Employees Run Amok: The Problem With Home Offices
By Richard Rabinowitz, Owner of Digital Photo Academy, New York City
After 20 years working as a VP/Group Publisher in the corporate magazine world, I opened The Digital Photo Academy out of the Gramercy Park apartment I share with my wife and our two daughters. My goal was to create a relaxed and nurturing work environment for my employees. But it wasn't long before the line between work and home quickly blurred and our home turned into a three-ring circus.
On any given day, we'd find our employees, most of whom were in their 20s, cooking, doing laundry, and sleeping over at the office. Clearly, we needed some house rules. Here's how I laid down the law -- without sacrificing the casual and creative feel of the business.
The circus
Digital Photo Academy is an instructional workshop series taught by professional photographers in over 23 metro areas. We work in three conjoined New York City apartments that include DPA's offices, my wife's personal photo studio, and the home we share with two daughters. We have six full-time employees and any number of accountants, graphic designers, freelance photographers, and webmasters coming in and out of the apartment. It feels like a circus at times, but I like the energy of it.
I don't do dress codes or tell people to pick out a particular lunch hour. Those kinds of corporate customs had always felt a little rigid and stifling for my taste. We do most of our work on laptops and cell phones around the dining room table.
The problem with trying to create a comfortable, creative work environment, is that my employees began treating the space a little too familiarly. They'd use the phones and computers for personal business, calling friends and social networking. We had people cooking and leaving our kitchen a mess and doing laundry in the apartment.
At one point employees were sleeping over in the office instead of going home to their own apartments. They'd go out after work and at 3 a.m. they'd come back to the office rather than going home to Brooklyn. I would wake up to find four people sleeping in the living room. That was kind of the breaking point. My wife was upset, my children were uncomfortable, and I knew we needed to make some changes.
Defining the Space
Without clear boundaries our "home office" wasn't a productive workspace, nor was it a very comfortable home. Our employees weren't careless, disrespectful people; we just hadn't given them any rules to follow. We decided to change that:
- Office communications. We told everyone that our four business phone lines were for business only. If employees needed to call out from the office, we designated specific phone lines for their personal use. We also prohibited social networking of any kind during business hours. The benefits of these changes were almost immediate -- employees actually left work on time rather than staying late to make up for time spent on Facebook.
- No-fly zones. Next, we designated certain areas of the apartment as off limits. Employees could no longer use our children's bedrooms as a quiet place to work or wash their clothes in our laundry room. They could use the kitchen for some light cooking, but we expected them to clean up after themselves. Certain bathrooms were off-limits for staff use.
- Closing time. We made it clear the office closed at 6pm. Everyone was expected to leave and not come back until the morning!
Follow the Leader
In fact, the segregation of workspace from living space was probably harder for me than for any of my employees. I quickly recognized, however, that if I expected my employees to treat my home as an office, I had to do the same. It meant things as simple as wearing work clothes during business hours - which I really hadn't done before we instituted the rules. My daughters couldn't interrupt business meetings to ask me personal questions, nor could I do personal business -- talk to a school counselor, or a family doctor -- on the work phones.
When I started this company I had worked around artists -- not to mention lived with one -- long enough to know that they enjoy working in a relaxed atmosphere. But having no rules can give your employees the wrong impression. In our case, just because it's someone's home, doesn't mean that they can use it like they would their own.
Digital Photo Academy brings in more than $2 million a year in annual revenue. Managing the unconventional, often hectic office, Richard Rabinowitz often feels like the character George Bluth, patriarch of the TV show 'Arrested Development.' He dreams of one day using his experiences in the business to create a sitcom of his own.
-- As told to Alex Coppola
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