Picture the stereotypical telecommuter: Is he or she still wearing pajamas at noon, calling clients from the kitchen or emailing the boss from bed?
Even though she works from home, Shelby Carlson, 26, of Lincoln Square, wouldn't be caught dead goofing around on the clock.
"I'm sure people do that, but that's just not something I could see myself doing," she said. "Especially because [my company] is trusting me from a thousand miles away."
In fact, Carlson's home office is so crucial to her job as an account manager with a Dallas-based digital ad agency, it was the first room she unpacked when she moved to Chicago in August and began telecommuting.
That means that when most Chicagoans are rising Monday morning to begin their weekday slogs to the office, Carlson is settling into a desk in her apartment's sunroom. In one sense she's a thousand miles away from her supervisor and coworkers. But it only takes an email or phone call to get in touch.
"An interactive agency is the perfect work-at-home job," she said. "All you need is a computer and a phone, and you're good."
That's the kind of thinking that has more workers turning to full-time telecommuting or part-time work-from-home arrangements with their employers. A little more than half of the millennials surveyed by the New York-based Families and Work Institute, which studies workplace trends, said they sometimes work their regular hours from home. The institute also found the number of employers that allow employees to be flexible about where they work has increased from 34 percent in 2005 to 63 percent last year.
The upsides: no commute, more time for family members and pets, and the rare flexibility to run a load of laundry or take a trip to the post office in the middle of the day. But in the worst-case scenario, a work-from-home arrangement can leave employees cut off from their co-workers and managers, decreasing productivity and corroding the organization's culture.
Some companies have banned working from home altogether. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer sparked a national conversation about the practice earlier this year when she announced that the company would end telecommuting as an option for employees who have been working remotely.
A memo to Yahoo staffers said the new rule would drive business forward, because "speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home ... we need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together."
That sense of office togetherness is what Tim Gough, 29, of Noble Square, was looking for when he gave up working from home in 2010, after nearly four years telecommuting for an email hosting company.
"The drawbacks started to outweigh the benefits," he said. "You're not really having any face-to-face interactions. It gets boring. And you don't have your boss there, so you could sit on Facebook or ESPN every day."
Besides the potential for distraction, Gough said, the main downside to his arrangement was being cooped up in the house all day, while most of the people he knew were out.
"There were so many times I was champing at the bit to find something to do out of the house," he said. "On so many days, in the middle of the week, it was 5 o'clock, and I'm calling my buddies, wanting to get out of the house, but they were all tired."
Carlson said she also has struggled with her motivation while working alone. Her solution has been to spend at least one day a week at a shared co-working space on Chicago Avenue called The Coop. The Coop is one of a handful of Chicago office spaces where individuals who freelance or telecommute can rent a desk for $350 a month or $20 a day. Its founder, Sam Rosen, estimated that nearly a quarter of his clients are telecommuters who would rather pay a monthly fee for a desk in his office than work from their homes, where they may be more likely to succumb to loneliness or distractions.
Those issues mean working from home isn't for everyone, but seasoned telecommuters have some strategies to combat them. Kyra Cavanaugh helps Chicagoland businesses and individuals navigate those challenges and develop flexible work programs as the owner of Life Meets Work, a telecommuting consulting firm based in Park Ridge.
She said telework is most commonly found among accounting and consulting firms, but some organization have been slow to catch on because they have a tradition of face-to-face, hands-on work-think Chicago's steel and meatpacking industries.
"Chicago employers don't all embrace flex[ible work] with open arms," she said. "Telework is really embraced and seen as much more necessary in markets where there isn't as much talent. The fact that Chicago continues to attract people has made employers feel like they don't have to be as creative."
But, Cavanaugh said, the trend could catch on in coming years if more suburban-based companies return to the city and their employees don't follow.
"Sometimes you can actually improve productivity when people can work more flexibly," she said. "It isn't just for moms, or just for 20-somethings."