This is a Guest Post by Jody Forehand of Visioneering Studios (a national church design-build firm). He is a friend of mine. He’s smart. He’s authentic. More church leaders need to know Jody and his blog. You can follow Jody on Twitter too.

Welcome to the virtual revolution. Technology has shrunk the world to the size of your cell phone, tablet, or laptop. Just a generation ago a virtual workforce was almost unheard of. Today more and more industries are allowing greater numbers of employees to work virtually. Home offices are springing up in every neighborhood and businesses are realizing the savings they can achieve by not having the huge overhead of an office and all that goes with it.

When I started my career in the work force it involved daily commuting to an office for 11 years while wearing “dress” clothes (that usually included a tie…which I’m convinced must have originally been invented as some sort of torture device or practical joke). In 2003 I started a new job with Church Development Fund in California…but I wasn’t moving my family across country…I was going to start working out of my house in Virginia. Yes! Thanks to technology and some air travel I was able to work with churches across the country and keep in touch with people in our scattered regional offices.

As the company grew I was asked to move to Atlanta to work in their regional office. After working at home for 18 months I was not looking forward to a long commute in notoriously heavy traffic and “dressing up” again. It was actually a great time with some great people, but a year later when an opportunity arose for me to move over to CDF’s sister company, Visioneering Studios, I jumped at the chance to become their first employee outside of California and once again began working out of my house.

I spent six more years managing projects all over the country while keeping in contact with our California office and even helped open and manage a new office in Colorado for a couple of years…all from the comfort of my home office. Tools like GoToMeeting, Skype, and cell phones, along with some regular air travel not only made it possible, but also made this arrangement virtually invisible to the outside world. As far as anyone could tell I was working on the top floor of a downtown Atlanta skyscraper managing a team of employees while sitting behind a mahogany desk in my suit and tie (okay…anyone who has met a Visioneer knows they are more likely to be wearing jeans and an untucked shirt at the office, but you get the picture).

Now, while this was a great arrangement for me, I must admit that working from home is not for everyone and won’t work for every type of job. For one, you have to be disciplined and a self-starter to work from home when there are so many potential distractions (wife, kids, nice weather, a pool, golf, TV…do I need to continue?). If you are easily distracted, then you probably need the structure of an office environment. You also need to have a personality type that doesn’t mind working alone for hours at a time. If you are an extreme people-person who needs to be around others and have lots of interaction with others all day, then working from home probably wouldn’t be a good idea.

Obviously some jobs don’t work too well from a home office either. Retail sales (except internet sales), healthcare providers, and many others require a personal presence, but in the age of Skype and FaceTime, more and more industries are finding ways to work virtually. Since my position at Visioneering was primarily management and project related versus design related, a home office was easily achievable. Had I been a designer, or part of the document production process, working from home would have been more difficult due to the greater level of collaboration and coordination required to put together a good design or a good set of construction documents. But my industry is one of a growing number of traditional businesses finding ways to work in a new virtual world.

My wife Lisa has even jumped into the virtual workforce. She has chosen to stay at home with our three kids for the last 8 years, but since our youngest is approaching the start of Kindergarten this fall she began to consider going back to work. However, she really desired a job with the flexibility to be home when the kids were home and to have control of her schedule. A friend of mine from Atlanta, Bryan Miles, recently opened his own company, Miles Advisory Group (MAG), offering virtual assistants to pastors and para-church leaders all over the country. This effort was so successful he started a second division, eaHELP providing similar virtual executive assistants to secular businesses, again with great success.

Clients of MAG and eaHELP can contract for an executive assistant for as little as 5 hours per week, so when I suggested my wife contact MAG about a possible position, she thought this would be a great opportunity for her to use her skills, make a little money, and still be in control of her schedule by working from home. In short order through eaHELP she became an executive assistant for a home automation company in Texas and has been loving every minute of it. This is a win-win for the companies and the stay-at-home moms like my wife (where else can a company find college educated, professional women willing to work only 5 or 10 hours a week, and where else can stay-at-home moms find great paying jobs with so much flexibility?)!

Now that we have moved to Charlotte and I am working in an office again coordinating the construction side of Visioneering’s new design-build operations I can see the benefits of more face time with our team, but some days I must admit I do miss the 30-second commute down to my basement, sitting in my sweats with my feet on the desk of my home office while serving clients all over the country who were none the wiser.

Have you had the opportunity to work from home? What was your experience? Would you ever consider hiring a virtual employee or virtual assistant?

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