Finding good remote workers is very difficult This. A lot of the problem employers have with "work from home" employees is centered around this fact. Working

Finding good remote workers is very difficult This. A lot of the problem employers have with "work from home" employees is centered around this fact. Working from home almost always requires extremely good communication skills and extroverted employees. The problem is that working from home appeals more to introverted employees than extroverted ones. I've met several fellow extroverts who left work at home positions because they were lonely and several introverted employees who were let go from positions and had no idea why they weren't successful. Even as an extrovert, I've struggled in this area, going so far as to create tasks with reminder alerts to call specific employees for social reasons on specific days. You have to go out of your way to fill in the communications vacuum and it occupies a chunk of your work-life with tasks that an in-office worker never has to think about. Hiring for this skill set is also difficult. In my case, I had been working remotely for a manager who was in a different time zone both in-the-office and at home for about 12 years, so I had learned these skills over time and could speak directly to them in an interview. I'm not perfect at it[0] but have learned some tricks along the way and most of it is being willing to assert yourself, to interrupt others (carefully) and to speak openly about your life outside of work over channels where this doesn't necessarily happen naturally. I've found arriving to video/teleconferences a few minutes early and breeze-shooting with anyone else who arrives early helps. Adding video to every call regardless of whether or not anyone else enables video is also a good thing (and learning to look into the camera lens rather than the screen -- expressing emotion visually -- has a psychological impact as well). [0] Far from it sometimes, especially if I have a large work-load. In the office, it'd be obvious to my manager that I'm struggling under the pressure. At home, I have to be deliberate about communicating these facts while avoiding sounding like a complainer. Consider that if you're in the office, dropping by the boss's cube/office to complain about your work-load would be something that you'd only do in extreme circumstances because it'd be obvious to them by just casual observation. At home, you have no choice but to complain -- it's natural for you but it still feels the same to your boss if the rest of the team he's managing is in the office. He doesn't hear any of them complaining regularly about work-load, but he knows their work load through indirect observation. It makes matters even worse that you're bitching about being over-worked on a conference call you're conducting from your bed (cry me a river, right?). The best "cure" for this is a standing, weekly, informal "touch base" meeting that's designed to discuss work-life-related things which is scheduled and kept even when there's no problems.