Work from home?

Arbre

Have any of y'all ever done one of those work from home things? I'm talking more about the customer service ones where you talk to the people on the headset. My career counselor swears the ones he gave me are legit (and this one I'm looking at is for Pizza Hut), but it's requiring me to buy a landline and pay for a training course (not to mention a new, wired headset, evidently my wireless one isn't good enough). I was just wondering if anyone else had experience doing it and how y'all felt about it.

Xandren

no personal experience, so I wouldn't say I would have any useful advice in regards to working from home, but as someone who worked retail in a small privately owned (note: not-chain) store and often had most of the unhappy customers passed off to me, I'd indicate: Social Anxiety is something to consider, because you're going to be talking to people who may or may not be in a happy sort of state, and they're likely to yell at you, and they can get pretty vicious. I admit that I myself had to bite back a few choice words for certain.. types of women after they decided they had a few choice words because they didn't come in with their kids, and their kids bought a game from another person who didn't really check for ID's, just looked the kid over and assumed he was 18, even though the kid was 16. (height, and a bit of scruffy facial hair growing =/= 18). This happened a few times, and always, I was handed the phone pretty quickly, and apparently was "good" at dealing with these people.


Tl;DR: I may not have experience with your job in particular, I worked in customer service as part of my retail job, and if you have social anxiety, it's not a place you wanna be, not when you have a variety of customer types that will take advantage of that any way they can, or just be outright despicable.

Arbre

Well, this specific job I'm looking at looks like it's mostly going to be taking phone orders and entering them into the computer more than dealing with disgruntled customers, so I'm not -terribly- worried about that, but I appreciate the concern.

Buford

I don't work in the same field, but I do work from home; I've definitely got a few tips on the whole idea of working from home in general that I've picked up over the last 6 months or so, and was actually forced by my boss to read through a book all about it, so here's my two cents:

- If at all possible, have a separate room that you do your work in. For a little while I was staying with a relative while I was buying a house, and let me just tell you that working 4 feet away from your bed is just absolutely awful for getting into the work mentality. Have a separate designated area that's your work place (just like an office kinda) and make sure you're only there when you're working to drive home the idea that that's where you work - this does wonders for establishing that mentality.

- Again, if possible, work computer and personal computer fall in this thought process too. It's tempting to be able to open up a game/facebook/whatever in another window when it's the same one you use for that stuff, but clearly establishing that this is for work and that is for play will help your focus immensely.

- Continuing with that, wake up and do the normal routine you'd do if you were actually going into an office. Shower/brush your teeth/get dressed, etc., whatever you'd normally do. Working from home brings the temptation of being able to work in sweat pants and comfy clothes, but I've found that days I bum around like that my productivity isn't nearly what it is if I do otherwise.

- Set your hours that you work, and, if at all possible, stick to that as best you can. Even though you're not technically clocking in and out, act as if you are. I'm ridiculously guilty of getting a client email on a weekend and going, "Ehh, my computer's in the other room, don't see why I couldn't just jump on and do that for them quick" because it's that easy. Work/life balance is made much trickier when that can happen, but for your own mental sanity you'll want to make sure it's maintained. Handling calls you may or may not have to deal with this issue as it's not necessarily completely web based.

tl;dr working from home is a mentality you've got to figure out if you want to be as productive as possible

Apianora

Speaking from experience with WFH situations, I don't know that I'd like a job that requires all that. When I did take a customer service position for a phone company, all I had to buy was my headset - and even that they paid me back for. Otherwise, I got free training and all my calls were done via a softphone program they had. So, no need for a landline. You may want to take a look around at other opportunities before you settle for this one, just so you don't have to shell out money for something that you may not end up satisfied with. Working from home can be great, but it can also be terrible - like Buford here said, it's a mentality.

Arbre

Haven't heard anything back from the Pizza Hut company (it was a third person company, not Pizza Hut directly), but UHaul got back to me immediately with a job offer that I'm going to take. Doesn't require a separate phone line and has paid training. I'm not sure if this is something I want to do long term - my job coach said we could keep looking, which means I'll stay in the voc rehab system - but it's something, and it has much more consistent pay than the Pizza Hut job did. Overall, I feel much more confident about the job itself than I did about the previous one.

Aishia