Susan's Blog  
(Occasional comments by Susan Seitel)

March 21, 2009

If that’s happening at your office and you’re a manager, take steps. Make sure every teleworker has clear goals and measurable results, but don’t let them give it up, for everyone’s sake. 

We’ve always been interested in telecommuting. If you put “tele” into the search box on our Website (that allows you to comb through everything we’ve written in the Work-Life Newsbrief since 1990) you’ll get 486 hits dating all the way back to the beginning. But our interest has increased since we’ve become part of the team that will spend federal money to help Minnesota employers send more employees home to work. It’s part of a state project to reduce highway congestion.  

We recently put together a compilation of all the evidence in its favor and even we were amazed at the amount of evidence. It's overwhelming. The 17-page document, The Case for Telecommuting, will be available this week for new subscribers and those who extend their subscription for a year. Here are a few samples − reports that have come out just in the past year!

A new report from the Conference Board found 80% of employers in agreement: the payoff for enabling employees to work at a distance is such that it’s worth the extra cost. The purpose of the report, Meeting The Challenge of a Dispersed Workforce, was to identify effective ways to manage distance employees. Concluded Conference Board economist Linda Barrington, telecommuting is “no longer a cost-benefit issue. It is simply the reality of doing business,” and effective management of dispersed employees is a key to success in that new reality. 

More than two-thirds of companies believe telecommuting has led to greater productivity, lower costs, and better recruiting and retention, said a survey by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA). The increased productivity, say respondents, is due to workers spending less time going to and from work. Nearly six out of 10 said cost savings came from reduced use of office-related materials and resources and lower vehicle-related expenses. Nearly 40% said their companies have access to more qualified staff because of their telework programs, and 37% said telecommuting helped improve employee retention. Train your managers, said the report; distance managing requires skills that may be new to most. And pilot the program first, with 10 or 15 employees. Then, after the pilots succeed and the policies and procedures are in place, take the initiative far and wide.  

The Clean Air Campaign has conducted a survey of more than 150 metro Atlanta teleworkers and their managers and found that those employees working from home do more work. About 57% of the teleworkers reported that they use the time they save (an average 91 minutes a day) to perform more duties for their employer; and more than two-thirds (68%) say they believe their productivity has increased as a result of being allowed to work from a home office. Significantly, more than half of their managers agree; 91% said they now believe the practice is good for their organization.  

A new survey by the National Science Foundation found productivity either increases or stays the same for their teleworking employees, according to 87% of managers polled. The NSF found that each teleworker is on the road 62 hours less than office workers a year, saving $1,201 each in gas and other costs. 

It goes on and on - 15 pages of definitive, carefully conducted research. The case is so clear! Everyone benefits. Don’t give up on it, and don’t let your employees do so either.

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March 9, 2009

No argument. What we're experiencing right now is making it tougher than ever to be a work-life champion (and it was never particularly easy). But believe it or not, there are a few work-life-type supports for which we believe the timing may be exactly right.

Make managers part of the solution
Let managers know how important it is to build employee morale, and make them part of the solution. If you’ve had to downsize, notice and reward those managers who have been able to keep their top performers during and right after layoffs. Reward them, and find out what they’re doing right that others might be able to emulate. And knowing that managers are as stressed as their staff, if not more so, begin offering peer support groups, and you might have an EAP staff member or someone trained to deal with stress lead them. 

Make sure you’re offering an employee assistance service, by the way and that it's well publicized. Bring counselors onsite if they’re not there already and make it easy for people to get help. And add financial counseling if you’re not offering it now.

Take a closer look at the tasks
Now would be a good time to try work redesign. Especially if you’ve been downsizing, you know it’s unhealthy to try to do the same volume, quantity and quality of work. And even if you haven’t, it is healthy to try to take a closer look at the tasks people are doing. Work redesign, you’ll remember, is kind of like reengineering, but it takes into consideration the fact that your employees are whole people with important responsibilities outside of work as well as in the office. Have teams meet and ask themselves these questions: How can we help each of us work up to our full capability and still have a life? Which of our tasks, if any, are not really essential and what can we cut (especially if there are fewer of us)? Which are low-value? What really matters? How can we work smarter? How could we redistribute our work tasks in order to make jobs more amenable to flexible work arrangements?

Telecommuting is a wonderful flex arrangement to offer when times are tough. What a morale builder! We recently sat in on a focus group of nine employees, and every one of them – enthusiastically – said they would jump at the chance to work from home at least one day a week. But we were amazed at how restrictive their companies were after all these years, with all the evidence in its favor. Some of their companies had even cancelled existing telework arrangements at the same time as they were paring down staff.

Allowing occasional telework empowers employees and demonstrates trust. It saves them money by cutting both commuting and clothing costs. For your organization, in addition to increasing morale and productivity, it can eventually free up office space and cut leasing costs if done on a large scale. And it reduces your carbon footprint. A Sun Microsystems study found an employee could reduce the amount of energy used for work by the equivalent of 5,400 kilowatt-hours each year. You can start by looking for managers willing to try a three-month pilot. Help them set goals, figure out how they’ll know success when they see it, publicize it widely when it works, and look for more managers willing to try it.

Yes, these are scary times, but they will get better. And when times are tough, the tough take action they may not have thought of before. This may be the best of all possible times to transform your workplace culture.