I had a boss a decade ago who hated the idea of employees working from home. Hated it. Glared at me every time I suggested we let a few of our team work at home at least a couple of days a week. That team mostly comprised editors and, with an Internet hook-up, they could easily have accomplished their tasks in the basement in their jammies, with the Cheetos close at hand, if they so chose. In some cases, it would have saved them a two-hour round-trip commute. And cut down on their dry-cleaning bills.
It was all about control. He was the kind of boss who didn't believe his staff was working unless he could actually see them working. Didn't matter that their tasks had a required level of output whose quantity could be measured by how often deadlines were met or missed and whose quality was randomly scrutinized by us higher-ups, some of whom also could have worked from home. If Timbuktu had broadband, they could have edited from there. Even though my boss was a good deal younger than I, and should have been more with it, he stuck to this cramped, old-management style right up until the day he left the job. Just as he stuck to the view that people would never give up dead-tree newspapers for on-line coverage.
Economic news in the past couple of months has been decidedly mixed, which is why close observers - amateurs and professionals - have spent so much time lately debating what's next: V-shaped recovery or double-dip recession? Positive job growth or continuing massive unemployment? The mixed news applies in the work-from-home market, too. More people are working from home now. But many of them are earning less money than they did previously.
Sue Shellenbarger at The Wall Street Journal reports:
Amid the economy's many ailments, some good news has remained mostly off the radar: The at-home work force is growing, and it is encompassing new occupations ranging from radiology and nursing to auditing and teaching.
The bad news: Fierce competition means your odds of landing one of these jobs are poor. And if you succeed, you will probably take a pay cut.
For companies, home-based employees, independent contractors and freelancers are helping cut costs and improve customer service. Full-time, home-based freelancers and independent contractors in the U.S. are expected to increase by 200,000 workers to 11 million by the end of 2009, says Ray Boggs, a vice president of IDC, Framingham, Mass., a market-research firm; he sees another 200,000-worker increase in 2010.
While that is a mere blip on the radar in an economy that has been losing nearly that many jobs in a month, the trend means a lot to the individuals who are benefiting from it. They are avoiding dreaded commutes, doing volunteer work, pursuing college degrees or caring for family. And they are performing increasingly complex tasks from home, from reading MRIs to helping clients search for Bigfoot, the mythic wilderness monster.
"We are seeing a general broadening of the work-at-home landscape," says Christine Durst, chief executive of a work-at-home Web site and co-author of a new guidebook on the topic.
Applicants are stacking up by the hundreds of thousands, however. Based on my survey of a dozen companies that use home workers, your odds of actually landing one of these positions range from about 25-to-1 to 300-to-1.