Are you uncomfortable with home-based workers?

Do home-based employees work with the same dedication and productivity as those in office cubicles next to each other?

That depends upon the management as much as the employee.  I have a friend who is a

CEO of a recruiting firm who “virtualized” her company after a decade of maintaining a fixed office location.  She organizes morning conference calls, has each employee tweet the others in their department when starting work and ending the day, creates the feel of closeness with employee contests, and rewards her best sales people by assigning them the best leads, creating an environment where the best excel and those unable to cut it in a virtual environment fall out on their own accord for lack of revenue.

But most important, the unpredicted benefit of having very low infrastructure overhead may be the one most important element in saving the company during the strongest and longest downturn in recruiting industry memory because of the recent recession.  Much larger recruiting companies were in trouble, with high fixed costs for facilities that could not be shed quickly.  This CEO’s decision to try to retain an excellent, motivated staff in a virtual environment paid off and continues to pay off in every way.  The employees are more satisfied, actually work more hours in a day even if spread over a longer period, and uniformly claim a better lifestyle as a result of the move.

[Email readers, continue here…]   But as you see from the story above, it does take more creative management to make this work. It is a management skill that was not taught nor learned until recent times. A creative CEO will find ways to motivate and compensate for the lone nature of working alone, but using social networking tools to make office workers and home workers feel and behave as a unit.   After all, with this generation of texting, tweeting, IM-based workforce, you’ll find as much of this kind of communication from adjacent cubicles as from distant home offices.

Let’s pause for a word about dress code and formal accountability for the home office worker.  Employees working at home must dress for work, even if casual, and find a schedule for the start of each work day that is to be counted upon by fellow workers.  It won’t be long before home workers will routinely greet each other via video conference from the home desk.  Although possible today and used by some, it is not a requirement of most employers with home-based workers.  Someone who “comes to work each day” even if to the computer in a separate part of an apartment, is putting on the business hat in a much more formal way that one who drifts to a computer in the room beside a blaring TV, dressed in pajamas and arriving whenever convenient.

How about the employee unable to self-motivate in a home environment?  With the proper measurements of productivity, it will soon become quite obvious to both the employee and manager that such an opportunity is not right for that person.

Ask any CEO who has tried letting employees work from home, whether for a day a week or as a rule with occasional office visits.  You’ll find stories of emails time stamped well into the night, work performed at unusual hours and productivity increases.  You’ll also hear a bit of pride in the telling.  A CEO that encourages this once-risky venture and is rewarded with increased performance, is a person fulfilled and willing to tell anyone who’ll listen.