My flexible friend the office

posted by Tomas Mcinernery on May 12, 2007

Telecommuting – allowing you to fit work around life…not the other way round. Sound good? Some thoughts to get you off the ground

So this week I find myself in sunny California for team meetings. It’s far too hot around here for my British senses, even walking from air conditioned building to air conditioned car leaves me gasping for breath and dare I say it yearning for dull skies. I didn’t have too much of an issue with the dreaded hook on the flight over, I had a ton of work get done and the fact the in flight entertainment wasn’t working only helped me to concentrate. Carrying multiple batteries means I can keep going as long as my fingers would type, I even won the middle arm rest (always a victory)

Anyway, onto today’s topic which has come up because of an engagement I’m preparing for; how to deploy a telecommuting policy within your enterprise and, more importantly what’s it worth?

Many organisations are starting to, or have already begun using telecommuting as an effective way of reducing office space, improving employees work life balance, providing a convenient business continuity option and not to mention reducing environmental impact.

I would take a guess that most people reading this already use telecommuting and are probably sitting on the veranda as I type – great. But for everyone who is realising the benefits many organisations are still exploring taking the jump, and this (like any management decisions) revolves around the benefits for a business – I’ll attempt to bring up some of the things you need to think about below. Those of you on the veranda read on – you may just spot something new (or of course…comment on something I forget)

Firstly it’s back to that good old segmentation model (read go off and understand your customers) how many people do you have that could work away from the office if you gave them the right technology tools? Asking that question will help guide the amount of effort you should put into creating the technology and policies. Also ask what would you expect your telecommuting numbers to look like in three years? That number should guide the amount of future proofing you need to prepare for (40% increase year on year? How many users is that? Which departments are hiring?)

Work with your HR and Legal teams to understand how much employees can work from home without breaching regulations and other local legislations. Having boundaries within the policies ensures employees understand what will and will not get funded. Working to procure service in bulk may be something you want to look at, or providing a ‘work from home’ kit with wireless access point, home broadband setup etc.

Technical solutions in this area are primarily enabling secure connection back to the enterprise. Do you enable this from any machine, or just your IT blessed machines? Lots of solutions exist in this space, depending on your requirement you may want to invest in total ownership or work with a 3rd party to provide a solution for you, perhaps hosting two or three key applications. Collaboration is a close second, instant messaging is a killer application here, as is multi-way video conferencing to ensure employees ‘feel’ part of a team (one to one is good, but having the whole team in ‘one’ virtual room is great) Face to face meetings remain priceless so keep an expectation this is still needed for big projects. Voice solutions are also something you should investigate, if your policy dictates employees will be expensing calls how can you reduce these? VOIP could help you, but if you haven’t got that on your roadmap yet free applications exist which could provide a working solution.

So what do you need to track when implementing a telecommuting structure within your organisation? It’s the basics like employee moral which can suffer if employees feel they have become isolated within their home environment so ensure days are selected which the whole team will be in the office. Mentoring/development of junior staff also need to be tracked, development of the next generation is important, some organisations have mandated that people managers must have a certain percentage of meetings face to face. Think about building centres of competence within your teams focused around local sites, grow a skill base and keep it in one place then ensure the fringes of that organisation communicate with others (otherwise employees will only be concerned by their local silo) Also work with managers to ensure employee performance is measured by contribution – ensuring that those with a flexible working time have clear goals.

Once you have a policy in place the organisation can use this tool kit to set clear expectations and help make work something that’s done, not a place you go (corny, but you get the point) How close is your organisation to this model? Do you see the value?

ps – check out the Slashdot discussion that’s over here – seems to be going well. It’s good to see a few familiar IT faces jumping in, especially talking about our primary wireless campus

pps – I haven’t commended on the Santa Rosa launch, I was lucky enough to get my hands on a system last week, these blogs are not for marketing so I won’t attempt to sell you one, needless to say we should be having some more blogs soon on the advantages of improved remote management and hopefully I’ll be talking about the proliferation of cellular WWAN embedded machines.

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