Employees can work from home and still be very productive, but it takes good planning and management.

Having employees work from home can be for a short period to accommodate a need for a temporary situation or an ongoing arrangement for employees who require the flexibility.

Working from home for employees can be viewed as an attractive benefit for prospective employees and for retaining staff. It improves overall working conditions and reduces stress, especially for those having young children and need to fight traffic.

Guidelines

Setting guidelines for working from home clarifies matters and should be included in the employee manual if there is one. This will help explain who can qualify to work from home and how often. This will also support the managers who need to respond to requests from employees. Here is a partial example of a guideline.

Working from home is permitted for those employees who can meet their responsibilities and complete their tasks offsite. The frequency of days to work from home will be at the discretion of the department manager.

Managing Performance

Performance expectations should be clear and agreed upon with the employee up-front. This will eliminate any misunderstanding and make it easier to follow up.

An effective approach is to use the win-win agreement form in which the employee writes down specific performance commitments when working from home. This would be especially important for employees who have to work from home frequently and for an extended length of time.

The employee would submit their written performance commitments and this would be reviewed and discussed with the manager until a final agreement is signed.

A component of the agreement is for the employee to indicate support commitments from the manager to ensure that they can meet their own commitments. The manager would need to agree on these commitments. Both parties would review each other’s performance on a regular basis.

Follow up and Review

To ensure success it’s imperative to follow up on performance regularly. If using the win-win agreement process a regular review of progress needs to be done using the win-win agreement evaluation form  designed for that process.

Whatever system used, the employee needs to know they are responsible to stay productive and meet their commitments.

The win-win agreement form can be downloaded here or on Eloquens.