Telecommuting: Doing judo with corporate culture
by James Thomas
The recent controversy over Yahoo’s decision to withdraw a policy allowing its employees to ‘work from home’ has sparked a ferocious and polarizing debate. We have people variously calling it a massive step backwards for corporate culture and flexible working; no less than an attack on women’s employment rights; and a helpful blow against a ludicrous concept that just made it easier for lazy people to be lazier.
What is missing from the dueling op-eds is an acknowledgment that there is no “one size fits all” when it comes to remote working and other flexible workplace strategies. Yahoo states that it has specific needs that make a return to the office entirely appropriate at this stage in their development. For other employers, however, more powerful computing, high-speed connectivity and jobs that benefit from minimizing workplace distractions make sending workers home a trend to embrace.
The question of whether an organization should allow remote working, and to what extent, isn’t actually about where people are. It is about how important the social aspects of work are to value creation, and how easily it can be conjured from a distance.
When people think of the social aspects of work, they tend to have images of gossiping around the water cooler or going for slightly lengthy lunch breaks with colleagues. But the vital social part of work is that those conversations, get-togethers and informal meetings are typically informal, unstructured and unplanned. During these impromptu collaborations, colleagues give and take ideas freely rather than having a fixed, results-oriented agenda and hold each other to account through their unspoken social contracts.
Indeed, many people mistakenly see these impromptu collaborations as distractions to their job, when in fact they are not only essential to their success in their job, but actually a material component part of the job itself. Whether it’s a playwright being asked to work in a scene in a script, an engineer being pulled into a meeting to figure out why a gas turbine broke down for the fourth time this month, or corporate planners aggregating production forecasts based on inputs from a number of business units, some things just work better when people are in a room together kicking ideas around and solving problems.
That’s not to say that there aren’t an equal number of jobs, or at least tasks, where isolation and focus can be more important than interaction and collaboration. The rise of online ‘talent exchanges’ such as Elance and oDesk, together delivering over $500m of outsourced tasks in 2012, suggests that companies could outsource a tremendous volume of transactional work to people who don’t need to know anything about their companies or collaborate with their employees, much less sit in their offices.
Technologies such videoconferencing and desktop sharing, if properly used, can offer a reasonable substitute for face-to-face interaction and certainly reduce “wear and tear” on staff – the cost of flying people around for meetings is far greater than just the cost of air fares and hotels with mental fatigue, back problems, cold and flu all being well-known perils of the frequent flier.
So, it would seem that understanding the extent to which social interactions are key enablers of a specific job is the first step in determining whether remote working is a relevant concept for that job. When Shell wanted to develop remote surveillance capabilities for its offshore oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico, analysis of the type, frequency and mode of interactions between the various people involved revealed that individual desktop video conferencing and data sharing would be far more impactful than the original concept of a fancy video conference suite that bore more resemblance to NASA Mission Control that an oil company office.
Secondly, an appreciation of the significance of social interactions – those daily interruptions and distractions that many rue, but secretly relish – is only really gained through years of experience working in different roles, situations and cultures. As such, those that are looking to telecommuting as the ‘silver bullet’ for involving previously-disengaged demographic blocks, such as women in many Middle Eastern countries, need to recognize that they not only need innovative technology, but they also need to find new ways to accelerate the creation of these workplace social norms.
Organizations that are making remote working succeed have established leading technologies and best practices, have not compromised on hiring the best talent, and have implemented extensive communication efforts. But at the same time, these organizations have compensated for missed social connections through strong mentoring programs and remote networking events; their corporate culture nurtures remote workers as effectively as those based in offices. Similarly, their most effective employees know when they should be in the office and when they should schedule “social” calls with colleagues. They can turn what others regard as isolation into an opportunity to become more focused and organized.
These companies have seized the benefits of greater efficiency and flexibility and embraced the notion that telecommuting offers the possibilities to go beyond the concept of long-term employment, introducing new realms such as contractual or freelance work, and creating a paradigm shift from pay-for-time to pay-for-results.
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