How Times Change

How Times Change was Originally Posted on March 6, 2013 by lavarock

When I was in the computer industry, we started transitioning to allow some employees to work from home (Telecommuting). At the time, the economy was zooming along and allowing people to work from home was a useful option for both the employee and employer. Without adding more office space, we could add more employees by having some work from home and on certain days, come into the office. They would sit at a shared workspace where there was a phone, internet connection and access to fax machines, etc.
When they worked from home, they were able t otake advantage of an internet connection that connected directly to the office and a phone which looked like an extension off the office phone system (PBX).

The work at home employee looked to customers as if he was in the office. He could answer a call and transfer it to the secretary or a co worker who could be anywhere else in the world.

So the work at home worker saves on gas, he can be more productive by not having to commute (my commute used to be about 45 minutes each way) and it also kept the employee a bit calmer than one who was stuck behind “idiots that just don’t know how to drive” commuters.

The manager would assign tasks and the employee would have to meet certain goals and would be evaluated on his workload. This may have contributed to some employees taking off during “working hours” to do personal tasks, but then turning around and working half the night to catch up. As long as the employee got the work done, many companies had no issues with that.

However, the employee had to be very careful. There have been stories where an employee of a company is working at home, seemingly browsing the internet on company time, but whose actions were hidden from the manager. That is until the employee prints a page of pornography when accidentally is printed on the office printer many miles away. In an office this probably would not happen, but if it did, you can be sure that the second the employee hit PRINT and realized his mistake, he would haul it over to the printer (perhaps sprinting) to grab the printout. This is not possible when he is hours away from the printer. He might as well start packing up the equipment to take back.

One employee of a computer company had a company car to go to customer sites. All went well until one night when he drove toa residence and knocked on the door. He didn’t know it until the door opened, but it was his managers house. The next day he was in the office at the HR department signing his separation papers. It seems that although not specifically written in the company policy, delivering pizzas in a company car, was frowned on.

Recently, a couple of large companies have decided to stop or cut back on telecommuting. This can be understandable. AS the economy got worse, these companies began letting people go, or not rehiring as people left or retired, thus paring down the workforce. This opened up work slots in the physical building that the company is still paying for but are empty. If you owned or rented a big building and part of it was empty, you would find a way to fill it up. By reigning in the work at homers, the company can cut costs. Rather than pay for internet for these employees, they can use the internal system already in the building. They also don’t need to pay phone costs for the extended service. The company saves these costs and the employee now has to get to the office and pay for gas, etc.

The company also has a better control of how the employee uses his time. When he was working at home and the company was doing well, there was less oversight of the employee. Now with tougher times, the need for all employees to be more efficient is critical. Meetings are easier if everyone is in the same room and there is no need for teleconferences and associated costs. The interactions of employees is better if one can just holler over the partition rather than play telephone tag for hours, not realizing the person they want to talk to has accidentally muted his phone ringer.

So, I am not surprised that some companies are starting to pull employees from home back to the office. It can make sense in some way. It may also not be the trend and could turn around again.

When I was employed in one of these large companies, I did not really work from home, except when I was on call, such as weekends. I was a “critical employee” which in my case, was a salaried employee who was expected to work as needed to complete my workload. Certain weekends I would be on call and required to be able to make it to the office if needed in a short period of time. (One employee got into trouble when he and his family were at a theme park an hour away, when he was on call and an emergency came up).

With technology I was able to log in from home as thought I was in the office, and although I had no special telephone, I was able to call into the office and pick up an outbound line to call other offices internationally as though I was physically in my cubicle miles away. Yes, I could have even dialed an extension and accessed the overhead paging system. I did that once when I needed to locate someone in the office on a weekend and they were not picking up any telephones whose numbers I knew.

As an essential employee, I was the one who, when the blizzard approached, would be sent home to get extra clothes and toiletries and return to the office, while other employees headed for the safety of their homes for the duration. I might work a shift and then walk to the nearby hotel where a room was waiting for me. In some situations, the company had acquired a couple of rooms where employees would rotate through in shifts to shower or sleep.

Being single with no pets, this was not a big deal for me, and the extra pay on top of my already generous pay was welcome. For a family man (or woman) this arrangement was not always welcome.

My normal workday was 4pm to midnight and I got a second shift differential for that.

My normal workday was to get up when I wanted, watch TV and at about 2pm get ready for work. I would drive 45 minutes against traffic and arrive at the office as many people were leaving. As the night wore on, the office got quieter and quieter. Our floor normally held 100 people and our building has 21 stories. In the lower levers were a cafeteria (closed at night), a credit union (closed at night), a shoeshine stand (closed at night), two very large computer rooms and an increasing amount of empty space as most of the 2100 employees left.

My job was to keep the computers running smoothly while things like payroll and monthly, quarterly and yearly financials were run. The staffing at night was very sparse, but I could call on “daytimers” if needed, but the reason I was there was to minimize these day workers from having to do anything outside their regular shift.

I was paid to take charge and make decisions as best as I could, using previous experience and common sense. HUH? OK, well I did pretty good at that and only a few times got in over my head. I was lucky to have has managers who were also friends of varying degrees. I tired not to bother them with mundane decisions, but they knew that if I called I was concerned (perhaps unnecessarily) about something. They also knew that if I got a call after my regular shift or on a weekend, that they could rely upon me to drop what I was doing and come in to fix something.

Although I also got extra pay on top of that for holidays and that encouraged me to work all holidays I wanted. My excuse was to let the family people have a holiday with their family, that was not the only reason. The office would be quiet, very quiet, and I could get extra work done. There was less stress and you could turn the radio up if you wanted. We had a nice kitchen on each floor and I could heat a dinner or just go to the candy machine as I needed to. There was free coffee and tea and so on. At my last location, I had a great view of Atlanta in the distance.

So there you have a couple of takes on working from home or in a big company. I was luck at the time to work for a company that respected its employees, was respected in the industry as one of the best companies in the country to work for and had a job which my managers though was being performed well enough to continue to employ me for 18 years.

If you attend a party, don’t get there early. Things are slow and nobody is having a good time. Then when things are going strong and people are having a great time, watch for the telltale signs that things are starting to close down. Make your rounds and tell everyone goodbye. Then when people think about the party, know what they remember? Things were slow until you got there, then they went downhill quickly after you left!

Over the ensuing years, this company has had its share of problems and then some, and it not ranked as highly as it was. I like to think that it didn’t really get going until I was hired, but we all know the truth. It really went downhill after I left