We’ve just got through the madness of Carnival here in Trinidad and now we have World Cup Cricket on our doorstep. The resulting traffic jams, due to closed streets around the Oval for security purposes, has inspired this issue’s topic of how to avoid commuting stress altogether.
CRS is hiring! If you know of anyone with a couple of years working experience who would be interested in working as a Recruiter in our Energy Division, and is good at selling and communications, then ask them to contact me at editor@crsoilandgasjobs.com or click on Energy Recruiter Job to send their resume. Ideally, they should have some knowledge of engineering or other technical field.
Working From Home
Fed up with sitting in traffic every morning going to work and then repeating this ordeal when going home? Isn’t this a colossal waste of your time? Have you considered whether you could do your job at home and save all this commuting stress?
Many jobs could be done at home at least part of the time. Technology makes it very easy for you to connect to the database at the office and it’s convenient to use the telephone and email for communicating with people.
We at CRS have had at least one person working from home for some time now. It’s simple to use Internet software like GoToMyPC which allows someone to connect to a PC at the office as if they were sitting in front of it. It’s really quite eerie to see the screens popping up by themselves on the office PC.
The advantages of this arrangement is that the home worker can choose her own hours. She only comes into the office for meetings or other staff events. She is much more productive as there are less distractions, and this suits her very well.
From CRS’s point of view, one less person in the open plan office means less distraction to other workers when she’s on the phone, etc. Also, the PC is available for other uses when the worker is not on it, and this has proved very useful for conducting online psychometric tests, etc.
The main disadvantage of working from home is that of boredom, missing interaction with co-workers, and finding the discipline to “be at the office” instead of at home, with the laundry/ TV/pets/children or whatever, beckoning. You have to adopt the mentality of “being at work” once you are in front of your computer and refuse to allow yourself to be sucked into home distractions.
I myself have spent some time doing work from home and I did have problems with the discipline of it. I also found that I was working weird hours, like late at night and weekends, and using normal work hours to go shopping, etc. This suited me very well and it was great not to have to dress for the office, and I certainly didn’t miss the commuting.
If you’re considering working from home, research other people’s experiences first to make sure this will suit you. Here’s one Blog that discusses this: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.402425. Let me know how you get on.
Tell Us What You Think
We would love to hear what you think of this issue of CRS News. And of course, if you have any suggestions for upcoming issues that you would like to share with us, please send those too.