Telecommuting deals are much-coveted for a reason (just ask the Yahoo employees about to start the daily slog into the office):  You can use little breaks throughout the day to get housework and errands accomplished; you don’t have to commute, freeing up two productive hours a day; and you can get a lot done.

But you have to make sure your telecommuting arrangement works just as well for your boss as it does for you.

As outlined in this RetailMeNot article, the single most important factor is — surprise — communication. That’d be communicating with your boss and communicating with your co-workers. We’d all like to think that others notice all the work we shovel, but when you’re sweating it out in the privacy of your home office, they notice the results, not necessarily the effort.

And the effort counts. That’s where we bond with co-workers — over the shared frustration and small daily triumphs. Yes, document your results to your boss. But be sure to share daily with your co-workers, too.

The brilliance of his approach goes beyond calibrating generosity to help others while stoking your own sense of satisfaction and self-worth. Grant’s research also exposes what truly motivates people at work: a mission that actually makes a measurable difference.

When people see that their work genuinely improves someone else’s life or situation, they are deeply moved to strive for similar results.  They are both more productive and more satisfied with their work. Because their work means something.

We got at this dynamic in the 2012 Accounting MOVE Project, which showed how community service advances women’s careers in accounting. Women who merged volunteering aligned with strongly held personal values, with professional development, not only created their own fast tracks for advancement. They also reinforced the core meaning of their work, making for a fulfilling balance.

Yes. While you’re still employed.

In fact, ramping up while you’re still staff gives you the advantage of choosing a niche that has long-term potential, instead of just running from a tedious or odious job. Minda Zetlin outlined my Career Lattice strategy for managing this transition in her January post at Inc.com.

The strategy pivots on mining your remaining staff days to understand how you can leverage your industry knowledge and skills in a new direction that will be more apt to support some of your other priorities, such as flexibility or working remotely.

The key dynamic is one that you’ll keep using once you are on your own: tracking trends and interpreting them as market opportunities. If you aren’t sure how to do that, you’d best figure it out while you are still employed. And if you do know how to do that, now’s the time to start creating and connecting the dots that convert trends to  clients.

And if you live within 150 miles of Chicago, consider signing up for the “Lattice from Staff  to Entrepreneurship” workshop I’ll be leading later this year at Chicago’s Women’s Business Development Center. 

Here’s the silver bullet: the Employee Resource Group, or ERG.  “Affinity groups” took root about 15 years ago, mainly as a way for women and minorities to find each other in large organizations.  Smart companies realized that ERG’s were built-in focus groups. Smart employees realized that the horizontal nature of such groups meant that they had a great chance of meeting higher-ups with whom they already had something in common, as recently explained in the Wall St. Journal.

As I outline in The Career Lattice, ERG’s are a rich lode for self-promotion, especially if you need to cultivate skills that are outside your official job description.  Here’s how to aim the silver bullet that is an ERG:  look for new connections in adjacent functions or departments.  These are the folks with whom you will naturally intersect on a project at some point.  Use the ERG to get to know them before your work responsibilities collide – so you can be each other’s friends in lateral places.

She’s one of many voices in a chorus urging baby boomers to shift down, not out, of the workforce.  It sounds like great advice – until you start peeling back the assumptions. Here are three fallacies about late-midlife career shifts and how to avoid them.

Money doesn’t really matter.  Maybe it doesn’t to hedge fund managers,  investors and others who have piled up a cushy nest egg that can insulate them from the economic realities of a new career. Here’s Alboher on  transitioning from being a lawyer to being a journalist – which took, by the way, a decade:  ”I earn only two-thirds of what I was making in my last law job. But the trade-offs are worth it.”

Ok, it’s worth it to her…because she can afford it. But most working Americans have endured eroded home equity, spells of un-or-under employment in their families, and paltry returns on their retirement funds. And, the longer they work, the more they will reap from Social Security when they finally start tapping it. So, yes, Marci, money does count.

Keep earnings consistent by shifting within your industry, not abandoning all your accumulated contacts and wisdom to pursue something completely new. Build on what you know, and it shouldn’t take you ten years to find a sweet spot where you can work for love and money.

• Taking some courses will reposition you. If you concentrate on rebuilding only technical expertise, you will likely move yourself back to square one. By midlife, employers and clients assume that you bring wisdom, people skills, and get-it-done skills that actually supersede your technical skills. Instead of getting a certification in a particular skill, become conversant in the technical milieu and concentrate on project management and business skills.

• Age discrimination is illegal and pervasive. You’re unlikely to persuade someone to overlook a number you consider irrelevant…which means that many boomers will become self-employed. Instead of concentrating on finding a new job, focus instead on doing the new job. That might mean traditional employment, but it also might mean contract work, short or long term.? If you keep landing contract work, you’re self-employed. Mission accomplished!

They don’t stick around. They get training on their own terms — inside work or outside — and use it to cherrypick the best new jobs — yeah, before you even hear about them. They’re ok with cycling in and out of staff jobs, freelancing, and contract work. They align their careers where their values are — that’s right, they’ll work harder for less, if they believe in the cause.

Gee, this is sounding kinda of like the career aspirations that boomers had, oh, about 40 years ago when they  were the newest kids at work!

No less a luminary than CNN’s Ali Velshi has detected millennials’ propensity to lattice from the start. The best insight from his recent Money magazine article about how millennials are managing over as much as up:  ”Focus on the experience, not on the job itself.”  You won’t be around for long, they figure, so why not make a run for a job that expands your skills in a totally new direction? Not a bad thought for a new year.

It’s a good question. Immersed as we all are in economic uncertainty, concerned about the stability of our companies and of our careers, it’s easy to overlook the sweeping realignment that is crystallized in the lattice.

Three long-term trends are aligning to replace career ladders with career lattices.

• Baby boomers have to stay on the job longer, effectively blocking promotions for 40-somethings. Strategic lateral moves can equip valued middle managers with operational experience while they wait for promotions  to open up.
• Boomers themselves are finding satisfaction in late-career lateral moves. Some progressive companies, like Time Warner Cable, create internal consulting or project-based positions for pre-retirees. That creates a channel for sluicing the boomers’ knowledge back into training, talent development, and information systems, while opening up operational slots for rising managers.
• Millennials, observing the two trends outlined above, assume that their careers will be just as much over and up. And, that feels right to them, the first workforce generation steeped in social media. They already know the power of peer relationships; latticing gives them a career structure for the connections and opportunities they gather through social media.

The story is a terrific primer for those near the top who are wondering if a developmental lateral move is worth the risk. I especially like the advice of carer coach Darcy Eikenberg. Here’s her take on creating your own promotion:

With the collapse of mid-management roles in many companies, an employee with 10 to 15 years of experience may suddenly find there’s no next level in sight—their leaders may be in the same age range with no plans to retire or leave any time soon. Eikenberg said that in cases where you can’t expect a promotion, it may be time to orchestrate your own with a few key strategies:

• Identify the pain in your organization and how you are uniquely suited to help calm that pain from your current position.
• Build a business plan for a new role, department, or service you might lead.
• Communicate with key players in your organization to let your intentions be known.
• Take your efforts as seriously as you would a new job search.

Tasty tips:

• Based on entrepreneur Jack Stack’s philosophy of sharing financial results and responsibilities with employees at all levels, Tasty employees are in charge of contributing to their slice of the bottom line. With everyone from delivery vehicle maintenance staff to executives searching for ways to grow revenue and contain costs, Tastey saw 2011′s sales increase 10% and profits rise 125%.
• Employees learn how to read financial statements, too, so that Tasty can become “A business of businesspeople.”
• One Tasty employee detected a market opportunity for corporate gift baskets and developed a business plan for a college class. She presented her concept to her bosses…and walked out with a $50,000 launch fund, sparking a new division. That’s more than frosting!