Introducing the Five D's of Working from Home

I recently wrote the What’s the Big Idea piece in the November/December issue of FORUM Magazine, which talked about my experience as a remote worker and how associations can integrate this into their work arrangement for some employees.

While I work fully remotely from Aurora, Illinois – about 200 miles from my organization’s headquarters office in Indianapolis – I think my experience is easily translatable to telecommuting. I essentially used the two words interchangeably in the piece, and probably should have just used the umbrella of “working from home”…

Anyway, I have learned a lot in my three plus years working from a home office, with my cats being the closest thing to another human that I often see throughout my workday. It’s something that I had to adjust to, and in this experience, I have developed five major traits that you MUST be possess to be able to effectively work from home. I’m going to post these each week over the next four weeks on this blog, and hope that you get something out of the posts.

The first of the five D’s of working from home that you must possess is dedication.

Dedication in the context of working from home is one of the most important traits that you can possess. If you are not dedicated to your craft, to your association, or to your boss and co-workers, you are not likely going to succeed in working from a home office.

When someone determines that working from home is something they want to do, they have to be dedicated to ensuring that they will work collaboratively across geographic and sometimes time barriers. They also must be dedicated enough to the association to know that at times they will have to work harder to gather the information that’s necessary to do their jobs than those in the office. Lastly, they have to be dedicated enough to understand that in certain instances (like mine), they will have to travel more often to accomplish the job they’re responsible for. (I travel to Indianapolis about once every other month for a week of in office time.)

Overall, dedication is likely one of the most important traits necessary to working from home. Next week, we’ll talk about the second and third traits necessary to work effectively from home – discipline and diligence. Thanks for reading.