Telecommuting
How to Tolerate, er, Adjust to Work-at-Home Salespeople

Here are four tips to make sure telecommuters don’t drift out of touch or sap company coffers.

You may wince at the '90s buzzword telecommuting (after all, what are home-based salespeople really doing in those cozy den offices?), but get used to it.

The work-at-home trend is gaining momentum, and brokers say they're learning to adapt to telecommuters by finding solutions to the pitfalls of remote work.

"Salespeople who work at home miss the cross-pollination of personalities and ideas that goes on in the office environment," says Ron Malloy, broker-manager of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, Rye, N.Y. "They miss the informal learning curve on marketing tools and information; they miss news about issues affecting the local market; and if they're away from the office too much of the time, they lack team spirit."

Several brokers who've struggled with telecommuting woes now make sure that work-at-home salespeople don't sap company resources or throw their business into a tailspin.

Here are some tips:

1.Coax work-at-home associates into the office on a regular basis. You have to earn their presence in the office, says Bob Nicholson, CRS®, GRI, branch vice president of Coldwell Banker-Burnet, Stillwater, Minn. Brokers must create an environment to help salespeople grow, or else they’ll retreat by working at home more and more.

Nicholson says weekly staff meetings with strong agendas are key to getting salespeople out of their home offices: "Every week we give associates one important tip about the psychology of selling or offer role-playing so that they'll want to attend."

2.Find cost-effective ways to communicate with salespeople who work at home. John Foltz, CRB, designated broker and vice president of Realty Executives in Phoenix, recently realized that work-at-home associates needed a 24-hour-a-day help desk for answers to basic questions. The Q&A hot line, an information fax-on-demand service that provides a menu of indexed information that salespeople can order by document number, was installed especially for those who telecommute.

"The hot line gets 1,200 hits a month," says Foltz.

Most of the hot line's advice focuses on questions about contracts. "If someone needs to know whether selling a divorced couple's property requires both signatures on the contract," he says, “the fax-back service has the answer."

3.Help telecommuters find ways to troubleshoot technology breakdowns without draining the company's resources. "Our information systems person was always being asked to come to salespeople's homes to repair computers," says Clark Halstead,CRB, founder and managing partner of New York-based Halstead Properties. "Now we help salespeople locate outside service providers for the technology problems, but they pay for the service themselves."

4.Small steps can help the work-at-home salesperson reconnect with the office. "We have an at-home salesperson who, I felt, was drifting further and further away from communication with the office," says Ruth Dickie, GRI, manager of Long & Foster Real Estate, Bethesda, Md. "Today he still works at home, but he enthusiastically writes for our newsletter, which gets him more involved in the office buzz."

If you want to discourage new affiliates from considering telecommuting altogether, Malloy offers this tried-and-true tip to use when interviewing: "Continue to stress how working in the office on a daily basis is important to succeeding in the corporate culture."

The interviewee will get the hint.

--Marilyn Zelinsky

Telecommuters Don't Have to Be News Challenged, and Neither Do You

Do you want to make sure your salespeople--work at home or not--are staying on top of industry news?

If so, let them know about Today's REALTOR® Online's free daily E-mail news service. It takes only a computer connected to the Internet and a few seconds to register for Today's REALTOR® Online's daily news.

1. Access One Realtor Place® through REALTOR.COM.

2. Click on the link to register for the news on the One Realtor Place® home page.

3. At the news registration page, click on Yes to receive the news and submit.

Within days, you'll begin receiving about 35 news briefs daily--including the day's top stories as well as additional news by subject category--which will broaden your knowledge about developments affecting your business practices.

Users can also buy a news feed for use in their print and online marketing materials. Details are at the site.