Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of you earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 6th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

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This was originally posted on March 6, 2012 in my old blog.

Homeshoring

I’ve been working from home since 2005. I love working from home. Not having to get up every day and commute into an office in order to get my job done is a wonderful thing. I consider myself fortunate that my role affords me the opportunity to work out of my house.

Current technologies, such as e-mail, the internet, virtual private networks (VPNs), web-based meetings, conference calling, instant messaging, and, of course, my ever-present BlackBerry, make working productively from virtually anywhere a snap.

Of course, in the world of business and commerce, it is necessary to have a name that is more formal and business-like than simply “working from home.”

Some companies refer to working from home as telecommuting. Other companies embrace business-speak terms for their home-based workers such as remote employee or virtual employee. Regardless of what they label it, as long as I can continue to work from home, telecommute, be remote, or be virtual, I’m good.

Last week my boss sent e-mail to his team, all of whom work out of their homes, with instructions to go to our company’s employee portal and complete the homeshoring application. Homeshoring? What the hell is that?

I’m familiar with the terms “offshoring,” which is sending jobs overseas to places like India, and “nearshoring,” which is sending jobs to Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, or Mississippi.

I’ve even heard some companies use the term “rightshoring” as a way of explaining how they will provide resources, whether onshore, offshore, or nearshore, as needed to get the job done in the most cost effective and highest quality way. Some marketing executive probably got a big bonus check for coming up with that catchy buzzword.

So what is homeshoring? Quite simply, according to website netlingo.com, homeshoring is when ”an employee regularly works out of his or her home instead of the office. The term homeshoring is a derivative of the word offshoring, and involves the transfer, primarily of service industry jobs, to electronically-connected home-based employees, or essentially turning office jobs into work-at-home jobs.”

So even though I’ve been working from home for years, I now have to complete this damn homeshoring application. I also have to certify that my home office is ergonomically configured, which, for the most part, it is, and that my office equipment, both company-issued and personally supplied, meets the standards set my employer.

This all seems kind of silly to me, and, being the cynic that I am, I started wondering if this was a ploy by my employer to decline the homeshoring applications and require most employees who had been “virtual” to revert to being “physical.”

Fortunately, my boss, who also works from his home, assured me that the company is not trying to get its virtual employees to return to working at one of the company’s facilities. He explained that it’s all about accounting, expense control, and reporting.

Okay, whatever. Please excuse me while I complete my homeshoring application so that I continue to telecommute, as I’ve been doing since 2005.