Telecommuters and Remote Workers - Pay Attention!

Do you bring your laptop to long team meetings and try to monitor emails during topics that aren't so important to you? If you frequently work from home or you are a remote worker, flown in for the meeting, stop and think about what opportunities you're missing by doing this!

Last week my boss had flown in a handful of my teammates located in other parts of the country/world so the whole team could talk about some large projects face to face. We spent two days closeted together in a conference room going through all our services and discussing how they were impacted by these projects and what we needed to do.

I noticed that my teammates paid detailed attention whenever the conversation was related to one of their services. But as soon as we started talking about a service unrelated to their own, their heads would go down as their eyes fixed on their laptop screens and their fingers clacked away furiously on their keyboards.

Who can blame them? Our day-to-day jobs don't go away when we're in these kinds of meetings. The emails and action items don't stop. While we may all have out-of-office messages saying we're tied up these two days and responses will be slow, we don't want to spend our evenings or the following work day trying to dig our way out of our overflowing inboxes.

However, there's an opportunity cost to this. Sure, those folks who are located with the core team and who come into the office every day may be well plugged-in to what all their teammates are doing. But for the people visiting from out of town, and for the telecommuters, this is a perfect opportunity to get some more detailed exposure to what else is going on in their team and learn more about some of the activities, challenges, etc of their peers.

This kind of exposure, while seeming unimportant in the short term, can be valuable down the road. You get the opportunity to learn from your peers - for instance, if there are issues they are dealing with that you struggle with too, you can contact them later to compare notes. And it increases the opportunity for cross-collaboration and integration of projects down the line if you have a better big picture of everything that's going on in your team.

Sure, the cost may be an over-full inbox the next day. But that's no different from when you're away on vacation and the workload is piling up. (At least I hope you let the work pile up when you're on vacation and you're not sneaking into your hotel room to check emails while your spouse is lying on the beach.)

So telecommuters and remote workers, next time you're face-to-face with your team and tempted to sneak in some time working on your email, consider the opportunity you're missing. Grab an extra cup of coffee and pay attention to what your peers have to say!

Nicole Bachelor, the "Master of Telecommuting Success" is the author of "How to Avoid Going to Work Without Quitting your Job". She specializes in teaching people how to effectively work from home. Nicole has been telecommuting exclusively for over 4 years, and has vast experience working with teams that are spread all over the world as well as working with teams in low-cost regions of the world.

Find out how you can http://avoidgoingtowork.com

And "Unlock your telecommuting power".

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