Telecommuting * By Robert Moskowitz
And Weeding Out Or Working In Candidates
Telecommuting continues to grow in acceptance and its popularity continues
to expand: Even the cautious US Bureau of Labor Statistics admits to the
existence of nearly 11 million telecommuters today. So it's perfectly natural
for those familiar and comfortable with telecommuting to move on from the
very simple and obvious problems of how to encourage people toward telecommuting
to more complex and subtle concerns that may follow.
One of the most complex and subtle concerns associated with successful telecommuting is productivity--not simple productivity issues like, "How long does it take to do a given task or accomplish a given result?", but less obvious aspects of productivity like, "What to do with your telecommuting productivity dividend?"
This question breaks down further into such concerns as: "Exactly what are you trying to accomplish?"; "How can you select the best goal to pursue?"; and "How do you know your time and efforts are taking you in the proper direction to accomplish that goal?"
I have been contemplating these and related questions since I first wrote How To Organize Your Work and Your Time (1981, revised 1993, Doubleday), and I'm not surprised to find they're as puzzling to most people today as they were back then.
This can often be seen as another manifestation of the old "forest and trees" analogy.
That is, it's important to be focused on your daily activities, the nuts and bolts of what you do and how you do it. If you get too "global" or "strategic" in your perspective, you begin to forget the important details, make silly or expensive mistakes, and hit all the bumps in the road head on.
But many times it's also important to be focused on strategic direction. These are the larger considerations, longer-term objectives, and macro possibilities that provide a framework for your day-to-day actions. If you get too detail-oriented, you begin to forget major purposes, overlook or ignore emerging opportunities, and take the wrong forks in the road--even when you appear to be making good time.
Most people acknowledge that if you're too focused on either one, you automatically neglect the other, and that you can achieve maximum productivity only when you view both the forest and the trees in balance.
Similarly, few people dispute the notion that telecommuting increases a person's overall productivity. The evidence is overwhelming. In rigorously controlled experiments as well as ad hoc surveys of their annual output, telecommuters routinely register improvements of 10% or more. Some attain far larger levels of productivity improvement. But it's not enough merely to recognize that telecommuting usually yields a productivity dividend, because it begs the real question: "What should the successful telecommuter do with all that extra time and energy?"
The easy answer, of course, is to do more of the same. If you're managing contracts, as a telecommuter you can manage at least 10% more contracts than before. If you're auditing books, you can make time to audit at least 10% more books. If you're developing employment policies, you can develop at least 10% more employment policies while working away from the organization's centralized office.
But keeping your head down and plowing ahead doing more of the same is not always the most useful or successful course of action. There's a good chance you can make more overall progress by looking farther ahead and choosing a new direction, or by taking the time to learn new technology so when you once again put your head down, you can work faster or get better results.
A potentially better approach would be to do the same amount of work in at least 10% less time, and then make use of the extra time and energy--your telecommuting dividend--to accomplish something more useful or more important than the work already on your plate. You probably won't want to do this during the first week of telecommuting, but once an organization has a cadre of telecommuters, and people on both sides of the telecommuting relationships are comfortable with the process and with their respective roles, it's usually fruitful to look more globally at what those telecommuters are trying to accomplish.
Tweaking The Mission Statement: One good approach is to review or develop an overall "mission statement" not only for the organization, but for the positions now filled by one or more telecommuters. As you probably know, a mission statement is a description of the most important "added values" that the organization generates by its overall activities. It's normally conceived and developed by leaders who are trying hard to hold onto a broad, long-term perspective.
In many cases, an existing mission statement will offer insights or clues regarding some new responsibilities or directions the telecommuters can pursue. In other situations, the productivity dividend will itself provide time and energy to examine the organization's current activities and come up with a new, or an improved mission statement.
For example, a small communications consultancy that saw itself helping client companies produce better annual reports and investor relations materials used the extra productivity of its telecommuting top managers to review its mission statement. They quickly realized the company ought to be handling a broader range of public relations problems and opportunities for its clients. Within a few years, the company was generating more revenue from its new short-term "crisis management" services than from all its previously existing contracts.
In another case, a publishing company that had focused for years on producing controlled circulation newspapers for the computer industry made use of management time freed up through telecommuting to rethink its mission statement and to reinvent itself as a more global organization. As a result, it was able to branch out into other industries and apply its core competencies and established skills to the needs of customers in other industries. Net result: New controlled circulation newspapers for skiing, skating, golf, boating, hunting, and other industries.
Looking For New Opportunities: A shorter-term, less strategic approach for gaining benefits from the telecommuting dividend begins with each telecommuter making suggestions about extra goals or accomplishments that might be possible with the extra time and energy that telecommuting helps to make available. Without any prompting, nearly everyone's natural response to a less crowded schedule is just to do more of the same work already being done. But when challenged to think about what more can be accomplished, most telecommuters can offer a surprisingly valuable shopping list of new opportunities and long-neglected projects.
For example, a supervisor of file clerks in a large insurance agency convinced her boss that she should use the extra time she had found through one-day-a-week telecommuting to develop a procedures manual for her team. Within a month, she had it ready, and within six months, her manager noted significant improvement in her team's response to rush demands and increased compliance with daily production schedules. The supervisor's telecommuting dividend was being leveraged into productivity improvements throughout the team.
Initiating Customer Contact: A third approach for realizing benefits from the telecommuting dividend is for individual telecommuters to use their extra time and energy to initiate contact with their ultimate customers--the people inside or outside their organization who make use of whatever products and services the telecommuters provide. After a while, this feedback will begin to coalesce around certain issues, certain problems, or certain opportunities that seem most fruitful to pursue. The telecommuters can then apply some of their extra time and energy toward responding to these issues, solving these problems or capitalizing on these opportunities--none of which would be perceived if it were not for the productivity advantages of telecommuting.
These three approaches can be applied in sequence, or concurrently. There may also be other ideas that make more sense in your particular situation. It matters how you apply the productivity gains of telecommuting, but it matters even more that you apply them to the most important goals and tasks you can find.
No one suggests that telecommuting is rocket science, or brain surgery. Within even a modestly supportive organizational environment, the vast majority of people who want to succeed as telecommuters are certainly able to do so.
But this extremely high success rate doesn't imply that anyone at all can work successfully as a telecommuter.
Success at telecommuting seems to require a desire to work this way. When forced on people who don't want it, telecommuting can easily become an onerous burden, an ostracism from the centers of power of organizational society. A form of banishment, even!
What It Takes To Succeed: In addition to some degree of motivation, successful telecommuters usually show some loyalty to the company, a degree of self discipline, some self-confidence and self-reliance, a minimum comfort level with communicating at a distance, a responsible nature, good social skills but no discomfort at being alone for long periods of time, a willingness to learn new skills and new tools, and a well-organized approach to daily tasks.
It's an impressive package of traits that not everyone who wants to telecommute can muster. So it's inevitable that some people will apply for telecommuting positions without being able to demonstrate all the requisite characteristics.
The question then becomes, how do you handle requests you want to deny?
A simple way is to help the individual realize, one to one, that he or she has failed to demonstrate certain skills and traits that are important for success at telecommuting, and to give them some guidance on how to build such skills and the right kind of track record so they can be considered more favorably for telecommuting some time in the future.
Another, perhaps better approach is to develop a company policy that spells out minimum requirements for telecommuting--not only personal characteristics, but employment qualifications and required elements in job descriptions. Properly drawn, this policy will provide a fair, consistent basis for approving and disapproving applications to start telecommuting.
Some companies have found success in weeding out candidates who are unsuitable for telecommuting by sending all--or nearly all--applicants into a telecommuting training program. This helps filter out employees who don't meet minimum requirements--such as having a year or more of continuous employment with the organization, having no more than one absence or late arrival within the last year, and working in core positions (receptionists might be ineligible for telecommuting) or being responsible for certain tasks (like computer work or telephone work) that can easily be done as a telecommuter.
Telecommuting simulations are another element of telecommuter training that helps separate the good candidates for telecommuting from the more problematic candidates.
For example, many organizations now ask candidates for telecommuting to work for a week or two in the central office--but to pretend to be working at a distance. In other words, the telecommuter candidates can make phone calls to people who provide technical and administrative support, and can communicate with their supervisor and co-workers. But they can't have the normal face-to-face interaction available to everyone else working in the centralized facility.
This usually puts a considerable amount of pressure on the candidates. Those with the skills and motivation to succeed can work through their problems and manage to accomplish some useful work despite the difficulties. The less qualified candidates will often wash out of the training. Without the right skills and strong enough motivation to succeed as telecommuters, they'll usually find the whole experience so frustrating and difficult that they give up the notion of telecommuting and withdraw their applications.
In any case, this kind of simulation has real value, because it's an excellent way to provide candidate telecommuters with a real "immersion" experience in which to learn and practice the techniques and self-discipline methods they'll need when telecommuting for real. Because the telecommuter candidates are operating within a kind of protected environment, when they eventually complete their training and go home to work, they won't face such a severe "sink or swim" situation. It also helps the telecommuter candidate's supervisors learn how to communicate at a distance.
Copyright © 1998 by Robert Moskowitz. All rights reserved.