The stigma of working from home
I live in Kansas, and a I have a 45-minute each-way commute (pretty rare around here) because I live in "the big city" and work in a small town. Gas is costing me up to $12 a day to drive to work, and because of that, I work from home two days a week. I'm a software developer and systems administrator, so I can do 99% of my job from home.
But folks at the office don't seem to understand that. Our controller likes to talk face-to-face, so he holds on to stuff until I'm in the office so he can talk to me about it. Now that I get... he comes downstairs with his printouts and notes, and just doesn't like to use email or the phone. But when he was asking me to make some changes to some data, he asked me to do that on a day I was in the office. He didn't want me doing it from home, even though I could do so just as easily. He's just not comfortable with my doing work from home, even though he's ultimately the person who approved the arrangement.
But it gets worse. "Not in the office" generally means "not working today." So I get that there's some confusion in terminology. But very often I get, "You're here today!" in a tone that implies that somehow I wasn't "here" in terms of doing my job yesterday, even though I worked from home for eight hours. And this is reinforced by the fact that they had something they wanted to talk to me about, but they couldn't do so while I was working from home.
There are six of us in IS, divided evenly between Operations and Development. We have two working managers, both of which are out of town all week, leaving four of us. One tech (Operations) was out sick yesterday, and I (Development) was working from home. So the one tech support guy physically in the office yesterday told someone (documented in a trouble-ticket) that they were short-handed because, "[other developer] and I were the only ones here yesterday."
But I was working. Even though tech support isn't my job, they know they can push tickets my way, especially when half the staff is out of the office. (And by "out of the office" I mean "not available for work.") And... the ticket load was not high yesterday. If it really had been, he'd have pushed work my way. So he's implying to our users that I wasn't "at work" even though I was, further reinforcing the idea that if you don't see me, I'm not working.
I've been trying to figure out how to deal with this general problem. I'm the only one in our group that works from home, so I'm a bit the outsider. I already have to deal with the "oh, yeah, you weren't here when we talked about that" stuff. But it's the continued implication that if I'm not in the office, I'm not really working that's giving me trouble.
And I don't think it's because they think I'm goofing off all day... I think it's because I'm out of sight and therefore out of mind and therefore I must not have been "at work". I'm not sure how to combat that.