Working from home: neither working nor home

Katie Roiphe at Slate has a point here: The infiltration of work technology into every corner of our lives is the meat, 'home office' is just the bread. Why wouldn't you want your employees to work remotely, if you think 'work' means 'respond to the items rated as urgent by the person at the other end of your electronic tether'? Really, how is having more places your staff can be made to report from, particularly places you don't even fund, a bad thing? Framed that way, remote officing is feudal. And it can be. At SJN Sales, we make a point of hiring only qualified self-starters. If you need to be contacted every 90 minutes, or reminded every 15, about your task list, you're not a fit here. We do engage in some structural design tricks to keep everyone on the job and producing, but we can't achieve anything moderately interesting, let alone strive for the extraordinary, when executive time is being used on task management. Best of luck to Yahoo! in getting the market to reward their offloading of staff. Meanwhile, if you're productive working from a home office part-time, we're always hiring.

Top salespeople live everywhere

The original SJN Sales employees worked in one centralized location but spread out as management first experimented with, and then fully embraced, greeting requests for location flexibility that came in, one after the other as our sales team members had opportunities to follow spouses to great jobs or to accept that grad school fellowship. Now SJN Sales is completely distributed, and though we retain an Albuquerque home-base and think having a Mother Ship location is really important, our people are making sales on the road and in-between trips they are living in towns and cities from Washington to Floria, New York, to Nebraska.

We're growing and still figuring out how to keep company-wide relationships strong as we add widely divergent specialty teams, in different industries. We continue to find new ways of getting all SJN Sales people in a room, in ways that make the gatherings  a treat rather than an annoying exercise in wasting time.

SJN Sales is, as mentioned above, growing. And we think it's a great place to work. If you think you have what it takes to build sales for our clients and want to escape your commute, your cubicle or live in Anchorage adjacent, check out our openings at  SJN Sales Careers