Spanky's Place

February 1st is National Working Naked Day. It is a day for millions of Home Office Professionals (HOPs) to try to improve the way they work from home by stripping away their anxieties about working from home. This doesn't apply only to those who are self employed; anybody who spends a majority of their work time in a Home Office is a HOP.

In addition to a lack of (or severely lessened) support from a corporate office; I've discovered (from personal experience) that one of the biggest issues HOPs face is a complete cutoff of "water cooler" communications. While this might seem a blessing to you corporate-types ("quit the chit-chat and get back to work"); this type of communication is an often unnoticed yet extremely critical medium of information exchange. On the surface this gossip, chit-chat, half-joking type of conversation may appear to have a low signal vs. noise ratio; but that assumption could not be further from the truth. The signal is just not obvious. It is there, hidden amid myriad layers of blathering prattle, and it is quite strong. The nuggets of information carried in these quiet hallway conversations are diamonds of truth about what is going on (both good and bad) with regard to every project, client, venture, asset, goal and employee of the company.

Don't Go Dark

For the HOP; getting to these diamonds, even in today's modern age of communication, even equipped with the best collaborative tools in the world, takes hard work, dedication, and patience. You need to ping / call / email your boss and your co-workers on a regular basis with "pointless" requests. They, being in the corporate environment, are not even aware of how cut off you may be feeling. These interruptions allow you to both gather and give this non-official, yet critical information. I'm not saying make stuff up, nor am I saying to bother them for no reason. What I am saying is that while your pings / calls / emails may not appear to have any project pertinent reason they are still valid. Don't be an ass and overdo it. Your boss trusts that you are capable of working "unsupervised", so don't abuse that trust with a continual barrage of yakety-yak. Occasionally calling up a boss or co-workers just to say "hi -what's up?" may seem like an unwarranted interruption; but it helps maintain your relationship -it reminds both your peer, and you, that you are still part of the team. Just remember what "occasionally" means.