Remote Work by Will Gant

Author:Will Gant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2020-04-07T18:04:03+00:00

Chapter 6

How To Convince Your Boss To Let You Work Remotely

Once you have a reasonable remote work setup and are prepared to counter objections to remote work, you are ready to start trying to convince your boss to let you work remotely.

Convincing Management Is Not Easy

While it’s tempting to skip directly to trying to convince management of the value of working remotely, I urge you not to skip the preparation. Losing effectiveness because of a preventable issue will not go down well with management. You’ll then have a much harder time convincing them to let you try again.

You should also understand that management is probably not going to let you work in a completely remote fashion the first time you suggest it. You should slowly acclimate them to the idea that at least some people can be effective remotely and that you in particular are one of those people. This is not something that can usually be done quickly.

Getting your boss to agree to let you work from home is a lot like a long sales process. You initially test for indications that they are open to the idea, followed by a very short trial run (or several) in order to build up sufficient proof that you can work remotely.

Doing this with multiple trial runs can also make it easier for you to iron out potential problems that might keep you from being able to work remotely over the long term.

Eventually, once you’ve proven yourself capable of doing so, you’ll pitch the idea of working at home for one or two days a week. This will help you continue building up proof that you can be trusted to work remotely before pitching the idea of doing so more often. The goal is for management to already be comfortable with your remote work before you take the risk of proposing that you do more.

Toward that end, you need to do a little bit more work to make sure that you succeed in convincing management to let you work from home. We’ll be discussing how to do this with a sequence of small steps aimed at gradually increasing management’s comfort with the idea before asking, and asking in a way that makes it easy for them to say “Yes.”

(note: We made a handy guide to go with this process - get it at: https://simpleprogrammer.com/remoteworkbonus).

Before the Trial Run

Before attempting a trial run, you need to start feeling out management to determine how hard it will be to convince them to let you work remotely. If you are really lucky, they are already comfortable with the idea, and you will be able to easily proceed to the next steps in the process.

More than likely, though, your management will be resistant and will have to slowly be coached along.

To get a good idea of how management feels about remote work, start by casually dropping hints in conversation. This is probably the trickiest part of the whole process, as it involves knowing your manager well enough to know what might work and what will produce a bad reaction instead.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.