Are you one of many of the millions of Americans now working outside traditional workplaces who have found themselves surprised by how difficult home-office life can be?Before they were married in September, Nicci Young and Richard Wiese first had to split up. The problem was not romantic, but spatial: Young Wiese, who organizes community development safaris to Africa, and Wiese, a writer and explorer, found that their Upper East Side one-bedroom was not big enough for the two of them after both decided to work from home.
"He kept talking to me about his work, which is very interesting, but it was really taking time out of my workday," Young Wiese said. "And when I was alone there was a sense of loneliness and procrastination." Wiese, who is writing a how-to book about exploration for teenagers, acknowledged the problem. "Nicci tends to be a lot more intense," he said. "Especially with lighter work, I can be watching a ballgame. If I saw a funny e-mail coming through I'd want to share it. I'd get these glances from her, like, `I'm working!'" Young Wiese is one of many of the millions of Americans now working outside traditional workplaces who have found themselves surprised by how difficult home-office life can be.
It requires strict self-discipline and an ability to tune out spouses, children and pets. For the more sociable or emotionally needy, it can feel like house arrest, especially if the phone hasn't rung in a while. Young Wiese's solution was to rent space in a communal office, an increasingly popular option for those who can afford it. (According to Sara Horowitz, the executive director of the Freelancers Union, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the self-employed, the use of communal work spaces has been on the rise among members for about three years, "and in the last year it's started accelerating.") Those who can't afford a separate space, or who find home too convenient or rewarding a workplace base to give up -- learn to live with the challenges, coming up with smaller-scale solutions over time.
One of the hardest adjustments for those working from home is deciding when to take a break, and when to quit for the day. With the computer always beckoning and the commute measured in the time it takes to cross the living room, there's always a reason to go back to work -- or an excuse to avoid it. "It's sort of a guilty feeling -- I should be working," said Kathy McHugh, a headhunter for high-tech companies who has worked out of her Manhattan apartment on and off for several years. "My office is 2 feet away." Children can be a distraction, as Barbara Magnoni, an international development consultant, discovered when she and Magali Montes, a business associate, tried to hold meetings in Magnoni's apartment after picking up their children from school. "We'd meet at home with our kids running around and they would think it was a play date when it actually wasn't," Magnoni said. Sid Holt, a media senior vice president whose office is in a barn a few steps from his house in northern Westchester County, described the difficulty of pacing himself. "There are no cigarette breaks," he said. "You're either working too hard or not hard enough." Holt said he finds it helpful to schedule his time in a way that mimics the 9-to-5 life of his years spent working in a New York office.
He tries to keep to a routine that includes breakfast at a local coffee shop -- reminiscent of his ritual of picking up coffee and a bagel at Grand Central Terminal on the way to his former job -- and a 10am conference call with three other employees of go2Media, a Boston-based mobile Web service for which he oversees editorial content. The conference call and frequent e-mail exchanges with other employees contribute to a sense of accomplishment that would be harder to achieve if he were working entirely on his own, he said. And they also help him to feel that he has earned the reward that once greeted him on his return from Manhattan, and that he still uses to punctuate the day. "I say to myself, there's a martini waiting for me down at the house and I'm leaving now," he said. For home-office workers who aren't in regular touch with colleagues or clients, a frequent complaint -- even among those who say they are distracted by other members of their households -- is of isolation.
David Behl, a photographer whose studio is connected to his TriBeCa loft, said he enjoys working at home when the jobs are pouring in and the studio is filled with clients and assistants. But at other times, he added, he misses the studio he used to share with two other photographers. "You don't see anybody," he said. "You don't go out for lunch. It's easier to get depressed because there's no one to complain to." McHugh said business lunches can be a lifeline after a couple of weeks working from home, and that she often finds herself glomming onto her daughter when she gets home from high school in the afternoon. "I'm happy to see somebody who's out in the world," she said. These issues have been observed at IBM, where a "mobile work force" strategy has led to 30 percent of employees working full time from home (as well as a savings on office space that the company estimates at US$100 million a year). "We found if you're working from home and do not have an interaction with someone from work, or a client, or a physical meeting, after three days you start to feel isolated," said Dan Pelino, who manages IBM's mobile work force program. Soon after the company introduced the program in 2001, he added, "people have said to me, `IBM stands for `I'm By Myself.'" The company has tried to mitigate this problem with "mobility centers," communal spaces that it maintains wherever it has offices, offering desks, phone and Internet lines, and office equipment for the periodic use of home-based workers. It has also promoted "IBM clubs," meant to encourage employee bonding.
Club members have taken day trips together to a zoo, traded cookie recipes and "gone to a race track and learned how to be a NASCAR driver," Pelino said. For those who can't depend on corporate beneficence, it is now possible to rent a desk or office in communal work spaces all over the country. The Regus Group, a Dallas-based company that rents temporary office space around the world and has 17 locations in Manhattan alone, has been doubling its US business every two years, said Guillermo Rotman, the company's chief executive for the Americas. In addition to cubicles and individual offices in various configurations, its spaces all have business lounges with sofas, armchairs, Internet ports, coffee machines and companionship for those seeking it.
The company also sells US$300-a-year passes to its business lounges, which number 950 around the world and cater to itinerant laptoppers. One Regus client in New York, David Robertson, said he had been looking forward to working at home from his Lower Manhattan apartment when he took a job in 2006 with a startup company that licenses images from college sports events, but that he lasted less than three months. "There seemed to be a lot of distractions," he said, "whether it was my children, or the refrigerator, or some home improvement project that was just sitting there staring at me." His company pays slightly less than US$1,000 a month for the cubicle he selected over an office with a closing door because it presented more opportunities to socialize.
He now wears a suit and tie to work when he wants to, and enjoys the reassuring cadences of the 9-to-5 world, as well as the camaraderie of his new office mates. "It's not like they're best friends," he said of his fellow business lounge denizens and the Regus staff members who are there to support them. "But they're adults you can have a conversation with." Young Wiese, who pays US$650 a month for a desk in a communal office in a private house near her apartment, said she, too, is happy to be surrounded by office mates who are friendly, if less gregarious than Wiese.
They share job leads with one another, they go out to lunch. She added that she prefers these relationships to those in a traditional office. "You have this collegial atmosphere, but it's not fraught with any work issues or roles or responsibilities," she said. Several of them are women who, like her, have abandoned their home offices to their work-at-home husbands. Abby Vaughn, an advertising representative for Canadian newspapers, actually took over her husband's space at the communal office when he was dismissed by the office manager after two weeks because his telephone manner was too loud. He is once again selling market research from home, while Vaughn goes off to the rented cubicle. "He's worked from his apartment for two years," his wife explained. "He wasn't used to being around people."
Author: Pedro Martinez
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