enough to work from home and fly out there for one week a month. The
problem is that his boss is worried that he might not be putting in
eight hours a day when he is working from home and wants proof that he
is actually working those hours. Some of us are blessed with bosses who
understand telecommuting, but for those of us who are not here are some
simple things you can do to prove you are working from home.
Email: Commit to a “quality of service” standard for email – all
emails will be answered within 15 minutes. Then to show that, simply
screen cap your email sent box to show that you are sending emails and
keeping communications going. If you have some serious time zones
issues (like my friend working in the states and his employer in
Taiwan) the employee might consider working the hours that the company
is open rather than sticking to their own timezone limitations. That
always looks good.
Document Writing – we all know about the security implications of
meta data in documents, but did you know you can also use that meta
data to prove how long you have been working on a document, and the
chain of edits that the document has gone through? A simple tool such
as meta data analyzer can show how long the document was open for
editing, and those minutes add up at times. Below is a screen cap of
that process.
Web – any use of the web – you should be using an inbuilt proxy for
at least one of your browsers. At my place of employment, we live and
die on SharePoint, so I use a simple proxy for everything that I do on
the SharePoint site locally through IE. Almost all browsers have a
proxy plug-in you can download. If you are using Firefox, you can use
FoxyProxy for tracking each URL you are using. Ensure that you do not
do anything personal on the browser you are using to track what you are
doing for work. This is one of the reasons I use two different browsers
when I am working from home.
VPN – if the company has a VPN service use it – that will provide
an ample source of login and log out for your manager. Find the person
who monitors the VPN, and ask them for your access logs weekly so that
you can show when you logged in and when you logged out of corporate
provided services.
Do not do anything personal, if the company provided you with a
laptop then use it, and only use it for work. This does not mean that
you cannot do other things (especially if you have your own PC, use
both computers for the things you need and want to do). Treat your work
PC and your work time just like you were sitting in the office, and
always hit your deadlines or be early (at least by 24 hours) for any
project given to you. This will help your boss understand that you are
putting in the work, and hitting deadlines early.
Sometimes you do have to prove you are working from home, these
simple tools and processes will help you prove you are working from
home, and being a productive employee.
(Cross-posted @ IT Toolbox )
I would add one: be a conference call leader. Any time you work collaboratively, there will be meetings. Volunteer to organize and lead conference calls for those meetings. Its not glamorous, but it sends an unambiguous signal that you’re part of the team and you’re contributing.