Hi

Bob's answer was intended to be humorous, and it is. Unfortunately, those are some of the answers that I do hear. Sometimes the answer is BS, regardless of whether the person intended it that way. Some people think they have too much to do, so long as they even have one thing to do.

With an out of office employee, the difficulty of filtering out the real from the imagined becomes harder. I have 2 people who never come into the office as they live 1500 miles away. I am lucky in that both are excellent and trustworthy. However their perception of problems, "how long" to complete, and so forth is sometimes much different from mine, or yours. Prioritizing tasks does offer some relief; but does not solve the problem of measuring productivity.

Personally, I would like to have more people work away from the office, (especially programmers) because both the employee and I will have fewer interruptions and both of use can get more of our work done. However we can not do this until we figure out some way to manage the remote employees.

Don Lowrey