What’s Wrong With Wanting to Work in Your Pajamas?

Not all of the transcriptionists who work at home are WAHMs.  I'm a work-at-home-wife who has been an MT for 19 years both at home and in a hospital.  I prefer working at home; no office politics, and no having to get dressed up and fighting the traffic around here, which has to be driven in to be believed.  I also like the fact that I can work the hours when I'm more mentally alert, since I'm a night person and am at nowhere near my most alert at 7 a.m.  I work for an account on the east coast, and I'm located on the west coast and prefer working later in the day, so this benefits both me and the company for which I work, since I can cover the work dictated later in the day.  Incidentally, I get dressed before I go to work, although I usually dress in either jeans and a sweatshirt or shorts and a T-shirt depending on the season.  

Jay, I think the hit our profession has taken from MTs working at home is in terms of visibility. Having been a WAHM for 15 years now (including the past 5 of those for AHDI), I would definitely agree that from our side of the fence, we know how professional we are, how seriously we approach our roles (even in PJs...or in my instance, my trusty plaid house pants my family rolls their eyes at...LOL).  But the problem is that when MTs "went home," we disappeared from allied health, and that hasn't necessarily served us well in terms of messaging our value to healthcare delivery, who for the most part think those documents just magically "appear" out of thin air.  Some would argue (and I would probably agree with them) that we were no worse off at home than in the basement of a hospital somewhere tucked between the supply closet and the morgue, but we may have missed valuable opportunities to ride the moment of others in allied health who have used visibility in healthcare to their advantage.

Which is why we have to work harder to be visible, to be known, and to be valued at all the policymaking tables AHDI and MTIA have been working to get to.

But I have to give a shout out to all the MT WAHMs out there.  No one will ever fully appreciate the challenge of doing what you do from home...and being mom at the same time.  I say that as I attempt to type this post "quietly" from my keyboard because my 15-month-old is napping in the room next to my office.  :)

Thanks for your comments, Sara.  Glad to know there's fresh blood coming into our field.  Looking forward to hearing from you again.

Kim, thanks for your input.  Always glad to hear from folks who are preparing to enter this exciting field!

i enjoyed everyones comments and i received a new perspective of the challenges you face.  what you are wearing while you perform your duties doesn't affect the professionalism, it your attitude, respect and timeliness.

One of the advantages of working at home would be the flexibility it offers as far as meeting a deadline--I can get up a couple of hours before the kids and put in some work that is needed for that morning, etc.

Personally, I wouldn't want to walk around in pj's all day--it doesn't feel conducive to thinking and working.  

I have the great joy of working both in house for an acute care hospital as well as at home for a global transcription company.   My "day job" pays a salary, and my "night job" is production pay.   Jay, your article hits home with me from both perspectives in that I get to "dress up" and go to work, and then "dress down" and go to work -- all in the same day!  I take both of my jobs equally serious and thank my lucky stars to be doing what I truly love day in and day out.  

Speaking from the ongoing and debatable 'professionalism' viewpoint, I am absolutely no less professional at home than at the hospital; as a matter of fact, I tend to be more conscious of my conduct in the home environment because of the lack of face-to-face contact and voice-to-voice communication.   At least 95% of my corresponding at home is via email -- with supervisors, HR, payroll, and even with colleagues working on the same accounts as I do.  Interpretation of such communication is at the hands of the recipient, and needs to worded carefully to get the right (and professional) point across.  

Speaking from the ongoing and debatable "money saving" viewpoint, I agree with you that there is not a thing wrong with considering the savings benefit from working from home.  But like all MTs, I am concerned about our lagging (and most insulting) production pay scale, and will now slip into my Devil's Advocate persona:  Do we really think that we are reaping great MONETARY savings and benefit by working from home?  Well, we don't have the wardrobe requirement, the wear and tear on a car or the expense of the fuel for it, etc., but I don't see those savings being passed along to me in my 7 or 8 cents a line (providing I send less than 20% of my work to QA for clarification, in which case that becomes 5 or 6 cents a line).   So, is working from home BOTH convenient AND financially rewarding?  Most certainly convenient in today's economic environment - for both the MT and the company!   As a viable segment of the working professional market, and with AHDI behind us, let's hope working from home as an MT becomes more lucrative and worth the "cents" we save (or is it "sense?) for the convenience.  

Ah, back to myself - (Devil's Advocate shut down for now) - as you say, by the end of the day, comfy sweats and tees should absolutely in no way make any one of us less professional in the eyes of others and I believe each and every MT "WHAM", indeed the backbone of our MT workforce, who is  trying to earn a living by working from home, deserves no less respect and recognition than other professionals in the working world.  

I have the great joy of working both in house for an acute care hospital as well as at home for a global transcription company.   My "day job" pays a salary, and my "night job" is production pay.   Jay, your article hits home with me from both perspectives in that I get to "dress up" and go to work, and then "dress down" and go to work -- all in the same day!  I take both of my jobs equally serious and thank my lucky stars to be doing what I truly love day in and day out.  

Speaking from the ongoing and debatable 'professionalism' viewpoint, I am absolutely no less professional at home than at the hospital; as a matter of fact, I tend to be more conscious of my conduct in the home environment because of the lack of face-to-face contact and voice-to-voice communication.   At least 95% of my corresponding at home is via email -- with supervisors, HR, payroll, and even with colleagues working on the same accounts as I do.  Interpretation of such communication is at the hands of the recipient, and needs to worded carefully to get the right (and professional) point across.  

Speaking from the ongoing and debatable "money saving" viewpoint, I agree with you that there is not a thing wrong with considering the savings benefit from working from home.  But like all MTs, I am concerned about our lagging (and most insulting) production pay scale, and will now slip into my Devil's Advocate persona:  Do we really think that we are reaping great MONETARY savings and benefit by working from home?  Well, we don't have the wardrobe requirement, the wear and tear on a car or the expense of the fuel for it, etc., but I don't see those savings being passed along to me in my 7 or 8 cents a line (providing I send less than 20% of my work to QA for clarification, in which case that becomes 5 or 6 cents a line).   So, is working from home BOTH convenient AND financially rewarding?  Most certainly convenient in today's economic environment - for both the MT and the company!   As a viable segment of the working professional market, and with AHDI behind us, let's hope working from home as an MT becomes more lucrative and worth the "cents" we save (or is it "sense?) for the convenience.  

Ah, back to myself - (Devil's Advocate shut down for now) - as you say, by the end of the day, comfy sweats and tees should absolutely in no way make any one of us less professional in the eyes of others and I believe each and every MT "WHAM", indeed the backbone of our MT workforce, who is  trying to earn a living by working from home, deserves no less respect and recognition than other professionals in the working world.  

I have the great joy of working both in house for an acute care hospital as well as at home for a global transcription company.   My "day job" pays a salary, and my "night job" is production pay.   Jay, your article hits home with me from both perspectives in that I get to "dress up" and go to work, and then "dress down" and go to work -- all in the same day!  I take both of my jobs equally serious and thank my lucky stars to be doing what I truly love day in and day out.  

Speaking from the ongoing and debatable 'professionalism' viewpoint, I am absolutely no less professional at home than at the hospital; as a matter of fact, I tend to be more conscious of my conduct in the home environment because of the lack of face-to-face contact and voice-to-voice communication.   At least 95% of my corresponding at home is via email -- with supervisors, HR, payroll, and even with colleagues working on the same accounts as I do.  Interpretation of such communication is at the hands of the recipient, and needs to worded carefully to get the right (and professional) point across.  

Speaking from the ongoing and debatable "money saving" viewpoint, I agree with you that there is not a thing wrong with considering the savings benefit from working from home.  But like all MTs, I am concerned about our lagging (and most insulting) production pay scale, and will now slip into my Devil's Advocate persona:  Do we really think that we are reaping great MONETARY savings and benefit by working from home?  Well, we don't have the wardrobe requirement, the wear and tear on a car or the expense of the fuel for it, etc., but I don't see those savings being passed along to me in my 7 or 8 cents a line (providing I send less than 20% of my work to QA for clarification, in which case that becomes 5 or 6 cents a line).   So, is working from home BOTH convenient AND financially rewarding?  Most certainly convenient in today's economic environment - for both the MT and the company!   As a viable segment of the working professional market, and with AHDI behind us, let's hope working from home as an MT becomes more lucrative and worth the "cents" we save (or is it "sense?) for the convenience.  

Ah, back to myself - (Devil's Advocate shut down for now) - as you say, by the end of the day, comfy sweats and tees should absolutely in no way make any one of us less professional in the eyes of others and I believe each and every MT "WHAM", indeed the backbone of our MT workforce, who is  trying to earn a living by working from home, deserves no less respect and recognition than other professionals in the working world.  

In these days of with the eye on greening the world, it would make a whole lot more sense to me, as a work-at-home business owner, to be celebrated for not using spewing hydrocarbons from my car as I drive to work, and for not using the dry cleaners weekly, thus allowing them to lower their emissions, for not using as much water to do laundry as frequently, among other things that are good for the environment.  Perhaps it is in our best interest to try to figure out how much gas, energy and water we are saving the country by continuing to work at home and tout that aspect of it, as well as the convenience.  It seems whenever we try to tout convenience of some sort as a benefit, it is seen as self serving.  Turning that focus outward to the country and planet as a whole could certainly offset that mindset, in my opinion.

More than the "Work at home doing medical transcription" tagline, I would probably be more worried about the stigma it gets as a 'scam'.  The idea of doing that from home has been abused enough that it's starting to become blacklisted when someone considers their work-at-home options.

That's a great post you've written on the subject, and you're right - nothing wrong with working in your pj's! ;)

I now work as an IC in the MT industry. For 27 years, however, I ran an MTSO, and at one time worked with 17 other MTs providing transcription services to medical practitioners locally as well as surrounding towns. Most of the MTs I worked with did have families and the appeal of working from home certainly was motivation to get in the field. Most of the interns I worked with in their last phase of obtaining a formal MT degree, too, had entered the field with hopes of working from home. I learned, however, that perhaps 2 out of 10 had the self-discipline to work from home, and keep the home "working". Of the 2 out of 10 that succeeded, 1 out of the 2 lasted beyond 2 years from my experience for various reasons, from social isolation to unhappy husbands that their wives were always working. This is important work and without the daily inflow of completed transcription, from wherever generated, could bring the practice of medicine to a halt; and this could happen anywhere - a few years back when an ice storm brought Lexington to its knees, a local hospital who still had inhouse MTs found itself without electricity. The word processing department was not considered "essential" so the were not connected to the emergency generators. This went on for 5 days - you would have thought the world had ended with doctors being told to handwrite H&Ps for surgeries or other necessary documentation of patient care. Also, the medical coders who had electricity had nothing coming their way, so ran out of work. They were not sent home for that reason, but the MTs were told to go home and not come back until called and time off could be used as vacation or sick days, etc. So, the bottom line, regardless of where the work is transcribed, or what you are wearing, let us not lose sight of the fact medical transcriptionists basically are the wheels of the medical record and contantly being required to keep rolling with less and less grease. Let us not lose focus on OUR PROFESSION nor worry about where we do our precious work, or what we are wearing. And to those new professions making news about working from home so very proudly as a means of cutting costs for their companies, please, MTs created the concept.

With the latest statistics showing over 70% of the workforce being home-based, disrespecting the home-based MT is tantamount to disregarding the entire profession.  I think people have confused the WAHM with the "MT hobbyist" who also works from home, but does not respect the client's or patient's need for accurate, timely reports.  It is easy to work from home and miss the big picture, especially if you do not network with others in the healthcare community.  It can easily appear that the work is there for the benefit of the MT who needs to supplement their family's income instead of the other way around--the MT is there to support the efforts of the caregivers.  When you think the work is being created just so you will have an income, you have a completely skewed view of the relevance of your work and the need to perform your work in a professional manner (regardless of what you are wearing at the time you perform the work).

I think we will see the prejudice toward those who work from home go away, as it is a national trend in many industries, some of which are already marked by a high level of professionalism.