Home-Based Work Can Be Perfect Or Pernicious

Bees do it, ants do it, even termites do it. But not everyone, particularly gregarious human types, can manage to work at home.

True, few other employment options sound as appealing as avoiding the 9-to-5 grind by telecommuting or running your own home-based business.

Just think: No more commutes on congested freeways, only a 30-second dash from the shower to desk. Forget the pantyhose or constricting neckties, office politics and the demanding boss with bad breath.

And consider the freedom. If your most productive hours of the day are 6 p.m. to 3 a.m., that’s when you could be free to produce. You could even be available to pick up the kids from school at 3.

It certainly sounded good to Linda Van de Vrede.

“The home-based trend was really gathering momentum four years ago, and I had such a long commute to work,” said Van de Vrede, 35, a public-relations specialist. “And job stress - everyone is always after you, and there’s all those deadlines.”

About the same time, Van de Vrede bumped into a woman who had recently quit her job to freelance at home.

“She looked so rested and happy,” she said.

That was it!

Van de Vrede read everything she could devour on running a homebased business and decided to take the plunge and start her own company in 1991.

“There couldn’t have been a better time for me,” she said. “I had no kids, my car was paid off, and my husband, who was very supportive of the whole thing, could pick up my health benefits for me.”

Four years later, however, Van de Vrede has raced back to corporate America in all its stressful glory.

It isn’t because she hasn’t been successful at home. Quite the contrary.

“I found myself up against the wall,” she said. “I was at the point where I was going to have to expand by moving out of my house and renting office space, hire one or two people to help me and raise my rates. I didn’t want to do that.”

But there was more, much more.

Van de Vrede was lonely working at home.

“The UPS guy got so he’d leave my packages at the end of the driveway so he wouldn’t get stuck talking to me,” she said.

Consequently, Van de Vrede closed her home office and started a job as marketing-communications manager for a Phoenix firm April 12.

But she has no regrets.

“It was a good learning experience,” she said.

Not everyone, however, chooses to learn the hard way. And with interest growing in home-based businesses (24.3 million Americans were involved full or part time in a homebased business in 1994, according to Link Resources Corporation) and telecommuting (9.1 million workers nationwide telecommute one or more days a week, according to the 1994 American Information User Survey), being aware of the at-home hazards might help others avoid disaster.

Julie Schwartz Occupational & Career Services Inc. in Phoenix recommends that the first thing anyone considering a home-based or telecommuting option do is take a personal-performance survey to determine whether they’re emotionally suited.

“If you are first and foremost a people person, and you enjoy indepth interaction with others, you probably will want to think again about working at home,” Schwartz said.

In fact, two of the things Van de Vrede disliked most about working alone at home were the lack of teamwork and socializing.

“I like being part of a team and sharing in that energy, ‘and there was always instant social activity available at work,” she said.

Eileen Glick of Chandler, a suburb of Phoenix, runs the HomeBased Business Association. Glick cites typical pitfalls for self-employed home-based workers, while offering practical ways to patch them.

First, Glick said, “Everyone needs to sit down and do a business plan, listing where you want to be and when you expect to get there.”

She suggested posting them in plain sight for daily motivational purposes.

Consider, too, that being selfemployed also means handling everything by yourself.

“You’ll be wearing lots of hats,” Glick said, “including the one for bookkeeping, marketing, clerical, sales, technical and janitorial services. Make sure you look good in all those hats.”

Or else make other arrangements.

Set up a home office in a separate room used exclusively for working purposes.

“Make sure it has a door that you can close when you finish for the day, and a window with a view,” she said. “And it should have a separate telephone line from your residential phone, or else you’ll turn into a workaholic and be answering your work phone and working day and night.”

Van de Vrede learned how exhausting that routine can be.

“I’d even wake up in the middle of the night, fretting over a project,” she said. “So I’d just get up and finish it then.”

But it wasn’t until she took a close look at her eating habits while glued to her computer screen that she realized something was really amiss.

“I counted 14 Smarties candy wrappers scattered around my computer one day, and I was horrified,” she said.

If there are others in the household, it’s also important to establish some ground rules to protect the person trying get work done.

“You need to make it clear that when you’re in your office, you’re working and you’re not going to sew up your son’s pants,” Van de Vrede said.

Glick also warns against domestic distractions.

“The housework is always there staring you in the face,” she said. “But you have to ignore the fact that the living room needs vacuuming.”

Feelings of isolation and loneliness, even depression, are typical complaints of at-home workers, but they can be mitigated by maintaining contacts with the outside world.

“Get the hell out of the house regularly,” Glick said, “even if it’s just to walk the dog or meet a friend for a meal.”