Telecommuting, also known as working from home or from a virtual office, is an attractive prospect to many practice managers. Avoiding a lengthy and irritating commute is a top motivator for practice managers who work in large, crowded cities with heavy rush-hour traffic. And working from home often raises productivity by offering blocks of uninterrupted time for completing projects. This series of articles will explore the concept of telecommuting for practice managers.

If you’ve investigated the option of telecommuting your practice manager position and think it might work, you’re probably at least somewhat apprehensive about the next step – proposing the idea to the owners/physicians at your workplace.  The first and most important rule is to be thoroughly prepared.  This article, the second in our series on telecommuting as a practice manager, offers some tips to help you make a presentation to your owner/physician that has the best chance of being accepted.

If you’ve received permission to telecommute in your position as practice manager, either part-time or full-time, on a trial basis or permanently, you’ll want to make the right impression so the owner/physician who gave consent will feel good about the decision.  Whether you continue telecommuting long-term or not, it’s important for your supervisors to have confidence in your ideas and faith that you can carry them to fruition, as well as solve problems that crop up along the way.  To do this, you must arm yourself with the right tools:

Practice managers who take advantage of the option to work virtually, whether part-time or full-time, often wonder how they will stay in the loop at work when they are physically out of the office. Managing employees, participating in meetings, and staying informed about issues and changes is a greater challenge when you spend some or all of your workdays in your home office.

As a telecommuting practice manager, you are responsible for ensuring that working virtually fits your office environment.  A complete review should be conducted after 90 days of telecommuting.  If problems aren’t promptly corrected, productivity will wane, morale will suffer, and most importantly, your physicians/owners will be disillusioned and upset.  With that in mind, here are some ways to measure success as a telecommuting practice manager that will help you nip any problems in the bud;

Working from a home office has many advantages, one of which may be tax deductions.  However, tax law just is as specific on this topic as on others, so you’ll need to keep a few things in mind.  This information isn’t meant to take the place of an experienced tax professional, but it can help by giving you basic information and an idea of what records you’ll need to keep.