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Remote work doesn’t have to be glamorous to be effective

Jessica Stillman — Wed, 23 May 2012 13:06:41 +0000

Is remote work only for a select few? What demographic data we have on the phenomenon from the Telework Research Network has found existing telecommuters tend to be older, well paid and highly educated professionals. Meanwhile, a recent study suggested that while remote work boosted productivity on creative tasks, it generally reduced it for boring, rote activities.

These findings could suggest that remote work is best suited for senior-level folks and the highly educated – the designers, programmers and content producers that many of us generally picture when asked to imagine laptop-toting virtual workers. But outsides of cafes in places like San Francisco, there’s a whole other side of the remote work revolution going on, one that’s focused on lower skilled employees like customer service agents who are seeing their place of work move from call centers to home offices and living rooms.

Take Hertz’s “Journey to Home” program as an example. The rental car company originally housed its customer service agents in an Oklahoma City call center, but over the last few years has been transitioning to have nearly half of its agents working out of their homes. Why?

“From a disaster recovery perspective, if you put all your eggs in one basket, especially when that basket sits in the center of the United States where a lot of natural disasters can happen, you put yourself at risk for major interruptions to the business, so we decided that it would be good to have another center of gravity,” Joe Eckroth, Hertz’s CIO, told GigaOM.

Secondarily, he explains, “as you begin to mature a market where you’re already drawing a lot of the workforce, competition starts to rise. In Oklahoma City, a lot more call centers are coming in. Remote work allowed us to broaden the pool of people we could draw from. It’s allowed us to attract students, part-time workers, full-time people who couldn’t necessarily, because of life circumstances, travel every day to go to work.”

What started as a disaster preparedness and recruitment initiative has had plenty of side benefits, according to Eckroth. “It has exceeded our expectations for sure,” he says. “The actual performance results on the sales side and on the customer service side were in all categories as good as we were getting in a tightly managed call center and in I would say about half the metrics they were a little bit better — places like employee satisfaction. Productivity is as high and in some cases higher,” he says, and that’s not even including the sustainability gains from so many saved car trips (and the bonus to employees from not having to buy so much gas at about four dollars a gallon.)

Hertz’s experience shows that less glamorous remote initiatives can work, but Eckroth stresses that success requires careful thought and planning. “We took some of our best and brightest people and we made it their sole mission to make it work,” he says. “It wasn’t a part-time job. It wasn’t something on the side.” Hertz’s experience shows getting highly motivated, highly communicative managers is key, but so is getting the right employees, and they aren’t necessarily the same people who would thrive in a traditional call center.

“Anybody can try to work from home, but it takes a certain set of disciplines. It takes a different mentality for somebody to stay motivated, to be undistracted and succeed at home. If you just took the average guy in the call center and sent them home, there would probably be a fairly high failure rate,” Eckroth says, noting that in fact some of the Oklahoma City call center’s star employees tried remote work and subsequently requested to return “to the box,” as Eckroth refers to it.

To make sure Hertz hires folks with the right combination of a self-starter mentality and basic tech savvy, the company has set up a detailed profile of the kind of person it’s seeking, putting candidates through thorough testing to make sure they have the skills to succeed. “I don’t think we knew how different the hiring profile might be,” Eckroth admits. “We didn’t modify our initial hiring process enough to accommodate that, and so that’s something we learned pretty quickly over the course of the first year or so. We changed our competency model.”

Besides figuring out exactly what you’re looking for in at-home agents and testing stringently to make sure candidates have these qualities, is there any other recommendations Eckroth has for other firms contemplating taking agents out of the box and sending them home? “Benchmark,” Eckroth suggests, noting that more and more firms are taking a remote approach and have wisdom to share. “Go out and talk to some people who have done it and get their lessons learned.”

Also, ensure no one feels like an afterthought. “This is a part of the organization. Treat it as such. Agents at home are every bit as important as the guys sitting in the box. I do a periodic video for all agents in our customer care, but once in a while I will uniquely do it just for the at-home agents with a specific message to them. Call them out and recognize them for some of the unique things they do. They should always know that they’re a part of a thought-out strategy. Pull in some of the really good people. They can come in for a few days or a week and work on special projects. It makes them feel that much more part of the team and not like they’re just a contractor out there. If that mentality builds, you’ll begin to create a second-class citizenship and that can be a disaster.”

Should more companies consider letting their less highly skilled employees skip the drive in to the office and just stay home?

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Olympics causing remote work controversy in Britain

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 17 May 2012 12:03:51 +0000

With the London Olympics just a few months away, there’s the usual flurry of stories detailing frenzied preparation by organizers, the host city, the athletes and security forces. But this year there’s one other great wave of pre-Olympics news items breaking across Britain’s media—surprisingly controversial telecommuting stories.

Just this week interest turned to Britain’s civil servants who are being urged to work remotely to avoid adding to the expected congestion on the city’s already packed roads and trains. The announcement, which might seem ho-hum in some tech-savvy circles, raised a few eyebrows in Britain with the Daily Mail declaring government workers get “a gold medal for skiving!” (the British English equivalent of slacking off) for being allowed to telecommute for seven weeks this summer. The article notes that “business leaders” are complaining about the probable reduction in useful government work that the policy will bring.

“Business groups criticized plan that has led to fears of a massive reduction in government work as the country tries to pull itself out of recession,” says the paper. “They said it sent out the dangerous message that Britain would close down for almost two months,” it continues, quoting Pierre Williams, from the Federation of Small Businesses, as saying: “A lot of private sector workers will feel rather surprised that the public sector have decided to work from home during the Olympic games.”

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister was forced to deny that staff would be “skiving” at home, reassuring the public that no less work would get done. Meanwhile, other stories are offering businesses looking to offer staff options, tips on how to make flexible working successful.

With study after study confirming that remote work actually boosts productivity for most people and most tasks, the most surprising fact about the boom in remote work this summer in London may be the fact that’s it’s controversial at all, revealing to converted virtual work fans the deep well of skepticism that still exists in substantial pockets of the business community.

In four years when the Olympics are held again, will remote work have become so mainstream that a bit of an uptick during the games will be far less remarked upon?

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Remote work boosts productivity? Only for creative tasks, says new research

Jessica Stillman — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:04:25 +0000

Advocates of remote work have plenty of scientific ammunition to win over skeptics. After all, study after study after field trial has shown that workers get more done when they can work away from the office. But what’s true on average isn’t always true for each particular case, as experience teaches, and new research confirms.

We all know that some personality types find that the lack of structure when telecommuting hobbles their productivity. And most of us have experienced the phenomenon that some environments are less conductive to certain types of work than others, from noisy offices interrupting concentration to sunny days luring you away from a stack of unappealing tasks. Now a new study by economist E. Glenn Dutcher that’s soon to be published in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization and was outlined recently in The Wall Street Journal, put this anecdotal evidence that remote work productivity gains vary depending on the person and the task to the test. The WSJ’s Week in Ideas column summarizes:

Researchers assigned two tasks to 125 participants. The first was rote and repetitive; the other involved coming up with as many unusual uses for ordinary objects as possible, a test often used by psychologists to measure creativity. About half the participants did the tasks in a supervised lab, the other half remotely.

On the uncreative tasks, people were 6 percent to 10 percent less productive outside the lab. The fall-off was steepest among the least productive third of workers. (People who reported procrastinating on their homework were also, unsurprisingly, poor telecommuters—as were men.) On the creative tasks, by contrast, people were 11 percent to 20 percent more productive outside the lab.

“Lack of structure often abets creativity,” concludes the column, but the inverse is just as obviously true. The abundance of alternatives at home, from that suddenly urgent load of laundry to the siren song of your favorite guilty pleasure TV show, can make it harder to get routine (read: mind-numbing) tasks done. For these less exciting to-do items, this new research suggests, locking yourself into working by heading to the office might be a better bet. And if you’re prone to picking up the remote rather than face even relatively enjoyable tasks, this is probably even more true.

Do you find you have to corral yourself into certain environments to get boring tasks done, and if so, where do you head?

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Canadian managers still skeptical of remote work

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 14:23:57 +0000

Telecommuting is hardly the most new fangled idea out there. As we’ve pointed out here on GigaOM previously, virtual working has been kicked about as a way to improve productivity for years, but for some reason, despite regular research results validating the concept, telecommuting’s status as a good idea whose time hasn’t quite come continues. Why is that?

One of the most compelling and frequently cited explanations is that middle managers just aren’t that into the idea, distrusting their employees to keep working without supervisors watching them like hawks. You’d hope that over time managers would get over this fear, but a new survey out of Canada suggests that trust issues persist. Microsoft Canada’s recently released Flexible Working report surveyed 1,249 employees and 642 bosses and found that while 55 percent of employees feel they’re more productive working from home, only a quarter of bosses agreed. Why were Canadian managers less than crazy about remote work? They gave Microsoft a numbers of reasons:

Just shy of half (49 percent) said the inability to talk face-to-face
The same percentage complained about lack of focus
26 percent disliked the lack of accountability
22 percent opined that that employees do less work

Still, despite the skepticism of bosses, almost half of them (42 percent) support remote working arrangements for their employees. That stat just reinforces the inevitability of remote work, according to Carolyn Buccongello, vice president of human resources at Microsoft Canada. “Boundaries between work and life are blurring. You may dismiss this as a Generation-C issue but this speaks broadly to all generations. There are pros and cons to this new way of work, but it is not going away and technology can become the key to resetting those boundaries,” she says.

She also called for bosses to rethink their distrust and focus on employees’ results, not face time. “A flexible workforce begins with leadership teams building a culture of trust and a vision that focuses on individual results rather than how much time they spend at their desk,” she says.

What, if anything, will finally convince middle management to embrace virtual work?

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UK telecommuting study bolsters case for remote work

Jessica Stillman — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:09:58 +0000

As we reported a few months ago, on February 8th UK telecoms giant O2 sent nearly 3,000 staff based at its Slough office home to telecommute for the day. Now the analysis of how the experiment went is out and, unsurprisingly considering a slew of earlier studies on telecommuting, O2 discovered a day at home was an all-around good thing for its workforce.

The exercise was partly designed to test how the company might respond to disruption caused by the arrival of the Olympics in nearby London this summer, but the results of the experiment again illustrate the benefits of flexible working even if thousands of world-class athletes aren’t about to invade your city. O2 found:

Telecommuting staff saved a £9,000 (currently $14,000 and change) in reduced commuting costs
1,000 hours that was usually spent commuting was instead spent working, while staff also got an additional 1,000 hours of sleep
14 percent said they saw more of their families
More than one in three (36 percent) said they were more productive than when at work
12.2t of CO2 was saved in one day — that’s equal to CO2 emissions from driving 42,000 miles in a medium-sized diesel car

IT World offers some explanation of the technical details, which apparently produced no major issues: “In preparation, O2 upgraded its virtual private network (VPN) as well as its network infrastructure, which saw a 155 percent increase in users on the day, and a 110 percent increase in VPN data sent across the network. The company automatically redirected traffic between servers in the north and south of its offices to ensure that the load was spread efficiently and that there were no local bottlenecks.”

“The success of O2′s experiment extends much further than just allowing some of the workforce to stay at home and work. It proves that with the right thinking and planning, even the largest organizations can protect themselves from the most severe disruptions to their business,” Ben Dowd, business director at O2, is reported as saying in IT Wor. He also stressed the importance of proper preparation.

“Four weeks of intense preparation across the business – everywhere from HR and internal comms to IT and property services – laid the ground for an almost completely empty building and a widely distributed workforce,” he said.

Might a one-day trial of telecommuting be a good step towards remote work for your business?

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Virtual managers less effective, study finds

Jessica Stillman — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 13:03:24 +0000

Researchers have reached a pretty strong consensus on telecommuting – it’s awesome for employees. A recent study done by Stanford researchers in China demonstrated that working remotely makes employees more productive (and profitable), while teleworkers themselves consistently tell those that ask that they love the flexibility or working where they please. But does this rosy picture of remote work extend to managers?

Maybe not, suggests a new study appearing in Human Relations and highlighted on the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest blog. The study was co-authored by a professor from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and involved polling more than 11,000 employees of a U.S. Fortune 500 company. Participants were asked how often they and their manager worked remotely, as well as about several work outcomes. BPS reports the results:

Respondents managed by teleworking managers reported receiving less feedback and professional development, a more unbalanced workload and feeling less empowered. A similar negative pattern was found for those with fully virtual managers. The effect sizes were small overall, suggesting this needn’t be a make or break issue, but the trend was there.

Note though that the negative effects of managers working virtually were only observed compared to when supervisors were co-located with their teams. When a boss’s reports were themselves telecommuters, it made no difference where the supervisor was located. This suggests it might be worth investigating if having a boss with the freedom to work from their back garden or the local coffee shop while his or her employees are stuck in cubes could be behind some of the negativity reported by those who report to telecommuting supervisors. The researchers, however, had another explanation for the fall off in satisfaction when a manager went virtual. The researchers chalked the problem up to social exchange theory, which BPS explains:

Working relationships that are partly virtual have less opportunities for rich exchanges, with communications lacking the face-to-face component and fewer obvious opportunities to ‘grab a moment’, described by social innovator David Engwicht as spontaneous exchanges. Interactions are likely to be more task-focused and obligatory, as email is more onerous to produce when compared to a quick coffee or moment in the corridor. And professional development and mentoring becomes similarly laborious, always a dangerous place for any ‘important to do’ but non-urgent activity to be.

If you’ve experienced working in an office while your manager is working virtually, share your feelings –did having a remote manager decrease your satisfaction with your work?

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Tips for virtual team leaders: Teach your employees to manage up

Jessica Stillman — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 13:02:17 +0000

Managing a virtual team is like managing a traditional team on steroids. If miscommunications and blurry understandings of responsibility will hurt you in an office-based team, they’ll torpedo your work if your team is hundreds of miles away. (On the upside, research indicates that you’re less likely to be irked by the human foibles and political intrigues of your co-workers when you’re not forced into close daily proximity.)

Which means that while tried-and-true management practices like setting measurable goals, holding people to account and praising success continue to hold in a virtual team setting, other aspects of being a boss need to be beefed up and refined for the specific case of remote teams. What are these essential tweaks for managing virtually? Blog Workshifting recently came up with a list of seven.

Old standbys, like providing your team with the proper tools, are solid reminders but probably won’t come as an eye-opener to most — however, one tip in particular may have never occurred to managers of remote teams in quite the way Workshifting puts it. The blog suggests:

Tell them how to manage up. Telework team members aren’t in the office all the time learning how you work. Instead of making your team members figure out the best time to get your attention – tell them. Let them know the best topics to cover via email and the ones they should call about. Also inform them of those things they can just handle and never tell you. Or the ones they can handle and tell you after the fact.

As managers, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out the right ways to direct employees, to coach their performance and to recognize them properly. Why not also let employees know how they should deal with you as their manager? It would save a lot of time and frustration.

This is in line with advice from communication coach Yosh Beier, who stressed in an earlier interview with WebWorkerDaily that teams that aren’t physically present in the same space need to talk not just about the ‘what’ of their work but also the ‘how,’ delving into the process and guidelines that the team will use to reach its goals and communicate. How are we making decisions? How do we give each other feedback? How do we want to deal with conflict? These are the sorts of questions Beier suggested teams discuss.

Of course, most teams are busy, and Beier acknowledged that in the rush of everyday work and under the pressure of deadlines, it can seem like a waste of time to have these seemingly touchy-feely chats. But Workshifting has another tip that may help you use your communication time more effectively, making space to discuss the hows as well as the whys.

Communicate instead of checking in. Managers should regularly communicate with the team – both individually as well as in a group. But it’s important to use that time productively. If employees are meeting their deadlines and delivering quality, don’t use the time for “status reports”. There’s nothing more boring than a “Let’s go around the room and have everyone tell us what they’re working on” meeting.

Do you find you have to be more explicit about how to communicate when you’re managing a virtual team?

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Workers to pollsters: Widespread remote work is imminent

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 13:03:19 +0000

Surveys repeatedly show that workers are keen on telecommuting, so much so that they’d be willing to take a pay cut for the right to work remotely. Unsurprisingly, a new one from project management solution Wrike confirms this. The poll of more than 1,000 employees found nearly 80 percent would sacrifice employer-provided free meals to telecommute, 54 percent would give up their employer-paid cell phone plans and 31 percent would trade paid vacation for the ability to work remotely.

All of which, you could say, is yet another firm kick landed on an already very dead horse, but the other survey findings were more surprising. While telecommuting is often presented as a good idea whose time has not yet come due to entrenched institutional skepticism, Wrike’s findings suggest we may soon be turning a corner on a future where remote work is far less fringe, even for those in the least hip organizations.

Already, 83 percent of respondents reported spending at least a few hours each week working outside the office. This probably amounts to a bit of checking work email and the like out of hours, but many were extremely hopeful about the expansion of virtual work at their companies. When asked if their offices might go fully virtual in the future, 65 percent of respondents said yes, though they differed on exactly how long the shift would take:

25 percent expected their office to go fully virtual within a year or two (or their office was already virtual)
About another quarter (24 percent) expected the shift to take three to five years
While 16 percent thought it would take five years or more

Despite this disagreement about the exact time frame, the over-arching message of the survey seems clear. Workers are expecting a virtual workplace, and expecting it soon. Management will have to take heed, won’t it?

How long do you think before your organization goes fully virtual?

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Gas prices up? Time to remember remote work again

Jessica Stillman — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 13:03:06 +0000

Gas prices are once again high enough to warrant a flurry of media coverage. And, inevitably, the pressure that prices put on commuters leads to another round of interest in remote work, interest that in the past has tended to wither away when prices came down. Support for telecommuting is a slowly but steadily rising background hum, but the way much of the chatter about remote work tracks gas prices suggests that many commentators are focusing on remote work as a short-term solution for sticker shock at the pump rather than a long-term trend that might help damp down our gas-price traumas permanently.

Prices shouldn’t control our interest in telework. Instead, remote work, if viewed as an opportunity to fundamentally rethink how we live, could and should control (or at least mitigate) our gas-price sticker shock. That’s what a recent post by Switchbord, the blog of the Natural Resources Defense Council, suggests. The piece digs into the numbers at Chicago-based think tank Center for Neighborhood Technology, which maintains a huge database of information on average housing costs, driving rates, transportation costs and transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions in 900 metropolitan and so-called “micropolitan” areas.

Surprising no one who owns a car, the post finds that transportation costs have been putting a squeeze on family budgets for a decade. “Analyzing its current data in aggregate, CNT found that, between 2000 and 2009, US transportation and housing costs increased at nearly twice the rate of incomes. If you’re feeling squeezed, no wonder,” reports the NRDC blog. But the post goes on to drill down into the data on specific locations and makes the case that those who live in denser but not super-expensive communities are seeing their budgets impacted the least:

The aggregate data show that 72 percent of communities covered in the system have combined housing and transportation costs that under standard formulas would be considered unaffordable for typical families, when median regional household income is compared to average housing and transportation costs. Locations become more affordable, however, in neighborhoods with close access to amenities, jobs, and transit….

Residential neighborhoods closer to downtown where housing-only costs were still in the affordable range but where superior accessibility (proximity to jobs and other typical travel destinations) brought the costs of transportation down to an affordable level as well.

Dense communities take the bite out of transportation costs? There’s no shock there, but what does that have to do with remote work? In short, urban-design experts have argued that the rise in remote work will tend to promote denser communities as workers stay home all day and desire their houses to be in convenient proximity to amenities. In other words, more remote work not only saves you from a hefty gas bill to fuel your commute short-term, but if viewed as a long-term shift in how we work, telecommuting might prompt lifestyles and communities that simply demand less gas, whatever the gas price happens to be.

Fickle, gas-price-linked interest in telecommuting: a perfectly natural reaction to pain at the pump or a shortsighted failure to take full advantage of what remote work has to offer?

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February gets a new holiday: Anywhere Working Week

Jessica Stillman — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:04:43 +0000

February may be the shortest month, but as many in the Northern hemisphere can attest, it usually doesn’t feel like it. With winter grinding along and the post-holiday comedown hitting home, it is generally one of the gloomiest months of the year. No offence, Groundhog Day and Valentine’s Day (itself a source of depression for many), but it is a month in obvious need of more holidays.

Luckily, we now have one. A whole week’s worth of celebrating remote work, in fact. It may not sell as many roses or chocolates as that better-known mid-month holiday, but Anywhere Working Week is now in full swing in the UK. Announced late last year with the support of MP Norman Baker, the seven-day event to highlight the personal, business and environmental benefits of flexible and remote working has a fistful of big-name founders, including Business in the Community, Microsoft, Nokia, Nuffield, Regus, Vodafone UK and Transport for London, and it is also supported by the UK Department for Transport, WWF and the Trades Union Congress.

“It’s no longer viable for businesses to stick to rigid, inefficient ways of working if they want to compete successfully in the market,” says Gordon Frazer, the managing director at Microsoft UK on the initiative’s home page, and the weeklong event is meant to promote these more flexible practices. To spur participation the sponsors are offering giveaways to those who sign up as supporters, as well as a handy calculator that British individuals can use to find out how much they would save by working remotely.

As the Digital Workplace Forum points out, the event is hardly making waves and compares it unfavorably to a similar but more cleverly promoted event in the Netherlands. The Forum blames the British government for its lackluster support, saying:

The lack of visible ‘oomph’ with Anywhere Working week is disappointing. . . . For all the positive benefits which flow from the Digital Workplace we believe the UK government should be championing remote working far more actively. It reduces pressure on transport, is good for the environment and produces a healthier, happier and more productive workforce.

To be fair to the British government though, the U.S. equivalent, Telework Week 2012, is next week and is hardly a pressing topic of discussion around American kitchen tables either. The truth is remote working doesn’t have tons of immediate sex appeal (that’s probably why the Dutch had to use pretty women in pink bathrobes to get their event some attention), despite the Digital Workplace Forum and the Anywhere Working Week sponsors’ being completely correct about its many benefits, which is both a shame and a marketing challenge.

How could the Anglophone countries take a leaf out of the Netherland’s book and find a way to make remote work a hot topic?

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