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Stay Home and Work

blogs.harvardbusiness.org

12 pointspeter1234 comments

As the article points out (nearly making the entire point of the article pointless) is that this only works if you have strong managers running the show.

Any chink in the chain of command and it all falls in on itself.

Probably workable with a small team of 4, but anything bigger and you're shooting yourself in the foot.

I allow some of our developers to work off-site, but I prefer them in the space because even though email, IM, etc. exist to facilitate conversation, nothing replaces walking over to someone's desk, or yelling over a monitor.

Also, culture is important. It engages employees when the chips are seemingly down, and it's nigh impossible to cultivate culture if nobody works face to face.

Good management is a necessity for home working but when is it not a necessity? Poor management in an office is acceptable? Of course not.

I've worked in a team of developers (15 coders/designers/artists) one of whom was always off site and most people worked a week or two off site every year and there were no problems. I myself regularly worked at home and I was the lead programmer. IM/IRC and Webcams bring everyone together. The team members feel empowered, less stressed and they appreciate what the company and other team members are enabling them to do. In my experience it adds positively to all the team dynamics that matter to reach targets and achieve goals.

Culture is important, I agree and certainly a different culture is nurtured with off site employees. It is not destructive though.

Working from home has way more benefits to a company, staff, staff families, environment, family pets, local community, city life (as in less commuters and less traffic) then it has downsides for a business.

Is there any reason why this is addressed to Barack Obama instead of, say, tech CEOs? The President doesn't have the power to set business norms. One thinks that if one wanted to affect business norms most directly, one would address business leaders. There are far more business leaders than Presidents, and one would only have to influence a subset of them (instead of 100%) to start a trend.

Santa's finished, then. "Dear Barack Obama, for Christmas this year I want..." From over here in Europe, these Obama-pleading articles do come across as unamerican - we always thought that if the Yanks wanted to change things, they just did it. This article is more reminiscent of a pleading courtier at a thuggish Medici court.

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