quote:

Originally posted by TeacherTrainer:
I work for a quasi-state agency that allows me to work from home at least one day a week. Other staff here also Telecommute. I am the Training Coordinator, so my original request for working at home came because I was trying to do voiceovers for training and could not get people to keep quiet in our cubical environment. My first training vo's had faint printers going and chatter, so my request was approved.

Some of the things we do is to have an annual Telecommuting Agreement. It specifies what equipment the employee will provide at home (ergonomic work space, adequate lighting, home telephone, etc.), what the company will provide, the hours to be worked at home, how they are available, how they report what they are working on, where they will be located and more. This document is signed by the whole chain of command, up to the top of the agency, so everyone is on board. We are supposed to send our manager an e-mail report of what we work on at home. That is generally effective, but is still a pain.

Another thing that we do is to work through a VPN that can be tracked. If the management really wanted to check up, they could look at those logs. We also are issued a computer to use at home. We have a lot of sensitive data, so our IT Director wanted to have control over the machines hitting the VPN. They may also have some snooping software on there that I don't even know about.

You might also want to take a look at BestBuy's recent corporate change. Here is a Business Week article
about the radical changes they are making.

Regards,
Andrea