This would be funny if it was funny.
A satirical piece I published in InfoWorld (”10 sure-fire ways to kill telecommuting,”
3/30/2009) mentioned that some promised savings would not materialize.
In particular, reductions in office space lease costs often won’t
materialize for years, because once you’ve signed a lease you pay until
it expires.
The column also “recommended” pushing all home office costs onto
remote employees as a great way to encourage ergonomically unsound
furnishings, rely on consumer-grade networks, and cause employee
resentment.
The timing was perfect: The following, provided by a KJR subscriber, is paraphrased from an internal memo posted on a well-known company’s intranet just last week:
Audience: Employees for whom the company has incurred expenses
associated with home internet services. This includes expenses paid
through employee reimbursement as well as funds paid through company
corporate managed plans.
What’s changing? We are eliminating payment of home internet
expenses. You are now responsible for providing your own internet
access service if you choose to use such a service to conduct business
from a home office. This includes all types of internet access — high
speed DSL, broadband, cable, satellite or dial-up.
All employees affected by this announcement may elect to return to work at a company facility …
Objectively, the policy is fair: Most white-collar households would
have broadband service anyway, and the company isn’t requiring anyone
to subscribe. Working from home is, for this company at least, an
employee benefit — nothing more, nothing less.
And, this is 2009, where companies are looking for every nickel of
operating cost savings that doesn’t come from additional layoffs.
Further, my source informs me that as a result of staff reductions
and the popularity of the work-from-home program, “company facilities”
currently have acres of unused space.
So the policy is fair. Whether it’s a good idea is a different
question. Certainly, large numbers of employees will consider it
bait-and-switch and resent it. Then they’ll compare the cost of
commuting to the costs and non-work benefits of broadband, absorb the
expense into the family budget, and continue to work remotely.
This wouldn’t be the first company to discover that many of the
promised cost savings associated with telecommuting are illusory.
Because while one of the frequently touted and attention-getting
benefits of telecommuting is that it can save an employer money, few
employers can save very much, at least in the short term.
Recall from last week that “telecommuter” refers to five very
different classes of employee: Ad hoc or casual, scheduled, mobile,
remote, and virtual enterprise workforce. Of these, only remote
employees and virtual enterprise save serious money, and these are the
hardest to make work.
Using remote workers or virtualizing the entire enterprise can save
money because the employer doesn’t have to provide office space, which
can easily cost $5,000 or more to build out. But as already mentioned,
you’ll be paying rent on the office space until your lease is up. At
most you’ll save about half — the ongoing cost of maintaining employee
cubicles and facilities, and that’s assuming you push all home-office
costs onto your remote workers.
Not that you should. Companies run on trust, and even without
shifting costs to employees, working remotely tends to erode it. As
Larry Wainwright, Software Development Manager at Blizzard Internet
Marketing, Inc. explains, “People who work at home tend to become
disconnected from the belief system in the company, seem to generate
conspiracy theories because of this disconnect and aren’t nearly as
loyal to the company as to the customers that they tend to spend more
time speaking to.”
Successful use of a full-time remote workforce isn’t easy; managing
a virtual enterprise is even harder. Managers accustomed to walking
around, dropping in, getting a feel for team dynamics through osmosis
and so on will need extensive training and coaching to adapt to
managing and leading remote employees … doing what’s needed to maintain
their trust, sense of connection to the company, and ongoing
effectiveness in their roles.
As one manager new to managing remote employees explained, “We take
our best people and then cut back on the time mentoring and coaching,
and even end up delegating less to them. We’re eating our seed crop
when we do this and killing succession.”
Huh. Telecommuting is starting to sound pretty bad. It isn’t, of
course. It isn’t good either. “Good” and “bad” are simplistic
formulations.
And if we’ve learned anything over the past year, it’s that simplistic formulations get you into trouble.
Wilhelm Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good and Evil as a
treatise on ethics. I don’t do ethics. Even so, next week’s column will
go beyond “good” and “bad” to give you specific techniques that can
help you make telecommuting successful.
