Telework

Telework is wonderful. Telework is misery.

I've been on several telework working groups, and experienced this privilege a number of times. Years ago, I worked on a "half-way" project, a concept known as "hoteling" whereby remote branch offices are set up which are local to the employees and substitute for the primary work site. This variant may include assigned work spaces (cubicles, offices, etc.) or "hot-seating" (pick the cubicle that is available at the moment).



There are good reasons to consider telework for the company. Those workers who have long commutes, especially in traffic, will certainly benefit. Telework is good for workers at the right times when they have no expectation of or need for meaningful face-to-face interaction.

Many days I've interacted with my coworkers and managers on projects. Other days, I had what I needed from them and would spend most of the day working alone configuring or troubleshooting something that was not in the same space anyway. So, at work I already worked remotely from the actual device or service being turned up. With remote work-enabling infrastructure in place, it wasn't difficult to extend my workplace to my home. Thus, the same work, no traffic.

Working from home requires you to have the same or better expected peace and quiet you had at your workplace. If working from home signals spousal or familial availability, hope of increased productivity fades. It requires the right home situation.

Successful telework programs require the ability to measure productivity. If the employer cannot measure the productivity at the work-site and remote-site for comparison, telework is a monumentally bad idea. With all but the most disciplined and driven of workers, whether employees willingly or subconsciously reduce their performance, the net result is often the same: that less work will be done over time with telework in place than without.

Successful telework programs require an existing culture of communication within the normal workplace. I've been an engineer and enjoyed the chance to work from home. But as difficult as it was to catch people at their work desks or on cell phones, the problem is monumentally compounded if there is no instant message mechanism in place, or there is one but it is inconsistently used. Beyond the mechanisms, if the team doesn't communicate well in the workplace, telework is going to compound the problem.

You don't implement telework where the existing work culture has serious issues. For this reason I am grudgingly but highly skeptical of most telework arrangements. They don't cure anything. They will only worsen existing issues.

In one place, someone thought it was a good idea to cram multiple departments into the same area work space. As a result, many employees lost previously assigned spaces, often on the basis of hierarchy (contractors, upon whom much of the work depended, lost most of their seats). An existing single telework day for many, implemented generally throughout the organization to alleviate regional traffic and parking patterns, was extended to two days. This should have meant that telework days would be somewhat coordinated and staggered to ensure an average presence on site, but they were not. As a result, most in the group teleworked Fridays and Mondays, which produced a "ghost town" in the office, and full staff for Tuesday through Thursday, with all the parking and cubicle shortages as before.

Since, with one-day telework, there had been an even distribution of who took Mondays or Friday's off, the office had seemed somewhat well staffed those days. Now, Monday's and Friday's became guaranteed days of no interaction, whatever the needs of a project. Those few workers who preferred alternate days found themselves cut off from the times when everyone was in the office. The net result is further degradation of communication and interactivity.

Unless they come in earlier than everyone else, employees waste time looking for free spaces. There is a peace of mind benefit to being able to leave things in your own spot for the next morning, rather than having to carry them with you or ask to store them in a manager's office. These are among the little distractions that eat at the worker's focus throughout the day. Whether there is an actual, measurable benefit to having your own space, most workers will subjectively agree that having your own (albeit small) portion of territory within the company represents a certain mental investment and lends the feeling of being productive.

Too often, what sounds good at the C-suite level is divorced from the realities of groups farther below. Telework is a program that sounds wonderful on paper or PowerPoint, that can potentially yield savings at a high level and where resultant drops in productivity may be significant but difficult to measure and estimate as a cost. Telework is ground-breaking, a shift in the normal business patterns. It could shift you out of your business at the worst case.

Excessive telework may reinforce the sense of employee isolation and reduce the employee's feeling that he is "part" of anything. You need the employee feeling invested in the company and its work in order to provide the motivation and self-direction necessary for high performance. An employee who simply collects a paycheck will focus on the minimum effort needed to collect and retain that paycheck.

In workplaces where existing metrics are used to measure productivity, pilot tests can yield value beyond the subjective impression of employees feeling it was helpful.

Where metrics are difficult to implement, a thorough system of reporting and accounting needs to be put in place. The best attempt I experienced was the requirement by managers that teleworking employees produce a plan for the day, and then a day's end report of the work done. I think this was helpful. For self-directed employees, these can be annoying extra steps. I didn't like it. The lack of accountability for plans and reports eventually led to my following the crowd and abandoning submitting my daily plans. The difficulty is that a solid accounting of employee time and productivity was not in place prior to telework approval. So, when a half-hearted attempted was made to do it to enable telework, it never produced solid results.

One could argue that employees who didn't submit daily plans and reports could have that used against them as increased leverage for termination, but this is a demoralizing and counter-productive reason. This is not a primary consideration in a healthy workplace.

In one consulting position, the ability to telework made sense, but it wasn't a grant from the company nor a concession. I had multiple clients which I would drive to throughout a large metro area. Driving time was not billable and it was miserable, to be avoided where possible. By introducing remote access methods, I found I could service more clients quickly from my home. For some clients a site visit remained necessary, but for many others it improved home life significantly and increased the percentage of time that I was billable (earning revenue) for the company. Here the only metric that mattered was this percentage of billable time, which was an existing, necessary metric for the company. The employee is then empowered to make whatever adjustments he needed to increase his rating. This, of course, introduces a counter-problem where an employee may find he works longer, more stressful hours when at home than when he is conscious of leaving to avoid traffic. But from the standpoint of the company, teleworking can be a win.

It seems often that the arguments for teleworking come alternatingly from the C-suite, where ambitious, pattern changing programs with cost savings are feathers on caps with no quantifiable immediate consequences, or the workers who lament work that could just as adequately be done at home as in the office, saving them a commute. Arguments against teleworking come often from the first tier and middle management levels with the reasoning that it will be much more difficult to determine if the employee is actually working from home.

As to the latter, management is skeptical not because the program doesn't work, but that their primary means of verifying if the employee is productive is a visual inspection of them at their work space. If they are on-site, they are assumed to be working. We hire employees, and then turn them loose imagining they will do fine on their own. And then we're surprised that, giving them freedom to work from home, we have even less idea of what they are doing or if they are doing anything at all. The problem here is ineffective management. A manager who has a solid idea of what their employee is doing at work and how well, will likely have a good idea as to whether telework will work or not for them once it is tried. Again, back to metrics. This is primarily a manager's challenge. A good manager knows how well his people are doing. Telework is a tool that can improve existing solid productivity or further degrade poor productivity.

I am convinced telework is a great idea when implemented correctly for the right reasons. I have rarely seen it implemented correctly or for the right reasons.