For more impact on clients, pick up the phone | Sep 11th 2007
In today’s hyper connected world more and more people are working from home at least some of the time. In fact, in May of 2004 the U.S. Department of Labor reported that nearly 21 million persons worked from home at least once a week as part of their primary job. About a third of these home workers (or 7.1 million) were categorized as self-employed.
This same report states that 8 out of 10 people use a computer while working from home. This is no surprise to me. In fact, it was the heavy reliance on my computer that inspired me to want to work from home in the first place.
My former day job required me to spend up to eight hours a day (often more) hunched over my computer, communicating with people via e-mail, instant messaging and (less often) phone. Even those people in the very same office as me!
When I struck out on my own, I really expected the transition from full-time in-house employee to full-time remote freelancer would be seamless. But I never accounted for the value of on site collaboration with colleagues, clients (and other adults). Nor did I plan for the daily challenges I face as a remote worker.
Too much focus on email
My biggest mistake was relying too much on e-mail instead of picking up the phone to follow-up with people. I was very dependent on my computer for companionship. It became my coworker, in a sense. We were inseparable. I spent long laborious hours crafting e-mails to clients and explaining things via instant message.
There’s nothing like plain black text on a white background to completely strip all personality and dimension from a person. When you don’t have facial expressions (other than yellow smileys), voice inflection or eye contact then it can be difficult to move any relationship forward, even a professional one.
My aversion to picking up the phone was a problem with bigger clients, in particular. Large organizations with a lot of on-site personnel are driven by the culture of face time. For example, the larger a company gets, the more internal meetings it seems to have. Often these meetings are the catalyst for moving projects forward.
I eventually realized that picking up the phone was my next best option to the internal meeting. It’s easy to ignore an e-mail or three, but it’s hard to ignore voicemail and e-mail requests for information or follow-up. It’s still a stretch for me to consider the phone as essential a tool to my business as the computer, but I’m getting better at it.
–
This article was published in the Poughkeepsie Journal on Saturday, September 8, 2007.