What’s it like to work at home?

For some, it’s fantastic. For others, it’s a nightmare.

In 2001, we started the Tulsa Beacon and we rented a small office right across the street from our house. Our kids were still in school and it was a perfect setup. Our teenage son watched our two younger kids after school and the kids were only a 100 yards away so they could easily visit us and we were close to them.

At that time, we thought we could turn the Tulsa Beacon into a daily newspaper. We didn’t and it’s a good thing. Small daily papers are going out of business all over Oklahoma and America.

Why? First, people don’t read printed newspapers like they used to and that is especially true of young people. Secondly, advertisers have abandoned print advertising. They just don’t buy ads like they used to.

Anyway, about a dozen years ago, we moved our office into our home. We have a large formal living room that was about the same square footage of the office we were renting. This was not only so much more convenient, but it saves us as much as $10,000 a year in unnecessary expenses.

Plus, everyone who works for us works from their homes. Thanks to the Internet, this is the wave of the future.

The coronavirus pandemic had small and large businesses scurrying to see how many employees they could send home without losing productivity.

One of our kids works in the computer department of a large company and he has been working for several weeks with full pay and benefits.

There are problems with working at home.

When you are at home, it is easy to get distracted and not get enough work done. We have a couple of pug puppies and sometimes they crave our attention during working hours. And they bark sometimes when we are on the phone and that’s not very professional.

Years ago, we had a friend who started a small business and worked out of his home. His wife had a good job and he found out that it was more fun to putter around the house than to scare up new accounts. He was busy, but not making money. His wife talked him into returning to work for someone else.

Interaction with fellow employees could suffer if everyone is working at home. It’s easy to email or even Zoom but sometimes a face-to-face meeting works best. I worked at a company one time that had a low-level manager who hated to talk to people who worked for him. Instead of walking into their adjoining offices, he sent them emails. He lost that job.

You can get audited by the IRS if you claim a home office. There are specific rules and people who work at home might be targets.

Obviously, some jobs work with home offices and some don’t.

A doctor, policeman or fireman pretty much has to go into an office. The days of a doctor making a house call are long gone and I don’t know if doctors ever treated patients in their own homes in the modern era.

My barber could work at home and so could some beauticians. As a customer, I would really prefer to go to a barber shop than someone’s home. My Dad was a barber and he cut my hair at home a few times. He and I both preferred that I go to the barber shop.

We are very organized in our home office. We have to be. We have to produce about three pages of our paper on average every day. We go to press on Tuesday and it would be impossible to write, design and proof a 16-page paper all on Monday. In fact, most daily newspapers that have a Sunday edition will have as much as 75% of the paper written and printed sometime on Friday. Then they have a small staff work on Saturday to finish the front section and even a smaller crew to crank out the Monday paper – usually the smallest edition of the week.

During the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, many of the smaller papers in Oklahoma closed their offices; cut back on the number of issues they printed; cut the number of pages and let their staff (except the actual printers) work at home. The results were not great but acceptable.

Except for our daily trip to the U.S. Post Office and trips to the grocer, we stayed at home and kept publishing the Tulsa Beacon on time with the same number of pages but with reduced revenue.

I guess I could do my radio show (Tulsa Beacon Weekend at noon Saturday on KCFO AM970) from home but it would not be the same.

I like having my office at home. Maybe the coronavirus quarantine will pave the way for some folks to make a permanent switch to home offices.