Telecommuting * By Robert Moskowitz
One of the most important aspects of succeeding as a telecommuter is to alter your work habits to reflect the different reality of telecommuting. Although it takes a little extra thinking to succeed as a telecommuter, it's very much like the difference between living with your parents and living on your own. Both require more maturity, and yield major benefits in terms of independence and personal satisfaction. Here are some suggestions that might help you "move out" of the company's office, as gleaned from successful telecommuters:
1) Keep a master schedule of what you plan to do every working day. Plenty of people who aren't telecommuters benefit from this kind of intense scheduling, but telecommuters tend to need it--and benefit from it--the most.
Continually update your written schedule with every call you need to make, every commitment you enter into, and every deliverable you promise. Even better, don't make a promise or commitment without first referring to this master schedule. Then as you do your daily work--whether at your telecommuting workspace or the company's office--frequently refer to this master schedule to make sure you're meeting your obligations.
This technique is particularly valuable for telecommuters because it helps assure that you'll call people while they're available, and that you'll keep yourself available for those times people want to reach you.
2) Use a "transport box"--anything from a shopping bag to a briefcase--every day. Get in the habit of taking your "transport box" everywhere you go, from the company's office to your home, on to your telework center (if you're working somewhere else), and back again.
Put into this box all the files, papers, forms, computer disks, reference materials, and other resources you'll need to accomplish the work you're planning (and scheduling, as in the previous point) to do as a telecommuter. Keep these materials in the "transport box" while telecommuting, too, so they unfailingly come back to the company's office with you when you return.
3) Develop an alliance with a colleague in the office. Telecommuting becomes a lot more flexible and less worrisome when you have an ally who is protecting your interests when you're away from your desk.
This "inside ally" can help you in many ways: keep you posted on current events and office developments, voicie your opinion (or at least mention that you may have an opinion) in office discussions, relay hand-outs and bulletin-board postings to you as needed, and otherwise help to keep you in touch with office doings despite your distance. In many cases, you can swap these "ally" services with another telecommuter who is out of the office on days when you're in it, and vice versa.
A recent study conducted in conjunction with last October's Telecommute America celebration has produced some extremely optimistic and satisfying results.
According to a recent summary of the study from the Telecommuting Advisory Council, nearly two-thirds of executives surveyed in Fortune 1000 corporations said that telecommuting has advantages both for their organizations as well as for the telecommuters.
This is the same percentage of these executives who acknowledged that their organizations actively support telecommuters. About half of this group report that their organizations have begun to embrace telecommuting only in the last two years. More than half said their organizations expect the number of their telecommuters to grow in coming years.
Among those organizations without telecommuters, more than 60% of the executives surveyed say they expect to launch the first of their employees into telecommuting within the next few years.
Clearly, the trend toward telecommuting has reached the level of the largest organizations--big time.
But the road to the future is not entirely without speed bumps. The Fortune 1000 executives interviewed in this survey cited two new obstacles to more rapid expansion of their telecommuting troops: 1) fear that management control will diminish when telecommuting comes in, and 2) concern that telecommuting will weaken the "team concept" now so much in vogue.
One can only expect that these relatively new objections to the spread of telecommuting will be addressed during the coming five years in much the same way that worries about "isolation" were handled in the past five years. That is, isolation is not a negligible problem for telecommuters. But since most stay out of the office only one or two days a week, and since isolation can be remedied very simply by paying more attention to the need to communicate with those back in the company office, it has never materialized as a major problem for most telecommuters, despite worries among critics of telecommuting that it might.
In the same way, worries about a loss of management control seems very overblown when you consider that telecommuters tend to be the most responsible, productive, and self-disciplined workers within an organization. These people are the least likely to run rampant once they escape the walls of the company's office. In addition, most telecommuters and their supervisors put a strong emphasis on "deliverables" rather than raw hours. This nearly always results in a strengthening of management control, rather than a diminishment.
Concerns about losing the "team concept" as telecommuters drift their separate ways are also somewhat larger than life, in most cases. One big reason that organizations are unlikely to be brought to their knees by overly independent telecommuters is that while "teams" are much talked about within today's organizations, few have made the structural changes in rewards, assignments, supervisory relationships, empowerment, and other factors actually needed to turn a collection of individuals into a real working team. In other words, there's more lip-service than substance to the "team concept" in today's corporate America. So while telecommuting may be one of the current whipping boys blamed for a lack of team cohesion, it's far less to blame than many other more potent factors, and not likely to have much negative impact on organizational teamwork.
What's far more likely, in fact, is that today's penchant for "teams" will fade into history and be replaced by some new concept, one perhaps not yet dreamed up by the pundits of organizational success. As the interest in "teams" falls off management's radar screen, so will management's concern about telecommuting as a "team-wrecking" force.
But strategically speaking, that won't eliminate arguments against telecommuting. Nothing will. It's subject to much the same phenomenon reported when automobiles began to become popular. Back then, the logic went something along these lines: "If God had intended us to travel faster than 12 miles an hour, we would have been doing it already. Obviously, we're not. And anything that upsets the natural way we're doing things today is objectionable. So cars are clearly not good for us."
No one is arguing that automobiles have been an unmitigated blessing to human society. But they do offer wonderful benefits, and they have knocked into a cocked hat any notion that pre-automotive society was any more "natural" or "good" than post-automotive society.
In the same way, no one today is arguing that telecommuting offers unmitigated advantages. Even the American Telecommuting Association acknowledges that successful telecommuting takes a little more thought and planning than working the old-fashioned way, and that many tasks--including building trust and teams, as well as brain surgery and plumbing--cannot yet be done very effectively via telecommuting.
Nevertheless, the costs of physical travel into congested areas, and providing workspace there, are now so high that the financial benefits alone make telecommuting an extremely attractive option for millions of workers--including millions more than are presently telecommuting.
With all the talk of telecommuting and how it's already changing lifestyles, workstyles, organizations, economics, and society, it was inevitable that these would be examined in greater detail by think tanks, futurists, and others.
One of the most attention-getting books so far is Bold New World: The Essential Road Map to the Twenty-First Century by William Knoke, an investment banker and business strategist who has been living in what he terms a "placeless society" for the past ten years.
Knoke's job has been to assemble teams of bankers from around the world for individual projects, and then lead those teams to help specific corporations finance new ideas for doing business. As founder and president of the Harvard Capital Group, he has been successful enough at all this to visit more than sixty different countries, where his office has been almost anywhere he can set up his laptop computer, modem, and briefcase.
Out of that experience, and his associated perceptions, Knoke has crafted a book that describes a future in very human terms, where distance is no longer the dominant factor in every business and personal relationship that it once was. Now that you can connect with almost anyone, anywhere, at anytime, and ship goods just about anywhere on the globe almost overnight, we are experiencing major realignments in business, governments, and society in general.
We see these changes all around us but, being human, we see them as the death throes of what we know and appreciate, rather than as the birth spasms of a new and perhaps better way of life.
According to Knoke, any organization that is neither local nor global is on its way out. For example, the American government doesn't have anywhere near enough power to control worldwidepollution, theft of intellectual property, or any of the other major issues now facing humanity. But neither is it small enough to do a good job of policing your home town or supporting local businesses there. Under Knoke's logic, the American government must inevitably yield the power it does have to both global and local governments.
Similarly, nearly all the mid-range institutions we now embrace will have to give way to a new bi-level arrangement, with strong local organizations binding us together in tight-knit and highly personal communities, and global organizations vying with each other to impose their values and visions on the entire planet.
Knoke is one of many to see the importance of modern technology not only to de-emphasize the need for physical travel, but to support new forms of community, democracy, and social interaction. For example, Knoke applauds the recent Oregon election that permitted voting by mail. According to Knoke, "virtual turnout" was about 68% of eligible voters, far higher than historical levels established when voting had to be done in person.
What he fails to explain to me, however, is how or why people will vote on Oregonian issues when they have become "placeless," and may live and work virtually anywhere on the globe.
In fact, won't the evaporation of "place" as an important aspect of daily living put us in the same position as today's financial managers, who move capital (and jobs) from one market to another with little apparent regard for local economies, societies, and populations?
If I'm not entwined with any particular place, and not likely to return to any place I've visited, what's to stop me from littering, stealing, vandalizing, scamming, and doing all the other things that animals typically don't do where they sleep?
Of course, one could argue that human values and an understanding that we are all living on one small "lifeboat Earth" will prevent exploitation of localities by placeless adventurers. But these same arguments apply--and go largely unheeded--today. Why should anyone believe these arguments will prove any more persuasive or predictive tomorrow?
But not all of Knoke's book is so theoretical. Each chapter begins with a fictionalized dramatization of what life might be like in the future, and contains suggestions on how to handle such changes. While you may not agree with all he says, we should all appreciate the effort and thought that has gone into this compilation of ideas and suggestions, and take it as a lesson that we had all better get busy and create a plan for a better future. If we don't, aren't we all leaving our futures to the mercy of those who would like to mold it to their own values and vision?
Copyright 1996 by Robert Moskowitz. All rights reserved.