I started to think, why there are still many companies not going into a telecommuting strategy, when everyone talks about lack of technological local knowledge.I could think of a dozen of reasons on why would companies embrace on telecommuting strategies, we can start on reducing our carbon footprint, passing by increase employees quality of live ending on getting the best specialists anywhere in the world. Although as always there are some dangers embracing a telecommuting strategy, i will try to explain both pro’s and con’s, in my personal opinion.

Companies should embrace a telecommuting strategy because:

1. Company should demand goals to employee not office hours

Company employees should be handled as adults, like they are, and they should be responsible to manage their own 24 hours of the day, targeting to attain company proposed goals instead of targeting to be 8/10 hours per day in a office.

2. Decrease office costs

Having employees working out of the office, the company needs in terms of space, energy costs or rental budget will decrease.

3. Decrease dependency on local expertise

Looking into the whole world as a probable hiring market will increase the company workers knowledge, increase the probability of having the best workers coming along. As opposite to have a small local prospecting and limited knowledge market.

4. Increase employees level of life

Giving the possibility to the worker manage their own time, will increase the employee level of life, commuting time on the begin and end of each day takes a huge amount of person energy. This energy will start to be applied into daily work tasks.

5. Became global and open the office 24/7

Accepting a telecommuting strategy, you will end on having employees on every corner of the globe, meaning that you will have the office open 24/7h.

6. Improve internal processes and documentation

Having a telecommute strategy makes the company to impose himself internal strict processes, as meeting schedule, documentation process, and others.

Although companies when embracing a telecommuting strategy should be careful with the dangers of:

1. Loose of human interaction

Lack of a constant office hours, and having all the company teams together will imply the loose of human interaction, loosing some of the daily discussions or over the coffee ideas.

2. Harder to measure employee work

Lack of physical presence by the employee will increase the need of strict metrics or goals definition, in order to be able to measure the employee productivity.

3. IT becomes more important than never

With lots of remote workers, company IT need to be more failure proof, security should be increased on internal networks, VPN is indispensable and systems should never be off-line.

Some interesting links about telecommuting:

• Telecommuting [Wikipedia]
• 2 big reasons to think about telecommuting for your company
• Honk If Your Company Loves Telecommuting
• SO YOU WANT TO TELECOMMUTE? PART 1 – BUILDING TRUST
• Open Teams
• Remote Developers

IT employees do often change their work environment, jumping between projects and companies. It would be easy to change project or company just trying to have more money on your paycheck. Altough you should thing more ahead and not only the present.

There are several questions that you should ask yourself before jumping on a new project.

Will more money now solve all your problems ?

It’s easy to give more importance, than it really has, to money and monthly income, but will that result on more happiness and professional realization ? Most of the times the answer is a simple NO.

Will the new project be a step ahead, in terms of career?

Will you have the opportunity to became a more valuable professional or increase your knowledge or became a specialist in your field ? If the answer is no, think twice before jumping out your current project.

Will the change increase your quality of life ?

By changing project, are you increasing your quality of life ? By working less hours, spending more hours doing whatever you love outside work ? Or will it be consuming more time and weekends of your time, making almost impossible to have time for the small pleasures of life ?

Will you have the possibility to attend technology events ?

Nowadays attending international technology events is almost mandatory in order to keep your knowledge in pair with the rest of the community and your network up to date. If your the new company will not give you the opportunity to do that, you SHOULD think twice before accepting.

So, what you should be looking on your next job is simply as:

A solid and challenging project

A company that will increase your professional value

A project that will increase your quality of life

A company that cares about your knowledge and incentives your network to grow

The money? The money will come by the sum of the parts, if you will grow up as a professional, if you grow up your network and knowledge and you love what you do, the money will come to you without you notice it.