“You started out with an interesting column, but now it’s just spam. Click.”
Usually I don’t even pick up calls with no caller id. At least it wasn’t a RoboDialer (now called, as I recently learned, “agent-less proactive contact”).
The call was, most likely, in response to my recent InfoWorld article, “10 sure-fire ways to kill telecommuting.” Everyone’s a critic. Not everyone is so succinct.
When InfoWorld asked me to write about telecommuting, my knowledge was superficial at best, so I asked KJR‘s subscribers to share their experience and insights. 350 replies later I’m officially an expert.
Starting with a realization many discussions don’t make clear, which is that telecommuters come in five distinct flavors (I doubt this is original, although I couldn’t find anything like this breakdown when researching the subject). They are:
- Ad hoc or casual telecommuters: Employees who work from home when special circumstances call for it, like when their pet iguana needs veterinary attention, they need to focus on a single task without distractions, or their spouse is called out of town and someone needs to watch the children.
- Scheduled telecommuters: Employees who work from home on a regular and predictable basis — for example, commuting Monday and Friday while working from home Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
- Mobile workforce: Employees who need to be able to create an office in unpredictable, random locations such as hotel rooms, airport lounges and Starbucks.
- Remote workforce: Employees whose home office is their primary location, and who have no place to call their own in the company’s offices.
- Virtual enterprise workforce: Employees who work in a company that has no physical location — a company designed from the start to be staffed by employees whose primary contact is through telepresence, and who meet each other face-to-face only rarely, or not at all.
These five work styles have more differences than similarities and very different dynamics, which is why most generalizations about telecommuting fail.
The generalization that doesn’t fail:
Telecommuting of any kind makes good employees and managers better and makes weak employees and managers worse.
As Mike Carpenter, EVP and Founder of Sooth, Inc. puts it, “It exposes bad management instantly. If someone is a micro-manager who likes to pop up and interrupt people, who doesn’t assign appropriate work and authority, that manager will not be able to hide that fact any longer.”
Dave Simon, IT Director at the Sierra Club sees even more to it. He regards telecommuting management as being different and more difficult than having face-time with staff. As he put it, “A manager needs to be more attentive and disciplined in all facets of managing a remote work group or telecommuter.”
Managers and employees agreed that good employees can become even more productive from a home office. Some thought working from home made bad managers and employees worse.
Others considered the tradeoffs more balanced, such as the telecommuter who said, “You can blow off the day just as easily at work as you can at home,” and the manager who pointed out, “Being in control and feeling like you are in control are two different things.”
Relationships? Who needs relationships?
Loss of managerial control is a minor inconvenience compared with another challenge managers face when dealing with a remote workforce: It’s easy for everyone involved to act as though employees are contractors — hired help, not a permanent part of the team.
With no office to go to, no co-workers to schmooze with, and most contact through the keyboard and screen, many remote workers said that while they liked working from home, they felt detached from their employer and teams, and the feeling increased as time went on.
One anonymous correspondent put it this way: “The single biggest challenge is that, as time goes by, a certain staleness sets in — the relationships deteriorate, organizations change, and people can get lost in the shuffle.”
Another — an Operations Support Technician — added, “In two years of telecommuting I’ve observed my influence amongst colleagues fade.”
The feeling can become extreme. Dean Baird complained that he never heard about job openings until long after his in-office brethren, Conrad Macina questioned whether, “…a telecommuter ever gets the same crack at raises and promotions as someone who’s visible every day.” No-longer-a-telecommuter Carl Hafner was succinct in his assessment: “I literally became a non-person.”
The worst consequence of working from home, though? As former-remote-worker Larry Cadloff explained, telecommuting “… takes all the fun out of pilfering office supplies.”
These lamentable outcomes aren’t, it turns out, inevitable. How to avoid them will have to wait until next week’s column, though, because this one is out of space.
Of course telecommuting means that all commutes are the same distance. That if you get a new offer that is also telecommuting the change in location is not an issue and the change in the distance of the commute is not an issue. Because there is no change.
This could make for a more mobile work force. Of course it also makes it easier to recruit talent from someone else. The relocation negotiation issues are basically close to nonexistent and also mostly simply technical.
You may have missed one of the “flavors” of telecommuting: Remote Offices. My company has offices in many locations around the world. Our team has people in several of them. They commute to an office every day, use (I won’t say “pilfer”) company office supplies, eat in the company cafeteria and drink company coffee. But they’re remote from their management, and in several ways that makes them more like telecommuters than not. We meet face-to-face only a handful of times per year, but we do try to make up for the distance with daily team meetings and such. It’s different from working at home or on the road, but also different from the traditional office environment. In net, I’d say this arrangement benefits everyone but there are some adjustments that have to be made on all sides.
Thanks for a great series of articles,
Conrad
the biggest issue with working remotely in the United States is defending your job from being sent offshore. Afterall there is virtually no difference except cost.
Dave Simon was correct in his analysis. Additionally, formal communication in all four directions takes on a greater importance there is no visibility into the accomplishments of you or your team. So, accurate time tracking, timely communuication regarding issues and successes is required for visibility. No longer is it true that ‘no news is good news’ for IT.
How does the “Virtual Office” fit into this? Can’t that be considered a form of telecommuting with the members of the team in different locations?
I remember seeing, years ago before seeing Mr. Lewis’ profundery, an article in the Wall Street Journal about OSHA type inspections taking place in telecommuter offices. The bottom line being “who’s to judge on safety issues when your work out of your own home”. (Sorry, it’s been to long to site a reference).
Lastly, I think the company that employes me to have management teams that fear telecommuting because they can’t personally SEE that individual. So, is it our job to arrive at a certain time and stop working at a certain time – or is it to be productive and accomplish objectives? Managers should be empowering employees to be creative, as opposed to monitoring their presence by status indicator in Instant messaging tools. Telecommuting, in a given sense could be the same as outsourcing, the cottage industry, where the employee could work from home, making it less expensive for the Company – but then the company would be giving up a good bit of control – or “Kingdom” if you are into the ego sort of thing.
Monthly home ISP charges – fiddy bucks.
RAS servers, VPN clients, two factor authentication – fiddy bucks.
Not having to see employeess everyday? Priceless.
😉
Being left out of things, not just personally but in ways that detract from your ability to do your job, is not just an affect of telecommunting. For three months, I was in a cubicle in an area gradually being thinned out in preparation for renovation. The rest of the project team was in a single room with about 4 feet of bench apiece.
Arguable, I had the better space but I got behinder and behinder on actually using the technology. Regular meetings were not enough. What I missed were the “Hey, Ann. How did you say you did XXX” comments that come up moment by moment. I also missed out on the situations where someone got a little behind and others stepped in to help–and learned as a result.
I am now in a reconfigured area with the team but the gap was actually resulted in some changes in my job description.
My guess is that one criteria for successful telecommunting, especially full time, is when you are using a stable technology and the people are experienced and know each other well. The less they need to interact on the job, the less the lack of interaction negatively affects the remote co-worker, telecommuter or just a different office or florr.
I loved the “10 ways to kill” column – excellent way to make a number of points re: how to do this tricky business of telecommuting. And your list of types of telecommuters is good – I hadn’t seen such a list either. John Wilson’s comments above are good of example of the real challenges – if your job/success depends on close interaction, distance makes it harder. (There was some research that found if you were more than 500 feet apart, you might as well be 5 miles apart)
Great categorization. This provides a very good framework for any discussion of telecommuting.
Re: relationships – it helps very much if strong relationships exist before the telecommuting starts. My frame of reference is this: I work for a company that made a significant change of location a few years ago. Public transportation was readily accessible at the old location and minimally accessible at the new location. As a result, a number of employees work from home most of the time. Those employees were all long-time strong performers and well-respected within our group. Their telecommuting (which I would categroize as “remote†except that they could have a place to call their own in the office building – but essentially they are never in the office building) has worked very well.
Thanks for the insights.
Bob,
Hopefully you’re planning on writing another article that extolls the benefits of Telecommuting more directly.
You article was good, but I do agree with the fear that apart from being read as the satire it obviously is, it can also be interpreted directly and used for evil, if you will.
I feel you clearly convey that to succeed in telecommuting, you need to do the opposite of what you’re saying, but I think more need to be said about the opposite tack. Also, you don’t go into the different types of telecommuting at all. I work from home a few days a week, but am in the office for the rest. My office days are for meetings and working with my team, my home days are for doing the solitary work that needs to be done. Now that’s not always true, but its generally the case, but I do like the way it works out.
Please write more on this topic. I don’t think this one article is enough….
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