-solid clear value add for your employer.

Too many people make remote working arrangements about themselves and that's why they fail (sure, the employer cares about you, but if you act like you're only concerned with yourself, you'll come across poorly). Spend time laying out exactly how your move won't only benefit yourself, but will save the company time, energy & money and even open up future opportunities that you're willing to spearhead. You have to lay out the path so that it's a clear win for them. If you can do that, then you can usually get what you want too.

Sean Ogle had an interesting write up about this here (from his own personal experience) - http://www.seanogle.com/entrepreneurship/approaches-to-quitt...

I work in a mixed office, half in/half remote. I'm one of the few people (team lead/admin) that has to be in the office 90 percent of the working hours, which is fine. But I deal with good and bad remote colleagues over the years, so here's some suggestions.

Let me know when you are available, we have shared calendars and other means of indicating status, use them. Respect others time, both work and personal. If I can't get in touch with you for an extended period of time, let me know ahead of time or have a good reason afterwards. Let me know of any critical issues, technical or personal as soon as reasonably possible.

Let me know at you have on your project plate so I can assist or re-balance work loads if necessary. Please keep up with the "paperwork" aka source control, logging, reports, time-tracking and documentation.

If working remotely isn't working out, I've got some offices with doors and a fully stocked break room down the hall. And I'll throw in an extra monitor. :)

The formula that works for me, a 10-year telecommuter:

Make people aware of your office hours, and always keep them. This means always starting on-time, taking lunch on-time, and hopefully ending on-time. Anytime in between is fair game for phone calls and Skypes, although of course we want to not distract someone who is getting something done. Any deviations from the agreed-upon schedule are no different from a commuter being AWOL. Don't do it without prior notice.

Skypes get acknowledged and replied to within 0-10 minutes, depending on whether I'm getting something out of my head and into the editor and therefore cannot answer you (or getting something out of somewhere else in the bathroom). But they do get answered promptly. E-Mail gets checked hourly or less (personal preference for me, but I don't permit e-mail to interrupt my workflow).

Also it's nobody's damn business where I'm working from, and unless I'm very comfortable with you, as far as you know I'm working in a quiet home office. Not very many clients ever know I'm using LTE from (sailboat, beach, back of a moving Honda), and they don't need to, because it can be important to maintain the illusion that I too am rotting in a cubicle, not having more fun than they are.

In my opinion, you should speak with the management to understand their stance and/or concerns. This can be done formally or informally but I would prefer informally just so they won't have their guard up, preparing to say 'no' to you. After you've understood their needs and concerns, as someone else has already mentioned, clearly defined your value proposition to the management team. Provide some structure/insight into the plan on how it may work, get some research supporting remote working and how it has made a tremendous impact on organizations in terms of creativity and boosting the bottom line. Offer to do a small pilot test if the situation allows for it.

It's a negotiation situation and when you're clear about the other party's interests and concerns, you'll know what's stopping to other party from saying yes. Good luck! I for one enjoyed remote work in the past but probably because I live far out and don't have kids, I find that going into office to see some faces and talking about tech stuff is more fulfilling. That said, who knows how I would feel further down the road.

Simply make partial telecommuting hard requirement from your side. I made it very clear at interview that I need some quiet time to keep my productivity. I got hired and now I work 2 days a week from home.

Surprisingly I work for large corporation at 'cubicle sea' and everyone has VPN access and works from home sometimes. My previous job in another large corp had similar policy.

Watch Greg Wilson's talk "What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It's True" -- he cites research that supports working remotely (http://vimeo.com/9270320).

You have to convince management that they don't need management. Good lucky with that.

While I tend to a agree to a certain degree (e.g.: you may want/be allowed to take some days to work remotely on a quarterly basis), there's a reason they saw this principle isn't working and even called back the people from large companies, like Yahoo!. Best buy is another example (http://mashable.com/2013/03/05/best-buy-flexible-employees/). Many agencies still permit this, because they may lose some valuable work force, but most of these decisions were also taken for companies to (re)build a certain culture.

One of the main reasons is that it is hard to build a team / team cohesion if you don't physically interact with the other members. Also, motivation inside a team can be much higher. For newcomers, it's also the desire to work next to the best people from the company.

I'd like to see the tool (which is still TBD on the github link) where you can achieve most of these and have more gains than losses.

I'd love to see a videoconferencing solution for cheap that dedicates a full wall of your home office (projector and hd camera combo) mirrored to a similar wall at the office, always on. I know there are expensive 100K type solutions out there, but I think a simple kit could be pulled off.

If someone wanted to do a quick face to face, they'd just walk up to your wall and start talking :) Additionally you could link walls with other remote workers or other wall set-ups elsewhere in the main office.

Edit: a mini short-throw projector would work well here

Edit2: for privacy, since this setup would be always on, you could switch to "closed door mode" which would project a wall and door picture instead. Perhaps the camera on the office end could detect using kinect style magic when someone knocks on your "door" :)

My personal experience has been that working remotely can actually make you significantly more productive, because you can shut off email and all distractions and concentrate on difficult problems for hours at a time. Just make sure people have your phone number if something truly urgent comes up.

In an office environment you have people wanting to talk to you all the time (almost always about things that could have waited), and you're constantly distracted, which means things take twice as long to get done.

This of course depends very much on the nature of your job. For programming, research, writing etc. the above holds, but for other jobs the situation might be quite different.

One thing that I've learned to do after a few years working remote is always, early in the beginning of the work day, to send an email to other co-workers with a list of TODOS I plan on working during the day and ETAs for each one of them. This way everybody knows what I'm working on and what deliverables to expect from me by the end of the day.

It makes it possible for priorities and adjustments to be discussed before I start working and it makes me feel responsible for deliverables and not for being always online in fear other people might think I'm slacking work.

I do work remotely for several years (with infrequent in-person meetings at the office with colleagues), and I'd say in long run it's somehow hard to separate matters and, for example, stay focused on the work, while being at home.

It's certainly manageable, but still requires some fairly strong willpower to manage oneself. Being lazy, sometimes, I would actually perfer to have a distraction-free office envinorment.

So, my suggestion is, don't [completely] deprecate office space, at least for the first 2-3 years.

> Make your location available on each working day (for both reliability and safety)

Does this mean like over Google Latitude or Find my Friends or something? How would that help with safety? It'd help if you can elaborate on this point a bit more. Also, could it be a slight privacy issue with some folk if they accidentally leave it on after working hours are over?

I like the rest of the points you make though. Good luck with convincing your management!

> Respond to any inquiry in up to 24 hours in working days (unless explicitly taking day off.)

If this means responding with the finished code, than make sure the inquiries are small enough. If this means confirming availability or that you got the message at all, than why would you need 3 full work days for that?

> don't need to do - Be available at any particular time of a working day

Sorry… but how is anyone supposed to work with you with this attitude.

If I had to work with someone who was never around and I didn't even know if I could contact them for sure without waiting 24h for a reply then I'd be complaining to management to ditch the guy and hire someone who wants to work.