Dont Quit Your Day Job! Convincing Your Boss To Let You Telecommute, Part 1 of 2
Are you desperately trying to find a telecommute job so that you can
quit your current one? Hold on! Your job just might have the potential
to be done from home. With the right approach, a little research and a good proposal, many
employees are selling the idea of telecommuting to their employers. In this first segment, we focus on the steps you should take in order to
determine whether or not your job is a candidate for telecommuting. Many jobs are well suited for telecommuting...and many aren't. Your
first step should be to evaluate your current job and determine whether
or not it is feasible to do it from home. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Does your job depend on resources that are only available at the office?
If your job only requires Internet access, phone and fax, it is
definitely possible to do it from a home office. However, if you are a
receptionist in a medical office, you probably have other
responsibilities that require you to physically be there, i.e. having
patients fill out paperwork and filing.
- Do you work well without supervision? Some people are perfectly content
to work on their own. Others need the support of having a supervisor
and co-workers nearby. Monitor yourself for a week. Be aware of how
often you rely on others and how you would deal with it if you had been
away from the office. In some cases, a supervisor may feel that getting
phone calls from a remote employee is disruptive, while a quick question
in the hallway is not.
- Do other companies offer telecommuting for your job type? Do some
research and find out if it's already being done. Having evidence of
success with telecommuting can go a long way in convincing an employer
that it can (and does) work.
- Does telecommuting fit with your company culture? If your company has a
culture of empowerment and trust, telecommuting may be a perfect fit.
If they have a more hands-on management style, it may not work. Think
about how your company manages their employees and whether or not the
hands-off style required for telecommuting is possible.
- Could you cope with the isolation? Some people crave office gossip,
lunches with co-workers, water cooler chats and all the human
interaction that comes with a traditional job environment. If this
sounds like you, you may need to give serious thought to whether or not
working remotely is for you- it may turn out to be more like solitary confinement!
Here are some useful resources for evaluating your current job and for
determining whether telecommuting is right for you: ====>Do You Have The Skills to Telecommute? from About.com ====>Is Telecommuting For You? In Part 2, we will discuss the ways that you can convince your boss to let you telecommute. -------------------------------- Sharon Davis is the Mom to two girls, the owner of 2Work-At-Home.Com, Work At Home Articles.net and the Editor of the site's monthly ezine, America's Home. In her spare time she reminisces about what it was like to have spare time. To subscribe to her free ezine, Click Here. This article may be reproduced providing it is published in it's entirety, including the author's bio. For a text version via autoresponder, send a blank email to dayjob@sendfree.com
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