Deciding to Freelance Onsite (In Client’s Office) or Offsite (From Home)

Deciding to work onsite or offsite sounds like a relatively simple decision, but it’s actually one which isn’t easy to make. Sure, when you’re lying in bed just after the alarm has gone off and you see that it’s raining outside and all you wish was that you could go back to bed for ten minutes and then do your work from home, working offsite sounds ideal. But there are as many cons to the offsite work job as there are pros and you need to weigh them carefully when making the decision about whether to work onsite or offsite.

The benefits to working offsite:

• Flexibility of your schedule. Although some offsite work requires you to be on your computer or involved in telephone calls during certain hours of the day, there is generally much more flexibility of your schedule when working offsite than when working onsite. If you’re a night owl who does your best thinking between the hours of midnight and two in the morning, you’ll probably do well with an offsite position that doesn’t require you to confine your work to the 9 - 5 schedule.
• Working in your pj’s. This gets touted a lot as a benefit to working offsite and that’s because it means more than just literally being able to work in your pajamas. It means that you don’t have to get up and shower and put on your make-up and worry about your pantyhose and spend the day in heels that hurt your feet. For some people, the comfort of home makes working offsite an idyllic situation.
• Avoiding office politics. There’s a whole culture that exists in the office which you don’t have to be a part of when you’re working offsite. The gossip, the back stabbing, the emotional power plays “¦ you lose a lot of that when you take your work out of a cubicle and into your home office.

The benefits to working onsite:

• The structure of a schedule. Yes, you hate it. But there’s a flipside to it and that’s that working onsite from 9 - 5 means that you only have to work from 9 - 5. On those days when you aren’t feeling up to par and not a lot gets done, you put in your eight hours onsite, go home and get paid. That doesn’t always happen when you work offsite and the line between “work” and “home” gets so blurry that you feel like you’re always at work. Working onsite draws a clearer line.
• Resources. You will have access to both human and physical resources when working onsite that just aren’t there when you work offsite. Sure, you can get in touch with your boss by phone or IM and you can buy the toys you need to get your job done, but there is something to be said for the availability and updated-regularly resources of the onsite office that the offsite office can’t compete with.
• Being in the loop. Yes, it’s nice to work offsite and avoid office politics but that comes along with the fact that when you work offsite, you often get left out of the loop. The little things that come through the grapevine of the office miss you when you aren’t onsite. Being onsite helps you be more in-the-know about changes happening which might affect your job.

These are just a few of the differences between working onsite and offsite that you should take into consideration when deciding which is right for you. Of course, in many situations, you can combine the two options so that you work part time offsite, getting the best of both worlds. Hm, now there’s a thought.

[tags]onsite, offsite, onsite vs offsite, work from home, work at home, home business, telecommute, telecommuting, freelancers, freelance, freelancing, self-employed, self-employment, home business, small business, consulting, self employment[/tags]