Telecommuning and Virtual Culture
posted by Eleanor Wynn on August 24, 2007
Ah, the good old days, remember them? The days when you had to be next to someone to communicate, or at least be near a land line? The days when you had to send a whole hard drive or tape or then, CD, to transfer large amounts of data? When your main network of friends were people you saw almost everyday? Now THAT was culture! Or wait! Wasn’t it culture when you had to write a twenty page letter and wait three months for the ship to sail back across the Atlantic to get a reply? Assuming it was North America and Europe, I think India took longer. PS that is where the term POSH came from—Port Out, Starboard Home. That meant you were on the land side both directions and maybe less likely to get splashed or more likely to have better views.
Anyway, onward. Sadly, culture has come to an end. Why, you can have a conversation on Instant Messenger with someone on a totally different continent! How can you possibly relate? Or so say some. Never mind the fact that half a million MMOG players are intensively coordinating groups of people all over the world. That can’t be culture! Or…could it?
I actually did really well on my first year anthropology orals and was praised especially for my definition of culture. (Rockier road for my 3 field area orals where my advisor had to hold my hand after it was over, but I survived that, too.) So what was that definition of culture that I gave? I don’t want to cheat and look one up. I invite others to contribute here. But first of all, culture is a set of practices, it usually involves a “people” which used to be defined genetically, but, no more.
Culture employs a set of artifacts with known methods and meanings, and it also has some predictability in the area of social organization: the means people use to get anything done. In the end, culture is a response to the survival needs of a people in a context, with meaning and art added on to reinforce and formalize the whole package, create internal identity, differentiate “us” from “them”. So language is of course a defining part of culture. Culture does involve marking time, celebrating key events like harvests or a good giraffe or salmon season, or the cycles of the religious calendar which often overlap with seasonal cycles—or are overlayed upon them. Whatever. In the past, being together was a necessary part of the transmission of culture, though many cultures involved only seasonal being together. Celebrations were one reason to travel a long distance to be with other people, once or twice a year. Neolithic cultures had trade routes from Alaska to Peru, that stretched as far East as the Missouri. Somehow across this time and space, they had codes of trade, conduct and mutual needs that stretched out over not only many months or years but vast stretches of territory, through hand-offs at key points.
We would not limit our definition of culture to that point in pre-history, though. So why would we limit our idea of a corporate culture to a period of time 20 years back during a different economy, different technological capability, different workforce, different everything? Hallowed corporate cultures can be a real obstacle to seeing the value in the present. Intel has a robust current corporate culture that has adapted amazingly well to being virtual, as our own internal tracking studies have shown us for the past four years. Not only have we done well, but in the last year for the first time, we saw perceived team performance finally get better, thanks primarily to the standardization and expansion of collaboration tools.
It is the whole package of these tools on the cognitive, practical and business process level that can make it work, and there is plenty of room for improvement. Despite the infomania-mania, e-mail is one piece of that puzzle; so are shared repositories, so is screen sharing and the most wonderful little tool of all: instant messaging. That has presence awareness and all the responsiveness you need. Our internal studies show that instant messaging totally equalizes the effect of on-site manager versus remote managers. In fact, if you IM, you are more popular with your reports, wherever you are. It is the ultimate “one-minute manager.” PS, I have never had an onsite manager in 7years at Intel.
There is some discussion now about the topic of “telecommuting”. I have a problem with that term, because it is backwards-looking. It is so hard to keep up with reality these days! Telecommuting assumes “commuting” as the norm and the “tele-“ part as a variant. That is why I am renaming it telecommuning.
I work with people in Arizona, Beijing, Israel, Malaysia, Folsom CA, Santa Clara CA, Massachussets, Utah, New Mexico, Bend Oregon and my home “site” Hillsboro, Oregon. If I were to measure my strongest connections either by frequency of communication or impact of the communication, I would have to say that I primarily work with Folsom and Arizona, with one strong connection in Oregon and lots of “lateral” connections there—people I run into and have known over the years that are part of my secondary network.
Two-thirds of our workforce work this way, as measured over the four years. We do a lot of telecommuning. And this is one great way to bond the whole global network together. In our original survey of virtuality in 2002, we found that it is important to have both or either: neighbors in the workplace and/or strong virtual team relationships. Basically as long as you have groups that are meaningful to you. It matters less where exactly they are.
I do get a social and motivational boost when I go to the physical site, but I probably actually work less while there due to the overhead costs to me of getting ready, driving there for 45 minutes, settling in, eating lunch (something I don’t really do in my home office), beating the traffic home for about an hour or so, only to have the traffic beat me anyway, reentry into the household and possible rejection of my computer after having gone through all the stress of traffic, etc.
I consider it a strength of our company that we do this so successfully. It means we have a robust corporate culture that can hold up across distance (wow!), that people around the company share similar values, understand the common goals, care about each other. The highest rated value was “comfort with other team members” and the second highest was “trust”, year over year. It also means that through forward thinking and research, IT has answered the basic collaboration needs of a global company; and we are working on those advanced needs that will really launch us into Virtual Culture in a more compelling way. More to come….
Comments (16) (closed)
tagged: global organization, organizational culture, telecommuting, virtual culture, virtuality
Comments
Aug 25 | Michael Molin said:
That’s for real, Eleanor. I’m here in Surgut, Western Siberia and I feel that I live more in U.S. than in Russia (we are a great country as you are and China along with India and Brasil).
Aug 25 | Eleanor Wynn said:
Michael, thanks for your endorsement. It is always good to hear from you. Now I know you are in Siberia! Which used to be a US synonym for “as far away as possible”. You are definitely proving the point. In telecommuning you are very close. I personally thrive on being global. For our other readers, here is a link to Surgut. http://www.admhmao.ru/english/powerE/common/csurgut/index.htm
Aug 27 | Alex Balk said:
Excellent post!
My experience with virtual teams and working cross-culture (in the traditional sense of “culture”), suggests that there are critical milestones to collaborating with your peers:
* Text-based communication * Voice-based communication * Face-to-face meetings
Each milestone exposes, in many ways, a “different persona” of the same person. Working successfully on one of those levels doesn’t necessarily imply productive work on the other levels. In fact, with some of my peers it’s absolutely impossible for me to work effectively face-to-face (too much fun, too little work!).
Interestingly, the company I work is running a few research projects to analyze social networks and the context of communication on each of the levels above. Using this data, I can easily decide who would be the most effective members to add to a new team - based on planned methods of communication, their existing relationships and their fields of interest.
All that being said, there’s also the emerging field of Virtual Worlds, which offers something similar to in-the-flesh meetings (customizable avatars + spatial-aware voice chat = WOW).
If you think “culture” was a complex term now, try adding VWs to the mix.
Aug 27 | Michael Molin said:
Thanks, Eleanor - Surgut (u’s like in ‘book’) is my native town. My vision of culture is related to the native land and no matter that people emigrate to other countries - the Earth is our planet.
Aug 27 | Michael R said:
Good article, Eleanor. Some IT departments, however, now think that telecommuting isn’t that good.
What would you say to an IT department which only allows people to telecommute once a week at most and is going to eliminate all virtual offices?
Aug 27 | Eleanor Wynn said:
Michael, I think you know what I would say. I would say that they haven’t really made the decision based on data, or have confused one kind of data with another. Some groups do need to be together, many don’t. A one-size fits all doesn’t make much sense, especially if the workforce is already distributed and working across time anyway. I have noticed that virtuality over large spaces creates virtuality over the smaller distances. If you are already working with people far away, that creates less magnetism from your local site, so there is some centripetal force there. The other thing is that if there has already been a telecommuting policy in the past and it is changed, it is really trying to put the genie back in the bottle. People make decisions on where to live based on those policies. Industry trends show that is it saves $5K per h/c to telecommute. Check the comments on this post from NetAge. http://endlessknots.typepad.com/endlessknots/2007/08/it-spending-as-.html
Aug 27 | Eleanor Wynn said:
we got some coverage on this
http://endlessknots.typepad.com/endlessknots/2007/08/telecommuning—.html
Aug 27 | Eleanor Wynn said:
Alex, thanks for an interesting comment. We have heard a lot about goings-on at IBM and I am curious to know more.
We have also been looking at social networks (along with social media, which is not the same thing). Social networks are a primary way of organizing that can now be supported with both analysis and with auto-profiling, network proximity analysis and other fascinating tools. I also view the network as the source of innovation, following the thinking of evolutionary biology and also some people in the management theory field, including David Obstfeld from UC Irvine.
It is interesting that you ascribe different aspects of a person to different media—of course this has to be true! And you forgot to put visualization in your list of communication methods.
Virtual worlds are more graphic and coordinated extensions of some tools we already have but there are some paradigm-busting aspects of virtual worlds. I believe we will see a transition of the psychodynamics of gaming move over into similar characteristics of working. Work is a kind of play! But the 3D interfaces are a whole different mode of information management and coordination. You probably know about our 3D environment Miramar and our arrangement with QWAQ to build this on a game architecture that is peer-to-peer, late-binding and otherwise amenable to managing large complex files over very large numbers of users (players). Keep in touch!
Aug 27 | Eleanor Wynn said:
Michael Molin, I agree that there is local culture, which comes with our mother tongue and is essential, and there is global culture, which we have to cultivate. The economist Arturo Escobar (no relation to the drug lord) wrote a fascinating book called Encountering Development. It is a critical view of “development ideology” which makes important points. But one of the most interesting points in the book is the notion of hybrid cultures: that in any country and even in any person, there is an overlay of cultures, some very traditional, some contemporary—and that this is basically a good thing.
It is a concept of sociolinguistics that people have a “repertoire range” for appropriate conversational habits, terms, accents and behaviors. We adjust to many contexts. Local culture is a very strong force—even though I am third generation Ukrainian on one side, I still respond strongly to Russian and Ukrainian people—they look like “my people”, and the way they think and talk resonates with my way of thinking. I have another side, too, Anglo-American. Then I was raised in Latin America, that is very strong. I lived in Texas for a while as a child and lived in oil camps, therefore I am also a “Texan” (it’s a culture!). And my mother let me go home with whoever was working in the house, so I connected with African-American culture in childhood and the rural and urban poor of South America.
I studied religions of India (including Islam and Hindu) and Tibetan dharma practice. Then there are cultures you learn through art—French from French movies and literature, Japanese from art, movies and people, Chinese in the same way.
So there is the “home culture” and then all the nodes we develop through life that allow us to connect to other cultures.
Aug 27 | Michael Molin said:
The world language, Eleanor. We feel the same way.
Aug 27 | Alex Balk said:
Source of innovation indeed! when looking at collaboration happening in plain view (blogs, forums, even social bookmarking to some extent) one finds the people who are passionate enough to speak their minds in public - enthusiasts, innovators, and whatever other tags apply. But what is their number compared to the number of silent readers? or those who avoid the public social medium altogether? I’ve seen some statistics that point to a 20%/80% writer/reader ratio of bloggers in large organizations. Which, I guess, makes the case for analysis of “covert communication channels” (email, VoIP, MSRs, etc). I want to get to all the innovators, not only the ones who speak their minds outloud. It gets somewhat spooky as far as privacy goes, but that’s the usual tradeoff between accuracy/level-of-detail and the warm fuzzy feeling of having your private space.
As far as information management on the 3D Web goes (new buzzword! yay!), the challenge is astounding. I’m much better at maintaining a cluttered desk than a cluttered desktop. Will I be more productive in an environment simulating my office space? or will I carry my 30-tab Firefox browser to my virtual office, multiplied?
That being said, it’s enough to watch any teenager playing some MMOG or even a plain shooter to figure out the possibilities in an online, 3D workspace. My question is, do you see more value in productivity or communication? Maybe that calls for another blog post.
Aug 27 | Eleanor Wynn said:
Alex, this is the difference between social networks and social media. The network hubs all flock to the social media. But that is not the network. Read Duncan Watt’s Six Degrees and this is also the implied point of Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point. A network has a structure and functions within that structure. The silent lurking mavens are just as important to a robust network as the gregarious hubs.
Aug 30 | PO said:
Too bad Intel itself no longer approves of full-time telecommuting. Perhaps we could invite Intel management to comment on how it will compensate investors for the forgone competitive advantage of the highly specialized human capital it plans to discard. Seems funny to me that a technology company so dependent on highly-specialized skills should handicap itself by limiting it’s talent pool to areas local to major sites.
As a prospective investor, I believe this says quite a bit about Paul Otellini’s expectations for growth of the mobile computing market.
Sep 19 | MB said:
I have to agree with PO comments. I’ve worked for Intel for 10 years and am now being laid off, along with 100 other folks for being a full time telecommuter / virtual office employee. What does that say about Intel’s committment to cost controls, environment, work life balance - and not to mention their own network connectivity & collaboartion products or lack thereof. I have consistently been rated at the top of the scale for annual performance and delivering results. But because I can’t move back to HQ site permanently they don’t want me. What does that say about the future of culture at large companies…
Sep 28 | Kevin said:
some deep and complicated for me , Try to understand the good post further . anyway ,Thank you Eleanor .
Sep 28 | Eleanor Wynn said:
Kevin, thank you for your feedback. It makes me aware I should use language that can be understood all over the world, not just in US.