I work in a satellite office. We're a little bit like the "red headed step-child" of the company. We're "out west", HQ is "back east". There's this feeling sometimes that they'd just as soon shut us down and centralize the jobs - but some of the groups that work here are fairly crucial to the operation. Even though about 150 people work in my office... most don't actually work here, they tend to work remotely from home, coffee shops, etc. It's actually one of the major perks of why I keep working for this stank hole of a company. That said, every now and then, the CEO comes for a visit. He's recklessly clueless about what we actually do - but somehow keeps his job. He's a jovial sort of dude who looks and even giggles like uncle Albert from Mary Poppins: So CEO Albert came to town yesterday. You'd have thought we acquired two new companies. The parking lot was overflowing, the cubes and offices were bustling with energy, the coffee pots never got cold as they were relentlessly refilled. Men were in sports coats, women in share suits and skirts, beards were trimmed, shoes were shined... shoot - I even tucked in my shirt. There was a buzzing Ice Creme Social in the afternoon. It was an absolute madhouse of corporate patriotism. And today... it is silent. My friend who sits next to me and I have the run of the joint. Other than some construction noise from some new cabinets being installed in the break area, I can't hear a thing... and it's marvelous. The ebb and flow of office population is interesting to say the least.
Working from home sounds like such a nice thing to do. Sadly my job is fairly hands on and the chance of me ever working from home with my current career seems slim. Does telecommuting have drawbacks? I imagine it would make the separation of home life and work life a bit more nebulous.
I worked from home essentially full time for 1.5-2 years. Even when I wasn't WFH full-time, everyone else in my department was. If I am honest the biggest drawback, which took me a while toidentify, was the fact that you have absolutely no social circle. If you are a new hire in an established department where everyone is already WFH, you are not going to get to know your coworkers, your boss, anyone you work with, in any significant way. You don't realize how much you learn about the people you work with until all of a sudden you don't have any coworkers. There were a couple of downsides that I found stemmed off of that isolation. First, I do think we're social creatures, and after school's out and we go to full-time employment, generally speaking, our social spheres contract even in a regular employment setting. When you WFH you essentially remove the "work social sphere" totally. So if you are a lonely post-college graduate wondering where to find friends or just to find someone to talk to, you no longer have work as a resource. I mean, I hate how much my coworkers talk to me and I deliberately sit off by myself, but I still would rather have the option of their company when I want/need it, than the total nothingness that I experienced working from home. Yes you have IM but IM is not a face-to-face conversation and I don't think you can build the same rapport that way. I found working from home lonely. Also as a result I wasn't very attached to my job. I executed what I needed to but beyond that I didn't have any reason to care or get invested. Most people will agree that your coworkers make or break your job for you. Good coworkers will really get you to care about your job, I've found, at least because you don't want to disappoint them, and also because you like them, want to help out, etc. Good coworkers really are what makes a "team" feeling, I find. Also, having to work with your coworkers. Since I started working in office settings I have cried about leaving jobs, about coworkers leaving, and so on. When I quit my FT WFH job I felt absolutely nothing. There was no one I missed, nothing even really. Another thing I experienced was that, especially if you are a new hire on an established WFH team (repeating myself I know), it's very hard to gain recognition, "be in the eyes" of management, "get your name out there," and so on. I found even if I went into work, no one else was there, so it was kind of pointless. Without helpful peers physically near me to talk to and confide in I didn't have anyone to point me towards potentially good career moves, such as "volunteer for this" or "go to this networking event." Also, unless I was IMing or emailing my boss all the time, I simply wasn't in her line of sight and she wasn't thinking about me. I think it is a lot easier to be overlooked and forgotten, especially if you haven't had the opportunity to establish yourself as a solid worker with a good reputation, when you wfh. I think without coworkers a lot of humanity is stripped from work. It's different if you WFH once or twice a week. WFH full-time was a luxury but it was also killer. There were other drawbacks too (like I basically never got any exercise, would wake up on weekends thinking I needed to be logged in, etc) but those are really minor in comparison to what I experienced when I was FT WFH and effectively had no coworkers. I would never work from home full time again. I do get to do it every Friday and that's great. Sometimes I go home mid-day and finish a day from home, too. But full time, never. I can complain that my coworkers talked to me for waaaayyy too long all I want these days but I would rather have them there for rapport, advice, solidarity, support, etc, than go back to the days when everyone was just a screenname on my IM.