Work-from-home No More?

During several of our classes we have discussed the concept of virtual teams. One common aspect of virtual teams at my company is the employees’ ability to work from home. The exact policy is left to the discretion of the individual directors and sometimes to each of their managers. In my case my director is pretty lenient about the work-from-home policy and allows my manager to make his own decisions regarding it. My manager and one of my co-workers work from home 3 or 4 days a week. Another guy on the team works remote 2-3 times a week. The rest of us do it about once a week. We don’t have to get our manager’s permission to work from home or even let him know ahead of time. This is how the policy operated and it worked fine, as long as we got our work done. At least up until last week.

Our senior VP got a hold of a list that contained how many hours her people had worked from home over the previous month, and she was shocked by the large numbers. There are some people who work from home every day of the week and never come into the office. There are some who come in once a week or a few times a month. Needless to say she was not happy. Her response to her direct reports was basically to fix this before it becomes a major issue for her. So last week we had a team meeting where we were told we could work from home 3-6 days a month. This is for the time being until something more concrete comes down from upper management. There is a chance this privilege could be revoked completely. 3-6 days a month works fine for me since I was only doing it once a week, on the day I have class in Columbia. My boss was complaining though. How is he going to get his two kids on/off the bus if he and his wife (who also works at the company) can’t be remote every day? Well, my parents both worked and neither had the privilege of working from home, and they figured it out. There are single parents who don’t have this privilege either, and they make it work.

I know I should be happy to still be permitted to work from home, but I find it sad that several people have taken advantage of the freedom so much so that the executives might take it away completely.