People always tell me how lucky I am that I have the opportunity to work from home.  And I agree, for the most part.  But working from home is not sunshine, rainbows, and butterflies.  I’ve had to re-learn working in a virtual environment.  It’s a different ball game.  While I do love getting to fold a load of laundry while on a conference call, my life can be totally unbalanced while I work from home.  And I’ve seen many a co-worker crash and burn when moving from the corporate office to the home office.

You may have thought of your office as distracting with water cooler conversations, idle hallway chit-chat, and that one person who always manages to burn the popcorn in the breakroom microwave.  But just wait until you are at home with a whole new set of distractions.

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My son’s preschool has been shut down for the last two days for Teacher In-Service.  The new “school year” begins after Labor Day and the teachers use this time to prepare their classrooms for the switch.  I know that I am lucky that my son goes to a year round school that is open most of the year.  With the standard holidays, four inservice days a year (two in the Fall and two in the Spring), and a week off between Christmas and New Year’s, I know that I am lucky.  I rarely have to find alternative arrangements. 

Still every year, the inservice days creep up on me and I find myself desperately making alternate arrangements.  Okay, maybe not desperate.  But this heat and forgetting to mark the days in my calendar is making me just a teeny bit crabby about the situation.  When I was complaining to a neighbor with school age kids that I was struggling to stay on task while working from home and having a four year old that was ready to break out of the house, she quickly told me to get used to it.  She pulled out the school calendar and showed me that in our local school district there is an inservice day at least once every month.  Throw in Christmas Break, Ski week and Easter break and a whole slew of other days - and we are talking almost 45 days off during the school year.

I practically had a panic attack about all those days off and my kid won’t be starting Kindergarten for another year.

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When I was a child, I was a major morning person.  I was almost always up before my parents.  It helped that I was incredibly independent too.  Before my mother even opened her eyes, I would have been up for a couple of hours - teeth brushed, hair combed, tummy full with Cheerios, and maybe even a little extra time watching Romper Room. 

In high school, I started to lose my early bird ways.  Having a part-time job that didn’t finish until after 10pm and a boyfriend who I just always had to call before I fell asleep translated into rushed mornings to get to school on time.  Don’t tell my mother, but my senior year in high school I was tardy to my first period class over twenty times in a single semester.

By college I had lost any notion of being an early bird.  Late night parties, hanging with friends, midnight movies, and all night raves made sleeping in until after 11am a standard occurence (ok and there was some studying in there too).  Whenever my dad would call around 9am on a Saturday morning, I tried my best to hide the fact that I only went to bed a mere three hours before.   

But it wasn’t until I became a mother that I became a bona fide night owl. 

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I’ve been a working mom for a mere four years; however, I think I’ve been doing this long enough to look around and see that … well … some large corporations could do a thing or two to ensure the undying love and loyalty of their working mom employees. Besides, I’m a firm believer that an happy and loyal employee is a productive employee. So, in an attempt to "help a corporation out" (and with apologies to David Letterman), I thought I’d list, in my opinion, the Top Five Things Companies Can Do to Make Their Employee-Moms* Love Them:

Number 5: No Time Clocks
I think there’s an argument which states that, in most instances, as long as the work gets completed on time, why should it matter what hours an employee performs her job? Often, being a stickler in requiring employees to punch a time clock is a classic example of form-over-substance: there is the implication that a company values full desks between the hours of eight and five more than it does maximizing the productivity of its employees. I guarantee that if a conscientious employee feels like her employer will be flexible with her working hours, she’ll likewise bend over backwards to ensure that her work is of the highest quality.

Number 4: Provide the tools to work away from home
Related to Number 5, a corporation that provides its employees with the tools to work remotely will — surprise! — end up with employees willing to work remotely. This means that instead of desktops, the company provides laptops. Mobile phones. BlackBerrys (or as I like to call them Crackberrys, because seriously, checking e-mail on those things can become obsessive). By giving an employee these types of gadgets, it’s unlikely she will get resentful about having to stay at the office until all hours of the night if she knows she can log off, go home and have a break with her family, and then log back on later when she’s refreshed, and ready to tackle her work anew. And while I don’t have any statistics to back it up, I’m willing to bet my next paycheck that in general, people who have laptops and PDAs for accessing email away from the office are far more likely to work more than 40 hours a week than those who don’t.

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The company I work for is a relatively large, global company, and in my opinion, it has a surprisingly small law department: it consists of one other lawyer and a paralegal. As a result, my job can be really demanding – it’s not unusual for me to work more than 40 hours per week, and spending the odd weekend or an evening or two to drafting contracts or negotiating deals. Thing is, I actually feel pretty lucky: at most other companies similar to mine, working these hours would require sacrificing a lot of family time to make the job work. However, when I signed on, part of my deal included working from home several days a week – and on days when I do go into the office, I’m usually free to leave at 2:30 to pick up my daughter from her school. Sure, it means that I finish the day’s work many evenings after she goes to bed; however, not having to punch a clock means that for most of her waking hours, I’m available to her.

Again, I don’t kid myself: I realize that I’m incredibly lucky that I’ve managed to work a lot of flexibility into my gig. That said, I’m also pretty realistic in the knowledge that this “flexibility” may cost me as far as future career opportunities with this company, unless I’m willing to give it up – but to be honest? I’m okay with that – I became a parent later in life, and feel pretty pleased with what I accomplished in my working career prior to my daughter’s birth. Right now, it’s all about figuring out what I can accomplish as a mom.

I’m curious: how do you work flexibility in your lives so you can be the best working mom you can be? If you haven’t yet, how would you like to make that happen?