Prepare for Telecommuting

If you are not making use of telecommuting possibilities for yourself or your employees, you may be missing out on an opportunity to save a some gas money. You could also miss out on savings on utilities and on employee time.

One critical thing you will have to do is figure out just what your employees are doing and how to measure it.  A major weakness in small business is that employers don’t know precisely what they want out of employees, and consequently very often the employees aren’t that sure either.  If you don’t know what “it” is, you will find it’s hard to measure it.

As with everything requiring technology there is time that must be spent on learning.  I have frequently explained to clients the benefit of some technology and demonstrated it for them only to be asked about it again a few weeks as though the client had never heard about it.  Sometimes I set up a technology, say a simple remote control, and find out that it is not being used because nobody has really learned how to use it.

Most of these things do not take that long to learn, but you have to take the time to do it.  I’m in favor of easy to use software, but even the best software requires some skill, if nothing else, the knowledge of what you want to do with it.

MSNBC.com has a brief note on this and a video interview with Tim Ferriss.  Employees and bosses should realize they both have an interest in making this work!