Why do employers seem to hate working remotely?

[Bo]

Originally Posted by PierceMarx

Do you have any source for this statement?

I had a direct report who got into an auto accident on company time and received minor injuries. I didn't even know he was out of the office, nor did his duties take him off of the premises that day. Created a real mess about whether he was owed Workers Comp for being injured on company time. My employer's risk manager at the time was none too pleased with either my employee or me.

My employer at the time allowed limited WAH. I have done WAH myself and also pondered many permutations of how the incident in the previous paragraph could have gone much worse if someone did what I described. I also live in a state where personal injury lawyers produce big judgments off of injury accidents involving company vehicles.

[JMatl]

With the exception of the Directors and core management, all of us are remote at our company. About half are in SoCal, the rest of us are scattered across the country.

It works very well for us. We Skype with our groups/key clients & management throughout the day when necessary. We have rules and parameters that anyone with some self discipline can handle, but slackers would be exposed pretty fast. We also seem to have a knack for hiring great team-player types. I love it.

[I_Love_LI_but]

... and here's why.

Companies are figuring out ways to really cheat workers who work at home by making them "independent contractors" because you don't have to guarantee at least minimum wage or ANY wage to independent contractors. Here's an example, although admittedly a simple somewhat unskilled job. With "Obamacare" working as hard as possible to change the responsibility for health insurance from employers to individuals, independent contractordom will make even more sense. However, if your job is more complex, don't be complacent and think "it cannot happen to MY job" as they might be able to think up a way to cheat you too. Never underestimate the power of software engineering. They might find a way to commoditize you and your job too in the future.

Call Center Salary and Pay Structure - Work at Home

Of course, one of the first questions one might ask about any new job is “How much does it pay?” However, when it considering an at-home call center salary, the question becomes “How does it pay?” because virtual call centers have varying methods of calculating pay, depending on whether it is an employment job or an independent contractor position.

Per-Call and Per-Minute Rates

Agents compensated on a per-call and per-minute basis (or for “talk time”) are paid only for time on the phone—not for time waiting for calls to come in. And there is little way to know if calls will come in a steady flow. Per-call pay rates might be anywhere from $.10 to $.25 per minute, but there is no way to know what this might work out to as an hourly rate. For those paid per call, obviously moving quickly through calls means more money.

How about the above scenario, where an at-home call center worker waits eagerly by the phone during his/her shift each hour and only receives a few minutes worth of calls because the company is "crowdsourcing" like mad and "hires" way too many operators because it won't cost them anything except per minute or per call rates. Sometimes a worker could earn only $0.50 an hour! This is a very sneaky way for companies to get native English speaking customer service at far less rates than staffing offshore call centers in third world countries.

It's a nobrainer that they are better off working in the office in a physical call center for a typical hourly wage, even though their job can be done 100% remotely. Separating the job from the office is not beneficial in all cases for workers.

[maus]

There are a lot of variables and there is no one answer that fits all. It depends on your company's culture, the management and the nature of your job. I've worked at places that are very open for remote working while others are not so flexible with it. At some places, working from home is up to the direct manager and is usually considered a perk. At more established companies, usually people who are at mid-career status get the option to work remotely, while people who are somewhat new would be required to come in.

While at job interviews not so long ago, I have asked if there was a work at home policy, some places have flat out said they don't allow to others who would allow at least part time working from home. Usually, you hear from others if remote working is somewhat accepted at certain companies.

[jgn2013]

I like most of my coworkers. Working from home 4-5 days each week would get monotonous. When we're moderately to extremely busy, I prefer coming into the office.

Working from home would be more enjoyable on those slow days where you have maybe 1-2 hours of work. If there's nothing to do after 10 AM but casually surfing the web, I can do that in the comfort of my home.

[adams_aj]

My wife works remotely 99.9% of the time for an employer several states away. I get to WFH 2 of 5 days per week, and more if the weather is bad. I WFH all last week, rather than risk the roads. No problem. We WebEx even when I'm in the office and others are scattered around the Eastern half of the country.

We have Cisco communicator for our phones. They ring in both places. If your phone rings or someone IMs you, you'd better respond within minutes. My boss keeps IMs open to his whole staff, and if your computer goes to sleep for more than 15 minutes, he gets notified.

We had to sign remote working agreements. One page--not a huge deal. As long as things get done, our managers make sure we have an adequate workload.

[Harlin]

I work for a software company doing support for it. The office is in Atlanta but I work from home because I live in Colorado Springs. My boss will know very quickly if I am not producing. For example, if I am not helpful enough to our customers, you can bet they will call the support line and ask to speak to my boss. My boss is a pretty good guy to work for but I do know that these days when he hires new people for support, they are only hiring in Atlanta and they *must* come in to the office. There are occasions when they are allowed to work from home but usually it's when the weather is pretty bad. I got lucky because the first couple of years after getting hired, they had a tough time finding experienced people to support our product. They were then looking for people across the country to hire. Now that our top 2 tiers are filled (mostly with remote workers), they only really need bottom tier support people. They can find those guys by the truckload (most of them recent grads from technicial universities/colleges) in Atlanta now. I was able to move out here to Colorado before all that came into being. I think a lot of these businesses look at a few things when it comes to working from home:

. Liability
. Team cohesiveness
. Productivity
. Expense

The Liability portion of this is not nearly what some of the posters on this thread think. If you leave the house without telling your boss and you get into a wreck, your company is *not* liable. You pretty much took it upon yourself and were not told to leave by your boss for part of your job. So, it's your fault. You *only* will get sued, not your company. The only way the company *could* get sued in this scenario is if your boss told you to do something job-related and you had a wreck. Even then it's really a long shot as your insurance in all likelihood would cover any issues you may have caused accidentally. So, liability may be used as an excuse for not allowing WFH but it's not a good reason for disallowing it.

Team cohesiveness: depending on what type of work you do, this could be the most important factor. Since I work in support and no one in the entire company (which is a global one) knows our product in and out completely, we all rely on each other for help. We use Skype and a few other tools to do this. We can always get on the line and talk something through. If you work from home, the best thing you can do is to answer either the phone or email quickly as soon as it comes in. This is something I strive to do so I can let my boss know he can depend on me. It works well and there's no complaints. Nonetheless, the team-cohesiveness thing is something all managers worry about as most of them don't have much experience managing remote workers.

Productivity: Let's be honest. If I want to screw off at home during working hours, I can do it just as easily in the office. We have a pretty good team but I have worked at other places where we were all forced to come in and half of the team was screwing off and not being productive. By that I mean, just doing things that made no sense in an office: playing solitaire on the computer, playing online poker, watching YouTube videos unrelated to IT subjects, watching Netflix, looking at porn... you name it. The managers knew it and no one got fired for it. The way to manage remote workers is to assign deliverables with milestone reports. In my instance, we have support cases to work. We have a set amount we have to close in a quarter, we have customer satisfaction goals and so forth. We also have to write knowledge-base articles. If a remote worker is not meeting these without very good reason, my manager will know about it.

These days productivity is no longer an excuse. If this is the sole excuse used by your manager why they don't allow WFH, it might be a good idea to find another job as your company is probably being run into the ground from incompetence. If you have to be closely supervised due to the nature of the work, it's time to go back to school, learn a new trade and find something else. If you're reasonably bright and a go-getter, you won't like being there long if this is the case.

Expense: This can be legit. If you have to answer phones or require the use of some not so common office equipment, it may make sense for a company to insist you come in and use the equipment there. For IT workers, this would/could include those who work closely with hardware and networks. There may be times when they can work from home but when I was doing this, if we had an issue with a server or router, we had to come in and do some hands-on work.

Bottom line, here is the main reason I like working from home: I don't needlessly use up 2.5 hours a day on commuting like I did when I was in Atlanta. I still work the same amount of hours, do the same amount of effective work (actually more due to less distractions) and do a much better overall job for my company. I can now spend that extra 2.5 hours a day with my wife and kids. When I come back to work the next day, I am so much less stressed than I used to be when I had to drive in Atlanta traffic to the office every day. The people in the office are great people and I miss seeing them every day but I prefer to see them over Skype instead of driving through mind-numbing traffic to get to the office.

[ohhwanderlust]

Because they mistaken self-imposed inefficiency for hard work.

Originally Posted by Kibbiekat

obviously, they want to know you are actually working. That's the simplest answer.

That's why you send them the output. Or at least a daily status report.