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The Power of Partial Telecommuting
There are a variety of options a company has when constructing a telecommuting policy in the game industry. These tend to consist of two main ingredients. The first is how to overcome the issues that make telecommuting bad. The second part is to form a plan of action for the company. First, let’s examine the problems companies face and how to solve them. Slackers A company needs to know how effective an employee is. Most employees (hopefully) follow, or at least participate in some type of scheduling. Is the employee meeting their deadlines? Are they successfully completing their tasks, or is there a drop in performance between their work in-office and their work at home? The good news is, in most companies, bad work can’t hide. This applies equally to offsite employees. If they consistently can’t meet their schedule, or they aren’t producing high quality work, it’s a clear indication that there is a productivity issue that needs to be discussed with the employee. Communication As many of us have found out the hard way, using email or instant messaging is usually a poor method of communication. Technology is the key word. Many of the offsite issues are resolved using technology. For example, programmers can have their machines taken over by someone remotely while they talk on the phone. Colleagues of mine tend to do code-reviews remotely in this fashion. In addition, many iterative steps such as, making quick build changes for a designer can happen remotely. Offsite programmers can VPN in, remote desktop to a machine at work, make the necessary code changes, build, and put the build up on the server for the designer. Meetings are an issue depending on the situation. If there are one or two telecommuters, it’s easy to put them on speaker phone during a meeting. If there are many offsite employees, then meetings can be conducted via voice software used by many people in online gaming, or even specifically designed remote meeting software packages. Working from home can actually help many people be more productive by making some of them be less social. Sounds strange, but we all know people who are very social, and like to mingle amongst the team most of the day. While being very social isn’t usually a bad thing, it’s generally true that if a person who spends much of their time talking with others, spends more time working instead of talking, the more productive they tend to be. An example would be the person who happens to casually drop by into your office to chat about the Sox game last night. Working from home makes these types of distractions and interruptions much more difficult. Special Treatment Syndrome If, when determining employee eligibility for a telecommuting program, this issue is taken into account, much of the anger and resentment can be defused. After all, if the resentful employee chooses not to meet the eligibility requirements, who should they be angry with? Security If a game company is willing to have offsite assets, if they are secured, then the solutions are pretty simple. First, every employee has to have a firewall at home. Just as the company on the internet is protected via a firewall, the employee needs to have a similar level of security. This shouldn’t be a causal “be sure to have a firewall on your machine” type of security; firewalls need to be on 100% of the time. It can take only a matter of seconds unsecured on the internet to have a machine compromised. Communication with work should be done via secure means. VPN should be encrypted, and off-site source control should be done either through VPN (admittedly slow), or through 3rd party secure software products such as Source Offsite. If done properly, assets can be as safe as they are at the company. Potential Costs
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Features
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