3 exact steps to convince your employer to let you work from home!
Have you ever been in a situation at the office where you have been interrupted by colleagues or your boss every 5 minutes of the day?
I am not even talking about meetings that seem to waste every participant's time or the enormous amount of time wasted in traffic EVERYDAY!
In those situations, if, like me, you have wondered how much productive you could be by working from home. It would even be possible to do MORE work in LESS time giving you few hours per week to do things that you have always dreamed doing but could not do due to lack of time... The only problem here is how you will present the topic on the table with your manager and how you will convince him trying it since it would create a precedent?
1. Become indispensable
Demonstrate your value. Make your employer want to go the extra mile to keep you happy so that you can stay in the organization.
You can negotiate working from home straight at the interview but you will have a hard time convincing the interviewer to hire you if they are looking for someone to work full time at their office. I have found out that it is much easier to first let the organization taste what you have to offer to them before presenting any unusual demand that you might have.
'The 4 hours work week' book by Tim Ferriss presents several ways that people have used to successfully convince their employer to let them work from home or from anywhere in the world. The next point is my strategy to bring the topic on the table...
2. Become an independent consultant
There are a lot of benefits to become an independent consultant. Once you have become one, you will wonder why you did not become one earlier. I have discovered that what is stopping most people to do the big jump is the illusion that being a full time employee provide a better job security. Wait till you go through a major restructuring. You will see how fake the illusion is and how fast you can lose your job overnight no matter how dedicated you were.
The worse stupidest work condition that you could ever find yourself in is being a full time employee in a consultant firm. You do not have access to the benefits of being independent and also no access to the benefits of being a full time employee of a growing organization (stock option, promotion, etc...). Beside, consultant firms makes an outrageous amount of money on the back of their resources. A consultant that they pay 100K/year (they usually pay much less than that) can generate 200K/year in income. That is an insane amount of money for shuffling one or two invoices to the client every month that the developer is leaving on the table.
With a good accountant, you can pay much less income tax and see your overall compensation increase. More than 20% more is quite common among independent workers. This allows you to implement your own 20% time projects like at Google except that you will be owning the projects.
One of the benefits that enables you to work from home is that being a consultant the usual setup is a renewable mandate. Typical mandate length varies but usually it is, 3, 4 or 6 months. Sometimes it can be up to 1 year mandates but those are rarer. What that means for you, is that you will have opportunities several times per year to renegotiate your work conditions, including the option to work from home.
3. Be in demand
Having several organizations desiring your services is very powerful. For one, having several options gives you the freedom to easily leave an organization if the work conditions ever change and stop meeting your expectations.
Secondly, having several organizations competing for your services will make them want you more (scarcity influence principle in action as described in the Influence book from Robert B. Cialdini) and make them more willing to offer what you want to have your services.
One way to become in demand is to use LinkedIn like a pro and be successful with LinkedIn. If you are interested in learning about that topic, I am offering advices to improve your LinkedIn profile that will teach you how to write a LinkedIn profile the right way.
Discover the 3 little known elements every 6-figure earner has on their resume that triple offers for high paying careers
