Do you have a formal work-at-home policy? Do you allow your employees to work from home at all? As Greg recently wrote about in our second quarter edition of Compass, the work-at-home and telecommuting debate is top of mind. An announcement from Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo!, that employees would no longer be allowed to telecommute has drummed up significant media coverage. This provision to Yahoo!’s work culture won’t begin until June—and the business world is waiting with bated breath to see how it plays out.
As Greg posits in his article, the choice of whether to allow employees to work from home is unique to the organization and often situational. There is no one-size-fits-all solution that can be applied.
Our experience at Jacobson is that allowing a work-at-home option has helped us retain high-performing employees. We have tenured workers successfully reporting in from across the country! We’ve seen tremendous success doing this with our contract employees, as well. We deploy work-at-home project teams for our clients’ critical workload fluctuations. Besides providing cost savings to our clients, it also broadens the viable candidate pool considerably. Candidates with very specific software skills and targeted experience come together virtually to complete a project in a timely fashion. However, executing this type of work requires strong project management methodology and sophisticated technology. A lot of hard work and dedication goes into making it possible.
Where do you stand on the work-at-home debate? Share your thoughts in the comments.
