Guest post: Coming clean about the home office

October 7th, 2007

[Hey folks, I'm trying something new here, a guest blog post from an aspiring anti 9-to-5er. Let me know what you think. -Michelle]

By Courtney Nash

I call my husband the “Master of the Mute.” He has worked from home for the past few years as an independent consultant with the New York Times’ online division and is on the phone with a widespread network of people up and down the east coast for much of the day. We don’t have kids, but do have two remarkably large dogs with impressive lungs who revel in saluting every person walking by our house with their pups, as we live right on a favored dog-walking greenbelt. He keeps the mute button on during his calls, expertly clicking it off just as he needs to talk then re-muting to hear people’s replies, sparing them the occasional sudden bout of baying. But he’s not trying to hide the fact that he works from home, he’s just keeping the dogs from disrupting the call. All his virtual cohorts know that he works out of our house, a phenomenon detailed in this New York Times piece on people coming out of the work-at-home closet.

According to the article, what used to be perceived as a sneaky fact that might make homebodies seem less legit now makes the person on the other end of the phone seem more “holistic” and ultimately, more approachable and less a disconnected voice. Designers, writers, dance companies, and technology consultants can come out of hiding, you work from home and that’s ok! The model is even espoused by full-time consulting companies too, like the Seattle firm Point B Solutions Group, which was just voted one of the country’s Top 15 small workplaces in 2007 by the Wall Street Journal. They have no physical offices, so all their consultants work from home when they’re not on site with a client. It’s a situation I envy, as another cube-dweller who is working on her portfolio/client list on the side, hoping to make the jump to 100 percent freelance someday. But I am at least a little lucky, in that my current job allows me to work from home one day a week. And I don’t try to hide that fact from the people I work with, either. They all know I work from home on Fridays, and generally my workgroup tries to avoid meetings on Fridays as a whole so it rarely causes even a minor ripple.

Of course, baring your home office’s soul means drawing the boundaries even a bit more tightly as a freelancer. Those of you free of the cube know that without an office where you can leave your work behind, you have to clearly draw the lines on when and where you conduct your business at home. My husband has a huge working network of newspapers he deals with, and while he was open about his unique work environment, not everyone he deals with got the message out of the gate. Early on, people were calling our house at 5:30 in the morning, not realizing he wasn’t on East coast time. And then there’s the people who call on Friday, and if Eric is otherwise occupied I’ll pick up his line. It’s another part of pulling back the curtain — many of his coworkers know me as his wife, or at least know a bit about me. But at least one actually thought I was his assistant! It was easier to let the charade carry on and take the message than try to explain, I decided.

One aspect of people increasingly staking out their home/work territory that wasn’t covered in the NYT article is how disclosing your work environs is simply another element of good business practices. Even the subtlest of subterfuges could jeopardize your trustworthiness. And conversely, the more you allow yourself to be reflected in your work, the more likely you are to attract clients or customers who actually like you. Which means the odds are much greater that you’ll enjoy working with or for them as well.

Courtney Nash is a web editor at Microsoft who freelances in her spare time. She writes for the Seattle city blog Seattlest.com and is a frequent contributor to Seattle Metropolitan magazine. She’s also a downhill mountain biker and teaches women how to ride through the Dirt Series.

Entry Filed under: This freelance life