Telecommuting * By Robert Moskowitz
An interesting trend among employers of telecommuters is the "home visit." Until recently, employers were concerned about what a telecommuter's home office might look like, but had no established model of procedures or parameters regarding how or when to check them out.
Today, more and more employers are recognizing they have a tremendous investment in their telecommuters' home offices, not only from the standpoint of the equipment the employer might own in those remote locations, but also in terms of safety and security issues there.
For example, if you're telecommuting to work from your home office and you trip over an extension cord, burn yourself with hot coffee, or come down with severe Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, there's every likelihood of a legal responsibility on the part of your employer. To my knowledge, none of this has been tested in court yet. But who could expect to prevail with an argument that an employer has no interest in the safety and security issues of employees working at home?
That's some of the background behind the changes now taking place in the world of telecommuting. It helps explain why several relatively large-scale employers are now directing their supervisors who have telecommuters on their teams to make plans to visit their telecommuters' off-site workplaces.
More and more employers are encouraging these site visits when their employees first begin to work from a remote site, usually as one small part of the approval process. An increasing number of employers are also asking for repeat visits to their telecommuters' homes at regular intervals, perhaps every year, every six months, or even every quarter--depending on the specifics of the situation and the nature of the work he or she is doing.
Because of the well-recognized and entirely legitimate concerns about privacy, visiting a telecommuter's home and inspecting his or her workplace is usually a lot more sensitive an issue than inspecting a workplace in a public telecommuting center. That's why employers generally seem to be bending over backwards to make sure they don't upset anyone or violate any employees' rights, while at the same time trying to make sure they are protecting their own interests by verifying the safety and security of their telecommuters' home-based workplaces.
Currently accepted guidelines for site visits to telecommuter's home offices usually include some or all of the following items:
1. Supervisors should schedule the site visit with each telecommuter at a time of his or her convenience. For simplicity, the best time might be when other family members are away from the home. Don't force a visit when it's not wanted, but make clear that a visit must take place if telecommuting is to be allowed to continue.
2. Have a written checklist of items to be inspected, and limit your inspection to the telecommuter's workplace, and specifically to these items. This checklist will usually include:
b. Verify there is ergonomic lighting, seating, work-surfaces, and other work-related resources.
c. Verify power cords, work-related tools, filing equipment, office equipment, and items stored in overhead shelves or bins are safely arranged and secured.
d. Verify there are reasonable safeguards in place to prevent family members from getting hurt within the telecommuter's workspace.
e. Verify there are reasonable safeguards in place against loss or theft of the employer's proprietary data and equipment.
f. Verify there are reasonable safeguards in place to protect the confidentiality of matters related to the telecommuter's work.
3. Establish the degree of compliance with the employer's work rules for telecommuters regarding taking home, storing, and using information, equipment, and other resources from the employer. For example: Does the telecommuter comply with the employer's rules regarding storage of company data on a privately owned computer?
4. Make a detailed inventory of employer-owned equipment and other resources being used at the telecommuter's workplace. Verify the presence or absence of dedicated telephone lines, fax equipment, telephone routing equipment, and other products and services paid for by the employer for the telecommuter's use.
5. Both the supervisor and the telecommuter should sign and date a site-visit form indicating that both parties were satisfied with the conduct of the site visit. Also, both parties should sign the complete inventory list to indicate they accept it as accurate.
The most ticklish part of conducting a site visit at the telecommuter's home is that it can compromise the atmosphere of "trust" that has previously been established between the telecommuter and his or her supervisor. To help prevent any compromise of this all-important trust, the supervisor should take pains to make clear that:
b. No problems or danger signs have prompted the request for this site visit. The visit is a normal (although perhaps a brand- new) part of the employer's well-established and long-standing policy on telecommuting. It is merely one more aspect of the employer's overall efforts to help the telecommuter maintain a safe, secure workplace.
c. These visits are intended more to provide opportunities to improve the telecommuters' home workplaces, rather than an attempt to find fault with them or shut them down.
One of the biggest drawbacks to working as a telecommuter has always been the lack of "professional" telephone systems. It's bad enough to miss a call from an important client or customer. How much worse would it be if your 3-year-old daughter answers an important call, makes a few unintelligible noises in the caller's ear, and then leaves the phone off the hook without telling you?
So it's always exciting when new products come along to make the process of staying in touch with others a lot easier and more professional for people working as telecommuters in remote offices or at home.
Here are two I think will particularly interest you:
This is actually a line of products from SoloPoint that handle your incoming calls just like they would be handled in your company's main office.
The SmartScreen is the simplest of the devices. It's designed to make more sophisticated use of telephone lines on which you've installed the phone company's messaging service, or "voice mail." You simply plug the SmartScreen into the line between your telephone and the wall jack. From then on, whenever a call comes in, SmartScreen lets you listen to the caller without picking up the phone. If you wish, you can immediately connect to the caller from any telephone on that line, even if he or she is in the middle of leaving a voice mail message. Finally, SmartScreen continually monitors your line and flashes a warning when you have voice mail messages waiting. So when you return from an absence you no longer have to pick up the phone and listen for the stuttering dial tone to find out if someone has left a message while you were out.
The SmartMonitor goes a step further and provides a very sophisticated form of call forwarding. Utilizing multiple telephone lines, the SmartMonitor effectively links your office phone to your cellular phone. With SmartMonitor in operation, whenever someone calls your office number, your cellular phone rings simultaneously. When you answer, you're connected to your own line as an "off-site extension." It's then your choice whether you'll listen in without being heard or "answer" the call as if you were picking up a phone in your office. You can even listen privately as the other party leaves a message on your answering system.
The SmartCenter is the most sophisticated element in this product line. Functioning as an automated switchboard, the SmartCenter lets your caller choose whether to leave a message, send a fax, page you, or connect to your cellular phone. This makes it easy to give people a single telephone number, and feel confident they can reach you no matter where you happen to go.
If you're part of a larger organization, the SmartCenter is extra useful because it provides a menu capability you can preset to let callers route themselves to other telephone lines for special handling of their specific needs, such as talking to a bookkeeper or an account manager. SmartCenter can also treat incoming calls differently on the basis of their Caller ID numbers, distinctive ringing, or the individual PIN numbers you can give to people who call you frequently. Calls from individuals or groups of people can then be selectively routed to an answering machine, or to a different phone number where you--or a person covering for you--can answer.
In addition, you can program the SmartCenter to change how it handles incoming calls, depending on the time of day and day of the week. For example, you can set it up to forward important calls to your cellular number during the days you're telecommuting, but forward them to your regular office during the days you're working there, and to an answering machine on weekends.
This is an extremely powerful hardware/software combination that turns your desktop PC into a sophisticated voice, pager, and email message management center. Once you've installed the adapter card, specified your email accounts and phone numbers, and plugged your telephone line and telephone into it (only a single line at present, but a bigger brother of the device will soon be available to handle multiple lines), Total E-Call gives you impressive powers to stay in touch with your co-workers, clients and customers.
Total E-Call is far too complex and sophisticated to explain thoroughly in this space, but here are some of the more interesting capabilities it gives you. Total E-Call can:
1. Answer your phone like a normal answering machine, recording messages digitally on your hard disk to the limit of your available space, and giving callers a menu of choices for recording a message and forwarding it to you, all based on their Caller ID number. You can call in anytime from any telephone to retrieve and forward your messages, even using a pre-set security code if you wish to prevent unauthorized message retrieval.
2. Originate calls to any number of people in your Total E-Call database, play each one a recorded message of your choice, offer a chance to respond by pressing any one of the ten keys on the telephone number pad, and keep track of which key each one of them presses.
3. Record new voice mail directly through your telephone and send it to any combination of the people in your Total E-Call database, either through conventional voice mail (effectively extending your voice mail system to everyone with a telephone) or through email with a "voice message" attached. Note: The recipient need not have Total E-Call installed to hear the voice message you've attached to your email.
4. Use Caller ID information to identify a caller before you answer the telephone, and either a) respond with a message you previously recorded for that person alone, or for a group of people of which that person is a member, or b) pop up on the screen that person's detailed contact records, including notes on previous conversations you've been keeping within your Total E-Call database.
5. Receive a phone call, ask for a message, and forward that message to you at your then-current phone number, pager number, or email address (with the voice message attached), again with or without using a security code.
6. Respond to emails and voice messages from around the world through your telephone, recording your messages separately, then have each response sent to the intended recipients at specific times of the business day in their different time zones.
7. Keep automatic logs of the phone calls you make and receive, including manually or automatically recording any or all of what's said during these telephone conversations.
8. Do any of this on a date-and-time schedule you've preset.
Copyright © 1997 Robert Moskowitz. All rights reserved.
SoloCall "Smart" System
SoloPoint, Inc.
130-B Knowles Dr.
Los Gatos, CA 95030
(408)364-8850
URL: http://www.solopoint.com
Total E-Call
American Network Systems
(805)579-8898