Go On Home And Git To Work!

Back in the late '80s or early '90s, the Neotimer read an article in the now defunct Communications Week magazine entitled, "Save The Planet - Stay Home".  It was one of the most common sense approaches to doing information technology related work I ever ran across.  Work here referring to work where the workers only tools are a computer, a telephone, some documentation and a coffee pot. System administrators, database input people, technical support, there's a bunch of jobs that do not require the entire workgroup to commute to a centralize job location just so they can sit together.  The Neotimer was working in one such job for a company who would make money by providing remote access for teleworkers.  But, not only did they not stress this capability and encourage non-travel work capabilities in their advertising, they was a lot of reluctance to telecommuting within the company.  I never understood this.  Fortunately, since the Neotimer worked in a dispersed group with people in Nashville, Charlotte, Jackson, Atlanta and South Florida, and for a manager who trusted his people, he was able to telecommute full time from 1996 until his retirement.

Now there is legislation, HR-1722,  before congress to ensure that at least part-time teleworking is not only encouraged but mandated for federal employees.  With the non-functional, partisan, bickering group that we now call congress, the Neotimer wonders if it will ever be made into law, or even if it should since it only requires managers to determine the eligibility of their employees to telecommute and allow the ones eligible to work up to 20% of their hours in a two week period from an alternate location.  This isn't much.

Here is the bill the Neotimer's would write on this.  If you work in a job which can be done from home, government or non-government, you will do it from home, all the time.  That's it.  Take out all the other stuff and simplify things. 

Some jobs require you to drive to be physically present at a location such as work at a manufacturing facility, food service provisioning, providing services at customer locations and building and maintaining our national infrastructure.  Admittedly, they are the majority of jobs, but many, if not most, information technology jobs can be done from home. With VoIP, VPN and USB headsets, remote access has never been simpler.  

If you are a manger and can not manage a dispersed workforce because you don't trust them to get the job done, the real issue is your own shortcomings in the area of trust.  As the old saying, often attributed to Confucious, goes "He who trusts least is least to be trusted."  So if you're in a job that only requires reading, typing, thinking and talking on the telephone, go on home ... AND GIT TO WORK!