Pros and Cons of Home Based Work Teams

I first heard about such work at home teams through Dan Pink’s book “Free Agent Nation”. You may never have heard of it… used copies are available for a buck or so.

But Pink documented the transition within our economy of the move towards free agents working at home or self employment as we used to call it.

He also got me to thinking about another trend…. individuals working at home in teams that were widely separated and connected only by phone, fax, and Internet.

You may be thinking “Oh I network all the time…” Maybe so, but home based work teams go beyond ordinary networking though to establish mutual work relationships between self employed people who carry their share of the work and each contribute their specialty to a project.

So keep up the networking but to achieve the steady income that can derive from a team you have to find people with the same chemistry who’ll carry their own weight and help the overall team effort while getting what they need out of the operation.

The huge “Pro” in this is that each individual in the team usually has multiple clients which means multiple sources of work and revenue. When a team knows they can work well together, it also means that new revenue and work for one will produce spin off work and revenue for the others usually.

For that reason, networking with folks in yours or related fields is essential. If you have a team in place of workers who would be generating income on their own any way, but they can also work together, the amoung of work and size of the jobs can increase proportionately. If the whole team has contacts they use to market, the team essentially acts as one another’s marketing division unless one member of the team functions as a “rainmaker” or client gatherer, then the team is dependent on this person’s efforts for finding new work.

There can be “con’s” associated with such work.

The other day I heard a story from one such team member whose paid by the project. The same money is paid if the work takes 1 minute or 100 hours. Another team member’s computer glitch tied up the whole team for several hours trying to restore communications! And of course the normal hassles of human communications and personalities still exist, even if separated by DSL.