How telecommuters can ease career congestion

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but it can sometimes make it wander.

That’s what some telecommuters fear when it comes to whether their bosses’ hearts are beating fast for them during raise and promotion time.

A.C. from Denver works remotely for a Fortune 500 technology firm as a midlevel manager, but he isn’t sure telecommuting is helping his career. “It's been my experience that real advancement takes visibility, managing other people, and being where the action is,” he says.

“From an organizational standpoint,” he adds, “it's very easy to hire and fire remote employees. After all, they are just appendages to the company and can be clipped off at any time.”

This grim assessment is not that far from the truth for some of the 12 million or so employees who telecommute today.

As more and more employers look for ways to get workers out of expensive offices, off the roads and working remotely, tele-employees can find themselves in a career no-man’s land wondering if managers have forgotten that they even exist.

But you can stay on the minds of the power-that-be if you take action.

Teleworkers who are proactive and get their accomplishments and their faces in front of their bosses as often as possible are actually thriving in the telework environment. And they’re also taking advantage of all the technology out there making it easier for employees and managers to connect. Webcams, video and audio conferencing, instant messaging and, of course, e-mail, are all becoming telecommuter lifelines.

Daily IMs to managers, along with a host of other initiatives, helped Lawrence Imeish advance in his career even though he’s been a telecommuter for five years, first with General Electric and now with Dimension Data, an IT consulting firm.

Imeish, who works out of his home in Reston, Va., believes he was promoted from senior solutions architect to principal consultant at New York-based Dimension Data because of three factors: He's good at his job; he makes sure his direct boss and other managers are aware of what he does; and he does his own external promotion, writing technical article in trade publications that give him credibility in the industry and with Dimension Data higher-ups.

“It’s the fundamentals of pride in your work,” he explains.

Telecommuting has been working out so well for Imeish that he recently turned down a more lucrative job offer from a company that wasn’t open to teleworking. “It would have required me to sit in two-hour traffic to drive to Washington, D.C. I would pull my hair out,” he says.

With all the benefits, you need to realize that even with the promise of flexibility, telecommuting is not for everyone, and you could actually end up working more than you did before.

“Many teleworkers overcompensate for their non-physical presence.  Teleworkers prove themselves by being extremely timely in returning good results and responses to managers,” says Elham Shirazi, a national telework consultant.

Indeed, Imeish often finds himself working into the wee hours. “It’s a double-edged sword,” he says. “I can take 15 minutes out of my day to help my wife with my 2-year-old, and then more than make up for that time after 7 p.m.”

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