Managing Off-Site Staff for Small Business. Lin Grensing-Pophal
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to be less loyal to employers. In fact, the US Labor Department indicates that Gen Xers hold an average of nearly nine different jobs by their thirties. They change jobs in search of new skills, increased responsibility, and new experiences. Their tendency to change positions frequently has had a major impact on the temporary-worker industry.
5. The Impact of Technology
Technology has had a dramatic influence on the workplace and on the ways in which tasks are accomplished. Email, voice mail, and Internet technology mean that employees can literally be in touch with their employer 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The 24/7 culture is changing the way that employees and employers interact — it is, in fact, changing the very nature of work. Under the old system, employees were tied to the workplace. Tools did not exist to allow contact from remote locations. Today, technology is providing both employers and employees with freedom and flexibility that they would never have imagined even ten short years ago.
Technology is allowing employees to question the status quo and challenge the old ways of doing business. “Why do I need to come to the office to work on a report when I can do it at home on my computer?” “Why can’t I access voice mail and email from home?” “Why do I have to be physically located in a phone center to answer customer calls? Why can’t I be set up from home to do this?”
And because employers are faced with a shrinking labor market and a growing gap between job seekers’ skills and employer needs, more and more are responding to these questions with “Why not?”
What does all this mean? It means that businesses must become more flexible and creative in both the recruitment and retention of employees. It means that the traditional brick-and-mortar workplace will soon give way — in fact, has given way, in many places — to a virtual workplace. It means that neither employees nor employers will be hampered by geographic constraints: An employee can live in Florida and work for a company in Georgia, Wisconsin, California, Ontario, or Saskatchewan.
It means that whether they are telecommuting, or simply working in another location as part of a global organization, branch office or “virtual company,” the ability to effectively manage off-site staff is no longer a luxury; it has become a necessity for companies that want to compete effectively in this new millennium.
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Telecommuting: What It Is and Why You Need to Know
Teleworking: “Any form of substitution of information technologies for work-related travel.”
Telecommuting: “Moving the work to the workers instead of moving the workers to work.”
— Jack Nilles (a.k.a. “The father of telecommuting”)
Executive Summary
What’s the difference between teleworking and telecommuting?
There is certainly some confusion around these terms and they are often used incorrectly. Teleworking is a broad term that can be defined as working at a distance. Telecommuting is a form of teleworking, as are satellite offices, neighborhood work centers, and mobile working.
How common is telecommuting?
SHRM’s “2008 Employee Job Satisfaction” report indicates that many companies offer nontraditional scheduling options to employees to help them balance their work and personal lives. Fifty-nine percent of HR professionals indicated their organizations offered flextime, which allowed employees to select their work hours within limits established by the employer. In addition to flextime, 57 percent of human resource professionals indicated that their organizations offered some form of telecommuting: 47 percent of respondents reported that their organizations offered telecommuting on an ad-hoc basis, 35 percent on a part-time basis and 21 percent on a full-time basis.
How many teleworkers will there be in the future?
A 2009 study by WorldatWork indicated that the number of US employees who worked remotely at least one day per month increased 39 percent the past two years, from approximately 12.4 million in 2006 to 17.2 million in 2008. In its survey brief Telework Trendlines™ 2009, WorldatWork reports that the sum of all teleworkers — employees, contractors and business owners — has risen 17 percent from 28.7 million in 2006 to 33.7 million in 2008.
What is the biggest barrier to telecommuting?
The greatest barrier may very well be attitude. Managers and companies are often hesitant to consider the option because they fear the loss of control when employees are not located in one place. But the reality of today’s workforce is dispersion — satellite offices and international firms mean that even employees who aren’t considered telecommuters may be located halfway across the world from their coworkers.
1. The Origins of Telecommuting
As long ago as the nineteenth century, people were telecommuting. While the term wasn’t coined until almost 100 years later, the first person on record who performed work at a remote location was a Boston bank president who had a phone line strung from his office to his home — in 1877!
According to Gil Gordon, founder of Gil Gordon Associates (www.gilgordon.com), a management consulting firm specializing in the implementation of telecommuting/virtual office and other alternative work arrangements, the terminology may be new, but the concept really isn’t. Gordon is recognized internationally as an expert in the virtual-office concept and is a pioneer in the field. “I’ve heard stories of people working at home in their living rooms with keypunch in the mid-1960s,” Gordon says. But, he points out, telecommuting as we know it can be traced to the late 1970s and early 1980s, when more serious attempts at telecommuting were being made by businesses, and we began to see some widespread adoption of the concept.
Even as early as the 1950s, location was becoming less and less important to the concept of work. Telephone communications were widely established. And as the make-up of work changed to a more information-based economy following World War II, staff could work more independently, without need of constant supervision.
You’ve heard of the Internet, haven’t you? Well, in 1963, a programmer working on the Arpanet Project (the forerunner to today’s Internet) withdrew from the project to stay home with his wife, who was going through a difficult pregnancy. Another programmer suggested he install an additional phone line in his home so he could program from there. The practice of working from home still didn’t have a name, but people were starting to experiment with it.
In 1973, Jack Nilles, a scientist working on a NASA satellite communications projects in Los Angeles, coined the term for tel commuting. Now, Nilles is internationally known as the father of telecommuting. He originally used the term to denote “a geographically dispersed office where workers can work at home on a computer and transmit data and documents to a central office via telephone lines.” In 1982, Nilles incorporated JALA International, Inc. (www.jala.com). An international group of management consultants, JALA’s mission is “to help organizations make effective use of information technology — telecommunications and computers — and to better cope with the accelerating rate of change in the business environment.”
By the time Nilles had come up with a word for the concept of working from locations other than the traditional office, companies were already beginning to experiment with the practice. In 1978, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of South Carolina had started a cottage-keyer project — recognizing that employees could easily perform a number of keyboarding activities at home. In the first year of the project they demonstrated a 26 percent increase in productivity. In 1980, Mountain Bell started a telecommuting project for its managers. That same year the US Army launched a telecommuting pilot.
By the mid-1980s, telecommuting was becoming