Work from home seems to be the buzzword today. I have spent years on it. In 2010, a year after my MBA from the University of Chicago, I began working on building a work-from-home business. The first one failed. The second one followed suit. However, I kept at it. Through the school of hard knocks and after having made several mistakes - I was disabused of the assumption that work-from-home is just the office work done at home.
Along the way, I figured out the right formula - at-least that worked for me. I have been designing and running effective work-from-home teams since then.
Why was I doing it? First, a virus or a lack of office real-estate didn't force me to do it. I had a personal objective. I was building a utopia - where everyone makes good wages, doing exciting work in their pajamas. Partly, it was my desire and somewhat a way for me to drive social change. The persistence paid off, and today I run a successful work-from-home business and know quite a bit about this model of work. Analytics and technology were a critical aspect of this effort - and my IIT Kharagpur CSE education and experience as a data-scientist helped in solving this problem.
Along the way, I have worked personally with 100s of people in dozens of work-profiles working from home. At different times I have worked with software engineers, sales-people, recruiters, telecallers, accountants, data scientists, bloggers, and animators, to name a few. Some issues, such as a break-down in team-work, are common across all work-profiles. Other problems, such as confusion about objectives was more of an issue for some others.
However, it has been an exciting ride, and I would love to share the stories with everyone.
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