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By Info-Tech Research Group
A recent Info-Tech study of over 800 IT practitioners demonstrates that teleworking continues to be a popular initiative. A full 28 percent of mid-sized organizations report that they have fully implemented a comprehensive telecommuting or teleworking strategy. Another 28 percent of respondents are currently implementing a teleworking strategy, and a further one-quarter will do so within one year. Only 10 percent do not plan to adopt a comprehensive telework strategy.
The benefits of teleworking are well-understood in many IT shops. They include:
- Improved retention and recruiting. The flexibility of telework is a major factor in long-term retention. Moreover, flexible enterprises tend to attract the best talent, and a telework offering certainly enhances a talented candidate's rationale for choosing that workplace. In many cases, teleworking can create recruitment opportunities for talent that would otherwise be inaccessible to the business.
- Decreased real estate and administrative costs. If a significant proportion of the workforce is located in home offices, the organization requires less office space to house employees. Reduced office space is accompanied by decreased facility maintenance needs and lower electricity costs.
- Enhanced employee work-life balance. Employees no longer spend time commuting and dealing with traffic congestion, creating more free time for themselves; moreover, their cost of commuting is greatly reduced. Vehicle emissions are also avoided -- perhaps the biggest environmental benefit of teleworking.
- Business continuity. Adverse weather conditions, major traffic and transit incidents, natural disasters, and quarantines can all affect employee attendance, and ultimately, revenue generation. By enabling employees to work from home, these problems are typically circumvented.
Despite interest in teleworking, businesses often pay little attention to what is required for a successful telework program, beyond the technologies and basic communication skills required for remote work. By neglecting the development of a comprehensive teleworking strategy, enterprises leave telework vulnerable to manager and employee resistance and misunderstandings. This can lead to spotty telework adoption -- and might ultimately mean the long-term failure of a teleworking program in meeting its intended goals.
Key Considerations
To implement comprehensive teleworking, with a significant proportion of employees successfully engaged in telework, IT and the business must deal with these three closely-linked building blocks:
- Telework Policy & Performance Management. Managers need tools to assess employee suitability for telework, set expectations, conduct performance-based evaluations, and resolve performance issues. Employees need to understand telework expectations and ground rules for communication, in-office attendance, and performance assessments.
- Manager & Employee Training. Both managers and employees must be trained in the science and art of telework. Training requires both technical and soft-skills components. From a technical standpoint, employees and managers must be able to properly use enabling technologies, such as video conferencing and remote applications. In terms of soft-skills, the best practices for working remotely and managing employees from afar are new to many managers and employees, and formal soft-skills training will benefit both groups.
- Technology & Support. IT will be responsible for selecting, implementing, and maintaining the technologies that enable teleworkers to be successful. This doesn't include just the technologies themselves -- IT must develop a support process for resolving teleworker issues. Moreover, responsibility for the technical side of training may fall to IT.
Bolster Success with Manager & Employee Training
For both managers and employees, effective teleworking often involves a new skill-set. However, development of such a skill-set beyond technical training is often neglected. Regular teleworking is very different than occasionally working from home, but many employees who transition to this model do not receive formal soft-skills training.
By default, teleworkers and their managers should receive technology training from IT or subject matter experts. To stay connected to the office, communicate with distant employees, and run effective meetings remotely, teleworkers must be well-versed in telework-related technologies. Both employee and manager should be educated on using technologies for videoconferencing, virtual private networking (VPN), and time-tracking software.
The best telework strategies extend training beyond technology usage. New soft-skills are required for a teleworker to succeed in both daily work tasks and long-term career development goals.
Any employee teleworking on a regular basis (for example, more than two days per week) should receive soft-skills training for the following:
- 1. Virtual meeting best practices. Employees need to understand how to conduct virtual meetings, and when such a meeting may not be appropriate (for example, a project kick-off meeting or a meeting where contentious issues are at stake).
- 2. Effective remote communication techniques, including instant messaging, e-mail, and videoconferencing, and ways to avoid feelings of isolation by staying socially connected to coworkers.
- 3. Work-at-home best practices, including setting a home work schedule and preventing work creep, establishing core hours of availability, and setting up a quiet work area, including furnishings that encourage productivity and correct posture.
- 4. Specific methods for obtaining remote IT/help desk support. While IT should be responsible for developing a support mechanism that effectively serves remote employees, teleworkers should be trained on how to use this mechanism. For example, if the employee's at-home enterprise VoIP connection is down, the employee should know which IT phone number they can call from a landline or mobile phone to obtain support.
Managing someone from afar requires a different set of management skills -- most importantly, for communication. Face-to-face interaction is at a premium, and this can be a big obstacle to effectively supporting remote employees. Therefore, managers should receive training on:
- 1. Practices for staying socially connected to remote employees. Managers should host informal meetings with remote employees, since they do not have the same opportunities for hallway and water-cooler chats that office employees do.
- 2. Conducting teleworker-specific performance reviews. Managers must assess performance based on quantity, quality, and timeliness of work, and not face-time. Managers must avoid biased evaluation by focusing on what work employees do remotely, rather than when they do it.
- 3. How to deal with telework-specific performance issues, and deciding when face-to-face meetings may be the best option for coaching and feedback on poor performance.
- 4. Evaluation of employee candidacy for starting or continuing telework. The companion to this ITA Premium research note, "Support Telework with Policies & Performance Management," describes policies required to qualify and evaluate employees for telework. However, simply creating the policies and templates is not enough. Managers must be trained on how to consistently use these types of customized tools to conduct assessments and evaluations specifically for teleworkers.
In addition, managers should be familiar with the technologies and soft-skills on which their employees will be trained. For example, employees struggling to achieve a work-life balance should have access to coaching from a direct manager on how to set reasonable work hours and prevent work creep at home.
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