GazGuzla

With the price of gas soaring, asking the boss to work from home one or two days a week has become a very serious request, with far reaching financial consequences if the request is denied. You stand a higher chance of being denied if you ask with no prior history of working remotely, attract attention from your peers who all jump on the telecommuting bandwagon, or surprise IT with a huge request for everything at once triggering a complaint to your Boss. The best way to get yourself in a position of approval is to slowly, quietly, set up a home office and create a history of working remotely prior to asking. Here is a plan to put yourself into a position where the Boss is comfortable with approving your request:

Don’t talk about this at work!!!! If your Boss finds out half his department wants to stay home, he will say no to everybody to be fair….

1) Approach IT Department

• Have a casual hallway conversation with your IT department. Find out what type of external connectivity your company uses. Normally this is some version of VPN.
• Determine what is accessible from the outside (printers, databases, file servers, etc.)
• Do they offer mobile services for handheld devices like Blackberry, Windows CE.

3) Configure your Home Office

• Start with the network. Submit a ticket to IT for a connection.
• Configure your Home Office connection, work out all the bugs.
• Figure out what you can and can’t do from home.
• Optimize your network and system performance.
• Verify you have the compatible Software you will need.
• Get a UPS for Desktops!!!! This is huge. Before I started working at home full time, I never realized how often the power goes out during the day, at least once a month, whether its the weather or just for a second for no apparent reason.
• Get a Flash Drive for transporting data back and forth from work. Make sure this doesn’t break any company security guidelines.
• Get a Larger Monitor, or 2 smaller Monitors. Makes a huge difference in productivity.
• Configure some type of teleconferencing mechanism.

2) Change your Existing Work Schedule

• Once you know what you can do remotely, start manipulating your schedule so the tasks you will do are lumped into one or two days, and seen as your normal day by your boss and peers.

4) Slowly Increase Remote Productivity

• Send emails, leave voice messages, do some work at odd hours early in the morning or late at night so people can see the timestamp.
• Take some Half days, come in late, Sick days, but work. Submit something.
• Call in for a meeting when you not there. Teleconference.

6) Ask the Boss

• Now that your configured, and have proven to the Boss its no big deal, Ask!

For more information read the GazGuzla 4 Day Work Week vs 1 Day Telecommute, and Telecommuter Hardware Checklist Articles.