Consider:
1. How much public contact does your job require and in what form? And how much contact do you have with your coworkers?
Fuller didn’t need to have strangers passing through his office. His job, rather, called for him to go to “clients.” Also, he was working on his own projects, not entangled in office-wide activities, and he didn’t need constant feedback from his boss.
2. Does your job require much office politics, and how secure are you in it?
John Fuller was about to retire. Had he been a young manager fighting for a promotion, he might not have chosen to remain most of the time out of his boss’s sight. Then again, he did have the benefit of a superior more enlightened than many. His boss wanted results, not mere attendance.
Margrethe Olson, an associate professor at New York University’s business school, warns that some telecommuters may suffer at promotion time. She correctly wonders about “the long-term career potential of an employee in an environment where visibility is still critical to promotability.” In a 1982 paper Olson observed: “Some form of management by objectives, either informal or formal, generally needs to replace ‘over the shoulder’ supervision, in spirit as well as in fact.” As she once said, “Culture changes more slowly than technology.”
Keep in mind the experiences of a vice-president of a New York consulting firm who telecommuted from Florida.
When the New York Times interviewed him, he insisted that he remain nameless, lest the wrong people in the firm find out about the arrangement.[[60]] “I still think there’s a mentality around there that people who work at home are not working,” he said, adding, however:
“I like to have uninterrupted periods of work alone. If I have to stop and go to a meeting for two hours, I lose more than two hours.”
3. What becomes of the clerks and secretaries whose work your telecommuting may change or reduce?