Know-How Exchange : Other

I'm not seeing a lot of advantages, other than this designer may be able to expand your base and attract business opps in the new area.

As a small firm, I assume the daily connection within the group is important synergy. You can always pick up the phone to the designer, but that's isn't going to take some effort, and some of the thought of the moment energy will be lost. If the culture of you org fosters that kind of thought process and open, spontaneous thought exchange, it will hinder that.

Client meetings, other mettings will be an extra effort and those times when he just has to be there will involve extra expense for travel. Which I'm sure as an employee, he'll expect you to pick up the tab for.

I'd consider offering him a 1099 position, the responsibility for travel and communication will be on him, and compensation will be based on a monthly retainer, or a job by job basis.

Offering a telecommuting position to a valuable employee is a great way to keep your talent happy. The question is can you make it work? Can you trust this employee to get his work done with little supervision? Can your office embrace the new tools that make telecommuting possible (skype, iming, filesharing, etc.)? I've read about a 100% virtual company that has used telecommuting as a way to excel and find the best talent.

In my opinion, it's worthwhile exploring the option. Sit down and explain that working from home will require more work for your designer. Set important goals and measurables to explain what you expect from him. The advantage is you might end up with a worker who is happier with his new situation and will stay with the company longer. Locating and training a new designer to mesh with you business does not ensure the new designer won't quit the next day. If you can make telecommuting work for you, it can be a valuable arrangement for all parties concerned. Your designer can forget his commute and continue at a company and job he loves while your company can benefit from keeping a valuable designer who has a new reason to work hard.

The story I mentioned about the 100% virtual company:
https://www.inc.com/winning-workplaces/articles/201105/where-virtual-is-the...

I agree with the others.

Primary advantage is that you can hopefully keep a valued employee who would otherwise quit.

Downside is less communication, less oversight, higher costs (travel and communication), etc.

Perhaps try it for a week. Have them work from home and see how it goes? Just realize that in this week, everyone will be trying hard to make it work (extra efforts that may not continue after months or years).

I think it would depend on how it's working now. If the 2 states are on different coasts...that's going to cause some problems in terms of getting everyone together at the same time. If you need to replicate all your technology for a single person office, that's a money issue.

What would be the lead time for your designer to leave? Often families are given several months to make the move. Again, the make up of the family will have an impact on how quickly they would want to join the spouse.

Hi KSgirl,

Working from home will be the future, and adobe has introduced 'cloud' where we can share large graphic files for other designers to access.

I think your designer he will need to travel on two occasions:
1. for the clients briefing
2. when presenting the work.

So if you are paying him the same salary with incentives he will need to bear the traveling cost. but any additional travel cost need to be paid by the company. If he is a lead designer better to let him design than asking him to travel often, I think it more of the time than money that matters.

There are ways to converse and monitor by skype and file sharing methods with 'descriptions' . I live in Sri Lanka and work as a designer, we do this kind of work even with a low bandwidth as 2Mbps. So distance does not matter.