I am just curious to know if any of my fellow Compliance Officers are able to work part of the time out of their home. Is this something any of your employers allow or are you required to spend your 40 hrs/wk in the office?

I have three kids at home and would love to be able to do reading/research at home while they are in bed & spend more of my day with them. Again, just curious as to what is being allowed at other institutions.

I can work from home on occasion (snow, sick child, etc.), but my boss generally likes to see my smiling face.

Like DQ, I work from home occasionally. Bad snow storms, having to meet repair people, or sometimes if I have a big writing project to do. I have found that I get more done at home than I do when I am in the office, but, when I work at home I generally don't have any distractions (home alone). Plus, I can retrieve emails, etc. from home and I often have teleconferences that I can do from there.

I couldn't work from home - too many distractions. I wouldn't be concentrating on work, I would be thinking of what to make for dinner, weeding the yard, laundry, going out for a run, playing with the furry creatures...

That would be the perfect job! Working from home wouldn't have to be 7:30-5:30. You could schedule your work around your kids - be there when they come home from school - spend that time with them - work after they go to bed. some positions are never in the office anyway - internal audit, loan review - always traveling - why couldn't their offices be out of their homes?

I could work from home, i spend most of my day at work twiddling my thumbs anyhow. I could get stuff accomplished around the house and still get my work done. That would be great. I just dont know how auditors would feel about me keeping customers Reg E info at my house

I don't work from home, but I have an alternative schedule in that I only work 32 hours a week (Fridays off) to spend with my daughter. It's worked pretty well for about a year now.

Yeah, there's a lot of private customer info that shouldn't leave the bank that I would be required to look at if I worked at home. Much as I would like to do it, current management wouldn't allow it in a million years.

Yeah, a fire proof combination lock safe outta do it. Keep that privacy info nice and secure. Uh...wait a minute... has anybody seen the cat lately?

From my tour of a few branches this week, the info would be safer in my house...

I'm exempt so if I stay home and work it's ok, but we don't encourage that on a regular basis. Unfortunately it gets abused far too often (for instance, I find reading regulatory manuals is much easier when a nice sauv blanc is sitting next to me...which is a bit beyond bank policy for work hours)

My commute is about 45 miles, just over an hour. If I don't have any meetings scheduled, I'll sometimes plan ahead & work from home. This happens less often in the summer because the kids aren't in school and they're way too distracting. But over the course of a year, I'll average about one day a month.

Hmmmmm, I must be doing something wrong because I work 40 hours a week and still do my reading and research at home . . .

I worked from home half days for a year after the birth of my twins. I worked at the office in the mornings and got any confidential customer type of stuff done and then brought piles of reading and research home in the afternoons, phone and webseminars also. It was OK, but not everything that I dreamed of. Maybe it was just the age of my children etc. but when I picked them up from daycare and we came home, they were supposed to go down for a nap for a couple of hours so I could get most of my hours in. Unfortunately, some days didn't work out as planned and it became very stressful. I was tired at 11:00 at night and didn't have the ability to stay awake reading compliance stuff (Why, I don't know!) Then it started taking time into my weekends to catch up on the hours that I wasn't able to get in during the week.
I am back at the office full time now and love it. It was the best decision for me. I am thankful that my employer let me do it for as long as I needed, if they wouldn't have I would have been forced to quit. Didn't plan on paying for three children full time in daycare, when we decided to get pregnant for the second time

No way my employers would allow me to work from home. It would be nice & I have some friends that do, but not in the banking industry. Maybe in "Perfect"!

A few years back in early spring, I participated in an interview where an applicant was returning to the workforce after taking ten years off to stay at home with her children. The applicant assured us that she had already taken care of summer childcare for her children. With that in place, we hired her. A week before her children’s summer break from school she informed her direct superior that she could not bear having anyone other than she take care of her children when they were off for the summer. The supervisor allowed the employee to “work” from her home the entire summer. To this day, we have yet to see the fruits of her labor.

The most frustrating part was that the majority of the personnel in the department had to arrange and pay for summer childcare, while this employee did not.

If situations are created for employees to work from home, be sure that they are created equally across the board, otherwise it creates a lot of animosity. Even better yet, hire supervisors with the backbone to say no when the rules change.

I don't know how someone can say they "work from home" on a regular basis and have their children around -- unless they are at least 13 years old. Even then...

Everyone I have known that works from home on a regular basis has regular child care outside the home.

I agree with that statement, but my daughter is school age. There is no reason I couldn't work 7:30-2:30 in the office, pick her up from school and spend the time between school and bedtime with her. After her bedtime (8:00), there is no reason I couldn't work a couple of more hours a day at home. (I have a better computer at home!) The bank gets its work done with a happier employee and mom gets to spend 5.5 hours with daughter instead of 2.5 every day. Best of both worlds. But, the company just isn't comfortable with it and won't even let me try as an experiment.

Your idea of module scheduling would work most of the time, until business people want to reach you during normal business hours of 2:30 - 5:00 and you are not around.

I think the reason work from home situations aren't allowed more often is the fear that many people believe it is o.k. to try to work their business hours around their family life, and most businesses prefer set business hours. I can certainly see the business' point: it only takes a few people who take advantage of the situation to make it impossible for the rest.

Yes, but do you get benefits?

There are huge chunks of my time now where I am unavailable - meetings, training, on the road. Technology allows me to answer voice mails and e-mails from home or my cell-phone. When I was out on family leave for 3 months, I was available at home to anyone who needed me. Our senior management is on the road a lot and can only be reached by cell phone or their blackberry. we're never really out of touch. Technology has made this issue of working out of our homes possible in ways that simply didn't exist before.

Actually, if the child is under 6 months it's not that hard to work from home - there are a lot of naptimes and times when the child is happy to sit in a bouncy seat and stare at her toes or a mobile. Add in getting up at 6 and working for a couple of hours while the child sleeps, and you can accomplish quite a bit!

Actually, it works great for me..and yes, I have children. My employer vetoed me at first, but I asked again, and they said ok, we don't want to lose you, let's give it a try. I get MORE done at home than I do at the office. I save research, etc, or "busy" work til then, and take care of any file reviews, meetings, etc. in the morning at the office. I'm sure there are those at the office that wish they could, too, but I can tell you that I get a lot more done in my part time in the office than they do all day! It just depends on the employee, in my opinion.

Also, I can retrieve emails and forward my calls to my mobile after I leave so that I don't miss anything. I have a copier, fax, etc., ...it's wonderful!