Telecommuting * By Robert Moskowitz
Learning How To Select Individuals Who Are Ready To Change The Working Structure
With approximately twelve million Americans currently telecommuting on a
regular basis, and with telework widely forecast to be one of the fastest
growing trends in the world of business management, HR professionals are
going back to their drawing boards to find answers to such questions as:
1. How do you identify managers who are willing and able to make the
changes needed to manage others at a distance?
2. How do you know in advance which employees will be successful working
outside the organization's physical structures?
3. What criteria will ensure the best uses of human resources when project
teams are formed and operated?
4. What types of compensation packages are most effective in non-traditional
working situations?
Until the answers to these and other questions become a well-recognized part of the conventional wisdom, HR professionals will remain eager to discover proven methods that can take some of the guesswork out of handling telecommuters.
One of the most interesting bids in this market comes from TDS International, Inc. Formed as a partnership between two experienced management consultants and teachers, the company has collected extensive scientific and anecdotal data regarding people who are already experiencing the so-called "virtual workplace." They have used it to build a system to help HR professionals make more systematic decisions regarding how to build and manage a successful telecommuting program.
"Teleworking began as a bottom-up phenomenon in many companies," says Sandra Fox O'Hara, CEO/Managing Director of TDS International, Inc., a psychotherapist who has many years experience as a leadership consultant and trainer, "where individual employees and their managers negotiated a virtual alternative for a specific project." For many, this grassroots approach has been successful because a self-selected group volunteered for telecommuting and the managers were favorably disposed to it.
Now, however, corporations are responding to telecommuting's potential for higher productivity, improved utilization of resources, and reduced real estate and operational costs by implementing telework as part of their strategic plans. This forces telecommuting on less-than-superb candidates and less-than-enthusiastic managers. Given this level of investment, corporate leaders understandably want telecommuting to be more than just another short-lived management fad. That's why they're interested in finding a more scientific method for choosing the right people for the right jobs, identifying the individual's unique training and support needs, and delivering services targeted at those needs.
Designed to support precisely these kinds of choices, TDSI's telework development system (called the "Synetas Profiler") includes assessment tools specifically developed for selecting, training and supporting a successful telecommuting workforce.
The "Synetas Profiler" centers around an analysis of the employee in three critical areas:
1. His or her relationship to the organization and the manager, including a focus on career expectations, corporate affiliation, teleworking satisfaction and teleworking beliefs.
2. His or her work-life balance, which includes the integration of both personal and family/support system needs.
3. His or her personal resources, including self-direction/independence, self-management/personal boundaries, competition, problem-solving/ decision-making, and life satisfaction.
TDSI then produces a report called the Telework Quotient, which covers these three areas.
The teleworker's relationship with his or her employer organization is the traditional province of the Human Resource professional. But it becomes much more complex when the employee works at a remote site even just 1020% of the time.
Managing this relationship successfully is not easy, but it's essential to a teleworker's long-term high performance. An effective manager of telecommuters must understand the individual employee's style, competence, and needs, and be able to design accountability structures to maximize that person's performance.
Managers in many companies are typically wary of teleworking. They are frequently concerned about being held responsible for the work of employees whom they do not see every day. But while this concern is certainly valid, it need not block the road to successful telecommuting. For example, one Human Resources Vice-President within a large corporation successfully manages his staff while teleworking between three states. He knows that with the proper training and support, almost anyone who is successful can adapt to the virtual workplace.
According to TDSI, a dissatisfied employee in the traditional workforce whose motivation is waning can be spotted quickly. But not so when the person is telecommuting. Most often, a drop in satisfaction, then motivation, and finally the decrease in performance that usually follows can sneak up on managers who are unprepared to monitor their telecommuters.
That's why learning how to select individuals who are ready for this change in working structure, and discovering how to provide the necessary training so others can make this change, will provide a significant competitive advantage for companies. Investing in the human side of teleworking will help employees make the most of their personal resources, their work-life balances, and their relationships with the corporation--greatly influencing initial satisfaction, which in turn will favorably impact their motivation.
Another predictor of long-term success as a telecommuter is the individual's ability to integrate work with personal life. The new or prospective teleworker is asked to assess the impact of this working arrangement on him- or herself, as well as on members of his or her family, friends, hobbies, and responsibilities.
The difficulty of being at home, yet being unavailable is a recurrent theme in teleworking households. Successful teleworkers achieve a work-life balance that contributes to telework success by anticipating these difficulties and setting up new patterns of relationships that effectively and satisfactorily balance the needs of all involved. The more successful teleworkers generally report that they have negotiated with their significant others regarding all the necessary changes, and have clearly defined the time, place, interruption parameters, and other boundaries of their work.
The concept of balance is important, because sustained satisfaction, motivation, and high performance arise not only from meeting the needs of the teleworker, but from meeting the needs and fulfilling the agendas of all the stakeholders involved at the teleworker's home (even the babies).
These include the individual telecommuter's ability to manage needs, anxieties, and relationships; the ability to self-direct his or her effort and energy; skill in making decisions and solving problems while walking the fine line between information one already has and information one must obtain from others.
"The selection and training of managers is key to success," says Dr. Helen H. Solomons, the other principal of TDSI, an expert in managing others successfully from a distance, and the President and Founder of the European Women's Management Development Network, which held its first USA conference in Philadelphia in 1996, "although we hear much more about the training and support targeted at the employee level."
"The fact is," comments Solomons, "learning to manage from a distance involves a paradigm shift for managers, and making this transition begins by examining beliefs, habits, and anxieties in training before new skills can be developed."
To facilitate this paradigm shift, TDSI offers customized training modules to address the specific needs of individual managers and employees, as well as the various relationships between them. If you'd like to be part of the TDSI project at this early stage, contact Sandra Fox O'Hara by telephone at (610)430-3448 or 1-800-220-1365, or sandra@tdsi-inc.com .
"The goal is to avoid 'blanket training' where everyone gets everything, much of which is not needed and promptly forgotten," says O'Hara. Training is targeted to lend support to each person in his or her specific areas of need, helping them "hit the ground running" onto the virtual landscape.
To continue collecting anecdotal data, TDSI has established an email address (VirtualZoo@tdsi-inc.com) where telecommuting employees, managers, and their families can share their successes and dilemmas with other telecommuters. When asked, O'Hara offers some of these people advice via email, based on her expertise as a professor, consultant, mentor, and leadership coach.
O'Hara believes that families trying to reap the benefits of the technology without being consumed by it need help learning how to manage the healthy integration of virtual work with traditional family life. Becoming a telecommuter "is a time of re-learning and re-negotiating roles and expectations," O'Hara says.
VirtualZoo is the first online mentoring service for telecommuters that offers twenty-four-hour response time and up to four contacts per event. It's not therapy, nor chatting with a friend. But it can help telecommuters sort out the types of challenges faced in merging work, family and personal life through professional coaching from a leadership consultant, psychotherapist, trainer, and expert in the Human Resource issues affecting the remote workforce.
"Having a professional who is right there to listen and give practical suggestions to get through the tough spots is a terrific service to people," O'Hara says. "Just taking the time to write out the dilemma is the first step in dealing with the issues. Most people who contact the VirtualZoo are competent, bright, and highly-motivated people who love telecommuting, and they don't want to jeopardize the arrangement," O'Hara adds. "Having a confidential way to sort things out gives them the shot in the arm they need to make it work."
Sandra Fox O'Hara developed the VirtualZoo as an online extension of her mentoring practice, when she heard from remote workers about their varied struggles in setting up and maintaining successful home offices. VirtualZoo, a service of TDS International, Inc., is presently free of charge but will soon shift to a subscription basis for both corporations and individuals.
Here, from the annals of "VirtualZoo," are two case histories:
At midnight on Tuesday, Greg Hunt was 2,000 miles from his boss and on another planet with regard to his wife. As one of America's 12 million telecommuters, he didn't know how to manage it all. The first 6 months had gone very well, but now things were piling up on him--demanding deadlines that required late nights, family stress, and exhaustion.
Clare Pietrella was in her first month of telecommuting. She had made the case to her manager and was the first at her company to leave the traditional office and join the remote workforce. But now she was under tremendous pressure--not from home or from her manager. It was coming from inside her. A compulsive worker, she needed everything precisely in order and going smoothly. Her anxiety about managing work and personal life in the same time and space, and pulling it off perfectly made it hard for her to sleep, even though she couldn't name one thing that was going wrong.
Both Greg and Clare went to their PCs at 1:00 am and sent messages to their telecommuting coach at VirtualZoo. By noon the next day, both had received responses that helped them sort through their issues, and try ways of dealing with their dilemmas.
Greg's first steps were to lay out all his impending activities on his calendar, then check with his boss about the work to be done, and talk over with his wife the activities looming on his home front. O'Hara advised him not only to start exercising again to rebuild his energy level, but to set absolute limits in terms of the time he would spend in the office and the time he would spend at home and also asleep. He also decided to re-negotiate his roles and responsibilities at home, and to do this when he was fully rested and not feeling stretched to the breaking point.
O'Hara coached Clare to list everything that had gone well for her as a telecommuter, and also the things that had gone wrong. She also suggested that Clare talk with her manager about his expectations and how he would define success for her as she pioneered the telecommuting program. Looking at the reality of what was expected, along with how well things were actually going, turned out to be the beginning of Clare's relaxing into the new working paradigm.
Symantec is continuing its push into the telecommuting market by sponsoring a one-day seminar that recently traveled to ten cities and helped bring the message of telecommuting benefits to the masses. The seminar offered corporate leaders--who can take responsibility for putting telecommuting into their organizations--opportunities to speak with some big names in the world of telecommuting consulting and expertise, and to learn about the latest telecommuting trends.
The "Keynote Speakers" rotated appearances at the different conference dates, so attendees could hear one of the following: Gil Gordon, a leading management consultant specializing in implementing telecommuting programs; Joanne H. Pratt, a consultant and futurist who helps organizations adopt new work patterns, including virtual office and telecommuting; or Jack Nilles, another consultant and author on telecommuting.
Topics covered included:
* Cost-benefit evaluations.
* Evaluating and maintaining a telecommuting effort.
* Issues of internet access and email.
* Planning and policy issues.
* Real-time collaboration across distances.
* Security issues.
* Selecting candidates for telecommuting.
* Setting up home-based workspaces.
* Supporting telecommuters across distances.
* Various software issues.
The one-day session ended with an exhibit of telecommuting technology.
So far, the show has been rolled out to single locations in Seattle, Boston, Toronto, Chicago, Santa Clara, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., New York, Atlanta, and Dallas during February and March.
To find out about future scheduled sites or for more details about the program's content, call Symantec at 1-800-257-2478.
Copyright © 1998 byRobert Moskowitz. All rights reserved.