The American View: Shirking from Home

Working from home is likely Business Reporter’s resident American ‘blogger’s favourite perqs. It’s liberating, making everything more productive and less stressful. It’s also stressful in its own right thanks to poor workers who made the entire WFH programme synonymous with slacking off. I have reservations about Work from Home (WFH) programmes. To be clear, mine aren’t completely rational reservations. I freely acknowledge that. I do recognize the benefits that WFH can have for team morale, employee empowerment, and productivity. It’s just … there are undeniable negative factors that I feel must be addressed in any WFH scenario. Before we get to that, please understand that I’m not suggesting that companies forbid or shut down their WFH programmes. I know I’d hate to lose mine; most of the work that I do involves creativity, contemplation, and coordination. These activities are made unnecessarily difficult when working in a cubicle farm. For example, I take a lot of online training modules. Not for my own professional development, but to deconstruct how other course designers built their training. To learn how other artists engineered effective lessons, I need to analyse their product’s design elements. That requires concentration and contemplation – two activities that are impossible to achieve in an environment saturated with background noise. Every interruption breaks my focus and forces me start over. It’s infuriating. There there’s contemplation. Maybe other writers can simply sit down and start churning out fully-formed text. I can’t. Take this column: I spent an hour thinking through story structure, key phrases, and sources before I was ready to open a new Word doc. This is why most of my columns are written early in the morning before my household gets active. I need the quiet to think.

Googled the difference and realized that demanding a midnight teleconference wasn’t going to be received well. Still, Bob insisted that her schedule was simply ‘too packed’; she also wasn’t going to wake up early or stay late and she couldn’t free up time on her calendar. We eventually convinced Bob to accept an 8 pm CST call so that she could work with the early morning Asian contingent. She grudgingly relented … and then didn’t show up for the call. It took us days to get her back on the line. Bob claimed to have had a conflict and simply didn’t show. We tried again. She failed to show. Again. Finally, after weeks of pleading and some not-so-subtle hints about invoking the dreaded executives, Bob grudgingly agreed to do her danged job. We coordinated the 8 pm meeting, got the video chat working, and Bob showed up. Victory! … Except that twenty minutes in to a 90-minute demo, Bob abruptly left the call. ‘Oh, I have to drop,’ she said. ‘The repairman for my water heater just arrived. Bye-ee!’ Stunned, furious, and confused, my partner did some digging. We learned that Bob was a fully-remote employee. That is, she WFH’d [2] every day from her home office. There were no company facilities in her state, let alone her tiny rural town. Bob was on her honour to perform like a normal corporate employee: attend all meetings, be responsive to all calls, etc. Instead (her peers confided), Bob had made herself indispensable by taking over a niche function and then accepted a pay cheque for doing pretty much nothing. Bob was her division’s shining example of why people on WFH status couldn’t be trusted to put in an honest day’s labour. Without the threat of consequences from her equally fully-remote boss in another state, why bother? What really stood out to us was how much Bob’s peers held her in contempt. They had their own methods for getting results from her, all of which required measures of flattery, bribery, and the occasional application of intimidation. Bob was universally considered to be a blight on her office and an example of how badly the company’s culture had devolved.

Office Cowboys: Cautionary Tales from the Cubicle Frontier, which will be coming out in audiobook format later on this winter. [2] Pronounced ‘whiffed,’ referencing the sound a baseball bat makes when missing a pitch. Also used in US slang to refer to any embarrassing failure. Apropos twice over, I think. Pop Culture Allusion: None this week

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POC is Keil Hubert, keil.hubert@gmail.com Follow him on Twitter at @keilhubert. You can buy his books on IT leadership, IT interviewing, horrible bosses and understanding workplace culture at the Amazon Kindle Store. Keil Hubert is the head of Security Training and Awareness for OCC, the world’s largest equity derivatives clearing organization, headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Prior to joining OCC, Keil has been a U.S. Army medical IT officer, a U.S.A.F. Cyberspace Operations officer, a small businessman, an author, and several different variations of commercial sector IT consultant. Keil deconstructed a cybersecurity breach in his presentation at TEISS 2014, and has served as Business Reporter’s resident U.S. ‘blogger since 2012. His books on applied leadership, business culture, and talent management are available on Amazon.com. Keil is based out of Dallas, Texas.