Off-site work agreement...?

[Civil Samurai]

As CAD Manager my boss has asked me to come up with a semi-legal document that basically states guidelines for working from home and charging the time to the company. I think it needs to be something simple and straight forward but I could be way off.

For example, if I call in sick one day and am feeling well enough to at least get some drafting out of the way from the comfort of my own couch, I think my boss wants some kind of assurance that if I say I'm doing work that I actually did it. Also, if an employee states that he/she has put in 8 hours of work at home and the work he/she has produced is apparently a lot closer to 1 hour he wants to be able to decline some of that time.

Working from home on a sick day or doing some overtime at home over the weekend is meant to be a privledge that he wants people to utilize but not abuse. Does anyone have any ideas for starting up an off-site work agreement? Any tips or help would be much appreciated.

Thank you!

[glee.94356]

Why are you drawing up a legal contract?
CAD managers as a whole tend to have to juggle their duties as CAD managers with IT, drafting, design etc, depending on the type of firm they work in. So this is a new one.
If they had a lawyer draw up their employee contract, they should at least get the lawyer's opinion again.
What labor laws are affected by this document you are drawing up? In what ways does it conflict with the existing employee contract?
It's one thing to draw up a disclaimer or indemnification for the use of CAD files. Even then it's a good idea to bounce it off the firm's lawyer. It's another thing to be drawing up agreements for employees.
Besides, how does your boss really know that the employees are 100% efficient at work? Are they checking their e-mails or surfing the web or designing or detailing or drafting? Are they on their required break or just goofing off? Just because they are present at the work place does not mean they are present.
Same goes for working from home. What guarantees are in place just because an employee signs a contract? Is the boss going to check up on them at home? Another thing, what appears on a sheet is not necessarily the right way to calculate the amount of time spent on it. Somebody could get a full sheet of details done in less than an hour pulling details from a firm's detail library. Yet somebody else may have spent 24 hours on a sheet and have little to show for it because it maybe a difficult design that required a lot of thought and research before anything was drawn. Um, this applies to whether the work was done at home or in the office. If this is the way your boss looks at productivity, then everyone will resort to just stuffing the sheets. Why would they want to spend time working properly if they are accused of not getting anything done?
Your boss is looking for some lame brain excuse to find ways to limit the amount of time and as such their salaries they can pull. I understand that not all firms operate on a basis of trust and some bosses are better than others. The firms typical employee contract probably accounts for time spent working on the firm's projects regardless of venue. Consider the engineer/designer on the road, at meetings, flying to another country for a presentation etc.
An employee working for home for the most part just wants to make sure they get the job done, or not lose too many sicks days etc. There are those who will abuse the system but then, they probably abuse the system at the work place already.
There will be many who may disagree with this but I don't think you need an additional agreement or ammendment to your firms' employee contract unless that was not well written. Besides unless you are a lawyer, I suggest for your sake you leave that to the lawyers. Your boss wants to cheap out. I understand that need to cheap out. I do it too but not when it's something legal.
Good luck getting out of writting this "semi legal" document.
At the last firm I worked at, much of my overtime was spent working from home, on the road etc. There was no extra layer contract required and the hours were posted on my time sheet. The work was done, it was appropriate and there was trust on both sides. Truth be told for the most part, more hours were worked than ever reported and I think that's pretty normal in any industry.

[Civil Samurai]

Wow, thank you so much for your reply! You have opened up the can of worms that I knew was just waiting on the sidelines. In my mind it didn't seem like an easy document to try to come up with. Trust is a good issue to bring up since we are just a small company of about 20 employees and we're like a big family. Trust isn't an issue as of right now, I think my boss has been burned in the past by a few bad employees and doesn't know how else to try to prevent that from happening again. My feeling on it is that, like you said, if an employee wants to work from home on a less than regular basis it's probably because he/she has a genuine desire to finish a project or needs to make sure they make their 40 hours by the end of the week. I will bring up the items you've mentioned to my boss and make a case for not drafting a document of this nature. Instead, I may suggest that he read through the employee manual and see if he wants to add a blurb in there about working from home from time to time being ok if approved by management or something.

Thanks again, I really appreciate your input. It was exactly the help I needed!

Take care,

Mike

[Wanderer]

Wow, thank you so much for your reply! You have opened up the can of worms that I knew was just waiting on the sidelines. In my mind it didn't seem like an easy document to try to come up with. Trust is a good issue to bring up since we are just a small company of about 20 employees and we're like a big family. Trust isn't an issue as of right now, I think my boss has been burned in the past by a few bad employees and doesn't know how else to try to prevent that from happening again. just wanted to throw in my $0.02... I'll expect change. ;)

when my son was born, I asked to work from home 2 days a week and my boss (who is a total micromanager) said no way. But, I have had a few projects that I needed to get done, and to work OT, I requested to work from home, and he was fine with it over a few month span.
About a month into it, he started asking for just a list of things I'd completed so far, luckily the type of work was easy to count/see.
At the end, I just archived the project and he never asked to review it, I suppose, since he'd been kept in the loop regarding the progress.

I never would have even thought of a legal agreement governing that? It's pretty much a trust issue. Either you trust your employee to do they work they say they will or you don't.

[Maverick91]

just wanted to throw in my $0.02... I'll expect change. ;)

when my son was born, I asked to work from home 2 days a week and my boss (who is a total micromanager) said no way. But, I have had a few projects that I needed to get done, and to work OT, I requested to work from home, and he was fine with it over a few month span.
About a month into it, he started asking for just a list of things I'd completed so far, luckily the type of work was easy to count/see.
At the end, I just archived the project and he never asked to review it, I suppose, since he'd been kept in the loop regarding the progress.

I never would have even thought of a legal agreement governing that? It's pretty much a trust issue. Either you trust your employee to do they work they say they will or you don't.
I agree. it's much easier for a mananger to quantify your work while you're sitting in the office than if your sitting at your computer at home.... or not. However, if you can show that you have been productive away from his watching eyes, it'll help. For example, are you able to get five tasks accomplished in the time you're working at home in the same number of days that you'd spend getting five tasks done at the office? Can you get more or less tasks done from home? Do the drawings done at home have crayon and spittle on them?

Also, I think that once a manager has been exposed to the new concept of work-from-home he'll be more comfortable with the proceedures. Melanie eased her way into the arrangement even as the manager balked, but he softened his attitude towards it. It seemed to have worked.