Getting Your Boss to Let You Work From Home

For many of us who make the daily commute to the office, the idea of working from home feels like an unattainable dream. “My boss will never allow it,” “it would cause problems for me with my coworkers,” and “it just wouldn’t work,” are common responses people have when asked why they don’t try to make their dream a reality. However, if everyone knew how easy it was to suggest and sell this idea to their managers then there would be no people left in any office!

Why work at home in the first place? There are myriad reasons why working from home may be right for you, but one of the largest reasons is you would eliminate your commute time. According to a study done by ABC News, the average U.S. worker spends between seven and ten hours each week - which totals to between 350 hours and 500 hours over the course of fifty weeks during the year. That is a lot of time badly spent in a car, on a train, or in the air. Imagine how so many other areas of your life would improve, including productivity at your job, if you could remove that meaningless and get that time back.

The first thing you need to do is take a good - and honest- look at your current job responsibilities and decide if working from home is reasonable. Generally, the best candidates to work at home are employees who work independently, do most work on the computer, and communicate with coworkers or clients primarily through phone or email. To determine if your job meets these criteria, ask yourself the following questions:

-Who do I have daily interaction with?

-How do we most commonly communicate?

-What resources do I utilize daily?

-Where do I most commonly work?

-Could I work remotely on my daily projects?

If after answering these questions you still feel confident that your job would work well outside of your office, consider the next aspect: would your personality do well working at home? Are you a self-starter, who can manage and run your own schedule, or do you tend to procrastinate and need someone to keep you on task? Also, are you fine with working alone all day, or does your personality responded better as part of the office community? You need to think about this not only to be able to convince your boss to let you work from home, but also to make the venture successful - you don’t want to be called back into office life because you couldn’t keep yourself on task at home!

Before taking any action, pick two days in the middle of the work week to stay home “sick,” but volunteer to continue working remotely. Use this time to test your productivity as well as provide a good example you can cite when you pitch the idea to your boss. Make sure during these two days you push yourself into overdrive and overachieve, especially in terms of reaching goals and producing content that you can easily point to and say “look what I was able to accomplish.”

If this test was a success in your mind, begin to think reality and prepare yourself to pitch the idea to your boss.