It's Not All Wine And Roses
By Robert Moskowitz
Even Cathy of the comic strip is telecommuting from her home office these days; despite entrenched skepticism, it's becoming an increasingly common practice and stands to benefit employers and employees alike. However, a successful telecommuting experience requires serious groundwork, and in this article, MicroTimes Telecommuting columnist Robert Moskowitz offers sage advice about avoiding pitfalls.
For years, people without much vision for the future ignored telecommuting, or considered it nothing more than an interesting novelty. Yet the telecommuting movement has prospered, and today tens of millions of hard-working people all over the world accomplish significant portions of their work without having to travel to a central location to do it.
But telecommuting is not all wine and roses. Most organizations find that allowing some of their people to work via telecommuting creates or exacerbates at least a few difficulties, drawbacks, and problems. Fortunately, most of these can be avoided or minimized by early planning, so it's important to be aware of these potential sore points.
Here is a brief rundown of the most common problem areas for telecommuters, and some practical remedies:
Most people who become dissatisfied with telecommuting, it turns out, discover their dissatisfaction very quickly after they begin. Since most telecommuting is voluntary, anyone who doesn't like telecommuting can easily return to his or her previous commuting schedule.
That's why the overwhelming majority of telecommuters claim not only to be very satisfied with their work schedules, but very unhappy at the idea of reverting to full-time work in a central office.
Nevertheless, even the most satisfied telecommuters can face a few special difficulties caused specifically by their novel work regimen.
Stress: Occasionally, telecommuters experience too much personal stress or unhappiness within their new work schedules. Most often, this results from the company's failure to evaluate prospective telecommuters well enough before thrusting them into a telecommuting situation.
Feelings of inadequacy, distress, or uncertainty that aren't severe enough to create problems when working in a conventional office can escalate into personal unhappiness and drastically lowered productivity for a person who starts telecommuting too many days per week. The situation gets worse when there's no easy way for the new telecommuter to save face and return to a conventional commuting schedule.
Training Deficiencies: Some of the most common difficulties for new telecommuters occur when the individual doesn't receive adequate training about how to telecommute successfully.
After all, almost everyone working today grew up in an environment where commuting to a central workplace was the defining characteristic of the work week. It's only natural that newly inaugurated telecommuters would need a little time to learn and develop the few special traits they need to perform effectively while away from the central office.
Today, most organizations recognize the need to prevent temporary problems by providing some kind of relevant training before sending an office-bound worker out to become a telecommuter. But in the all-too-frequent cases where such training is deficient, both the telecommuters and the organization can suffer until they eventually regain their equilibrium.
The basic skills for new telecommuters and their immediate supervisors include:
Many telecommuters also benefit from basic training in how to use the computers, faxes, modems, cellular phones, and other high-technology equipment they'll be working for the first time. In the absence of adequate training, this kind of equipment can leave anyone feeling helpless and unable to cope.
Career Derailment: Special career problems can also arise for telecommuters who don't take proactive steps. Generally speaking, however, the problems are few and far between.
For example, the facts show that most telecommuters remain as promotable as they were before they began working outside the traditional office. And many telecommuters report they receive more and better recognition for their efforts than coworkers who don't telecommute.
Far from career "derailment," some telecommuters consider their ability to work from home one or more days per week a form of reward and a "promotion" they greatly appreciate.
In addition, frequent telecommuting gives you opportunities to learn new skills and increase your productivity. Also, telecommuting is highly visible to others in the organization, and may bring telecommuters into prominence.
However, no one can easily dismiss the lingering fear that being out of the office will leave you out of the loop for new projects and for other well-earned recognition or rewards. The only remedy for this is to make sure that you keep others informed of your actions, triumphs, and capabilities.
Telecommuters uniformly appreciate the opportunity to cut down on their physical travel. But labor organizations are not so comfortable with telecommuting, and have expressed widely differing reactions to it, ranging from relative indifference to very strong opposition. No union has yet expressed positive feelings about telecommuting, but with new efforts to organize telecommuters now on the horizon, this may change fairly soon.
In an effort to curtail or undercut the appeal of telecommuting, a few union representatives have advocated rules that would select telecommuters for their seniority rather than their personal preferences, suitable temperament, job responsibilities, work history, or other--clearly more relevant--criteria.
One union even reacted to telecommuting proposals by claiming that the easier commutes and the posh suburban telecommuting workplaces are unfair advantages given only to people in a few highly favored job classifications.
A few union representatives still fear the development of telecommuting, uncertain about how to react to its disruption of the traditional centralized workplace that gave rise to unions in the first place. They're worried that telecommuting might become part of a management strategy to convert full-time workers with benefits into part-time workers receiving lower wages and fewer benefits.
At first, union officials declined invitations to attend telecommuting briefings and planning sessions. But the more closely unions and management work together to develop telecommuting programs in an organization, the fewer problems tend to arise.
One good example can be found in Japan, where unions generally have a very cooperative relationship with organizations. Here, telecommuting has generated no serious labor conflicts. Within Nippon Telephone & Telegraph, for example, unions support the concept of telecommuting, and have negotiated an arrangement whereby telecommuters retain their basic perquisites--such as travel allowances--they might otherwise have had to give back.
Voice Communications: Fundamentally, successful telecommuting requires only a telephone, a form of technology that is readily available everywhere people are likely to work in California. And if more mobility becomes necessary, a cellular telephone easily keeps you in touch with the office from deserts, street corners and highway rest-stops.
Data Communications: But in practice, many telecommuters can accomplish their work only with access to company data available exclusively in the office computer. This includes managers, programmers, data workers, and many others. Even telecommuters who don't actually need such data access still want to have it, in order to accomplish their most important work while away from the conventional office.
The result is a serious problem of compatibility for organizations that use more than one or two different computer systems and software applications. It's easy for this situation to quickly become a major obstacle to widespread telecommuting. To avoid this, organizations must spend a lot of time gearing up for telecommuting, and must allocate sufficient resources toward taking the steps necessary to guarantee that data can flow to and from the workers easily and efficiently at any distance.
Communications Costs: Because electronic communication is rarely free, the cost of both telephone conversations and dial-up computer connections between the telecommuter and the central office can grow quite large. Attending a meeting by speaker phone, for example, can easily require 30 minutes or longer. And even with the fastest of today's modems, it's common to spend an hour a day sending and receiving important data files.
When phone calls to the home office--typically 20 or 30 miles away--cost $10 to $20 per hour, every telecommuter can run up a three-figure phone bill every month.
Despite the advent of fiber optic and ISDN telephone networks, the costs of telecommuter's communications aren't coming down. While domestic and even some international long-distance rates have collapsed in recent years, we haven't seen much relief from middle-distance phone charges, and may not for several more years.
These extra costs and difficulties can startle a management team that hasn't considered them in preparing to roll out telecommuting to a wider cross-section of the organization's employees.
The fear of precious data being lost or stolen is quite real, and a good reason to limit the kind of information that's available to an organization's telecommuters.
But before letting this problem scuttle a telecommuting program, remember that the very same organizations worried about data security problems due to telecommuters frequently leave the same "valuable" data lying around the conventional office in far more vulnerable situations. Disks, or binders, are often left on desks where unescorted visitors can pick them up and review or even copy them without being challenged. Reports often leave the office in the custody of employees who have no idea how to keep them secure. Computers and terminals tied into important networks are frequently left unattended, with the required passwords already entered.
While telecommuters should be alert to and trained in data security issues, it's rarely telecommuters who make the mistakes that compromise the organization's future.
One of the most worrisome problems for telecommuters--and sensitive organizations--is the very real potential for telecommuting to create new problems for an individual's family and home life.
For most telecommuters and their families, the boundary between home and work tends to blur. There are cases of telecommuters who suffer from overwork, workaholism, and unwanted interruptions during meals and at all hours of the day or night.
Employees and their families may also suffer from the added pressures that telecommuting can bring to family life. For example, a telecommuter working at home during business hours may have trouble and feel guilty over deciding whether or not to help with a crying baby, do the laundry, run to the store for a bottle of milk, or lay the table for dinner.
Everyone appreciates that telecommuting translates commuting time into time with the family. But few people are entirely comfortable ignoring family members in the next room just to clock a full day's work.
Naturally, these problems are easier to deal with when the telecommuter commutes to a satellite center in the neighborhood or works from a car while on the road, rather than staying at home to work.
But there's no denying that switching to telecommuting one or more days per week is likely to raise one's family's expectations and quality of life, particularly for any little children in the family, making it very difficult to go from regular telecommuting back to the daily commute.
This remains one of the most common obstacles to the further spread of telecommuting programs. In fact, many individuals are reluctant to ask for permission to telecommute because they're afraid that management antipathy will cause the mere inquiry to be seen as a sign of malingering.
But no one should discount the power of management reluctance to experiment with telecommuting. It often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is, organizations filled with managers who are reluctant to support telecommuting often experience problems with telecommuting in the few places where it does get tried.
In other negative situations, an organization may not even try telecommuting until every other option has been exhausted.
Managers will rarely admit they have a stubborn reluctance to accept telecommuting. Instead, they will put forward a heavy barrage of mistaken assumptions, unwarranted fears, and bogus concerns that seem plausible at first. Only later will it come out that the real reason telecommuting got put on a back burner was that management had little enthusiasm for the idea.
Among the commonly held, but decidedly incorrect beliefs about telecommuting you'll find in reluctant managers is the notion that telecommuting programs cost a lot to get going, and that the payoffs from telecommuting won't be both measurable or noticeable for many years. Other reluctant managers still feel that telecommuting remains an unproven strategy, one that entails a lot of risk for very little in the way of benefits. Given a choice of whether or not to let some of their employees try telecommuting, these managers prefer to delay or to kill the idea altogether.
Reluctant managers can often justify their self-fulfilling beliefs about telecommuting through spurious cost/benefit calculations. One of the most common mistakes is to underestimate the true financial and productivity costs generated by existing problems and difficulties, and ignore or underestimate the benefits that telecommuting might bring.
Whenever you check a cost/benefit analysis of telecommuting, make sure it factors in such elements as the time and expense savings from not commuting to work, the health penalties not paid by workers spending time in polluted, crime-ridden, high-stress office locations, and the productivity not lost to the distractions and noise of conventional office arrangements.
Although the emphasis has been on problems associated with telecommuting, that's not the end of the story. Years of actual observations of telecommuters' experiences provide a significant pool of knowledge from which to draw not only solutions, but strategies for avoiding the problems in the first place.
Thus organizations that begin to offer a telecommuting option today need not experience the same difficulties, or overcome the same complexities, as organizations that turned to telecommuting a decade or more ago.
By learning from past problems, organizations can plan a smoother path toward telecommuting success, and dramatically improve the quality and quantity of results they obtain from their telecommuting programs.
Copyright © 1997 by Robert A. Moskowitz. All rights reserved.