Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Telecommuting - Boon or bane?

The place where I am currently employed has overshot its capacity, and they plan to shift a few teams to another location which is inconvenient for most of the folks.
I wonder why management doesn't think of telecommuting as an option for us. The advantages are manifold ranging from increased employee satisfaction to better employee retention to monetary savings for the company.

The one about savings could be a big one am sure, considering the cost involved in setting up IT infrastructure, the cubicles, sundry facilities and so on. Yet, there are no visible talks of allowing folks to work from home. Of course everyone understands that being in a developing country that we are, there could be issues with logistics like frequent power failure, poor internet connectivity etc. but the onus of getting this in place can lie with the employee, failing which he/she can be made to lose this privilege.

Given the boon surrounding this arrangement, I really dunno why companies especially in India are hesitant to let people work from home. Just like we start new processes like Scrum, automating test cases, setting up CI servers and what not in software development, why can't we just kick-start and try this one as well on a pilot project?

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