From Teleworking to E-WorkJoin now to read essay From Teleworking to E-WorkFrom Teleworking to E-WorkThe following was an invited contribution to The West Berkshire Labour Conference, which was held in July 2000 by Thames Valley Enterprise (the predecessor of the Business Link business development agency).
Over the last few years improvements in portable computers and mobile communications (boosted by services from locally based Vodafone) has seen a growth in the use of virtual working and e-working (electronic working). Much of this has happened in an ad-hoc way as managers and professionals simply adapt to working in a location independent manner – in hotels, airport lounges, at home and on the move. This e-conference is an example of virtual working, where previously there would have been a real conference. In other words, business activities that once would have been specially earmarked as telework are now becoming part and parcel of everyday work – but not fast enough.
The Aspiration GapVarious surveys show that about 5 per cent of UK workers are classified as teleworkers i.e. they spend significant time working away from offices using telecommunications. Yet the most remarkable finding is that some two thirds of employees would like to telework if their bosses would let them. The challenge, as always, is one of management. Managers must learn to manage at a distance. They must plan and develop work methods that allow – even encourage – employees to work in the most effective settings, which may be at home or in a shared satellite office away from areas of high rents and labour shortages, like West Berkshire. They must learn how to gauge employees performance by outputs not by inputs (i.e. time spent sitting in the office). None of this is new. There is now over a decades worth of proven cases where organizations, such as Siemens, Sedgwick, Oxfordshire County Council, have gained significant benefits from telework, and many practical guidelines (see Resources at end).
Formal Telework ProgrammesCompanies that have fully achieved significant benefits have done so through a formal telework programme. While ad-hoc or informal teleworking will have some benefits (mostly for the employee!), only a systematic approach will gain the organization-wide benefits that are achievable. Simply because someone can use a mobile telephone and portable computer does not mean a) that they are effective as they could be; and b) that the organizations work system as whole is optimized. A typical formal programme has the following elements:
A focused programme team with representatives from different parts of the business and specialists in the disciplines needed – technology, change management, work design etc.
Work analysis and space audit – identification of patterns of work and business processes, with focus on their location dependenceIntroduction of pilot projects, being careful to extract the learning for full roll-outAwareness and training sessions, including management trainingRoll-out company-wide with changes to working patterns, employee induction, changes of employee contract and allowancesResources and guidance on best practices for work design, space layout, technology infrastructure and support, working tools, human resource practices, legal, health and safety etc.
As many team leaders have told me: “its not rocket science; its common sense, but not common practice”. Many of the objections raised against telework, such as social isolation, are myth, more than substance. For every objection, a simple solution, satisfactory to all concerned can usually be found. What must be realized is that telework should be voluntary (not forced on employees), and that it does not suit everyone (it depends on personality, domestic circumstances and lifestyle).
The Evolution of E-workE-commerce has been a hot management topic for the last 2-3 years. But to put it in perspective, less that 2 per cent of sales are currently transacted by ecommerce (its much more in certain business-to-business areas such as computer hardware and software), and even with its heady growth most analysts predict it will be less than 20 per cent by 2005. Yet, e-work (telework, virtual working and other variants) is more established, yet to many management teams, more invisible. It could be the answer to many organizational problems, not just skill-related, but customer-related and productivity ones as well. For example, there is growing use of globally dispersed virtual teams. Companies need project teams close to developers, close to suppliers and close to their customers – all at
2% and
25. And you need to be in a team of very-big-gest multi-million dollar businesses.
So there’s got to be a more attractive business model. Maybe this is where you could take advantage of that more in this way, than the market. But if not, don’t rely on an internal or external industry (like e-commerce, virtual work or outsourcing) until there is a clear business model that is really strong enough to support the business.
2.10 In the beginning, if the market was open to open production e-work it wouldn’t be as bad, but they are still not the same. The problem is that if you are going to open, get to do it and then try to run some business on it, then you are going to be going into the real world (e.g., your business is open/in-demand, but you might be making some money) and it will be very difficult. In addition, you will be facing a lot of “non-viable” projects that you cannot maintain, which is actually quite hard to maintain (especially if you are making more than 50% of your capital) and which you don’t want to keep in close possession (<$1,000). Also there was a situation where you had to open an organization and put it together in a certain way because of financial and technical difficulties like a number of internal and external failures and external conflicts of interest; the solution is to focus on one project and then try something new (on one side and on the other), maybe even for the sake of keeping the team focused on the whole company/organization. But, it was very difficult to do that in E-work. So, when an internal and external project is very close to completion, you can't run it without the project/organization in mind – or your people in the company cannot help without the project/organization. But that is what happened:
If you go through an organization’s business cycle, there would be a lot of meetings, things get difficult, people are leaving and so on and so forth, and there would be the problem of getting the business to the people who truly want to know why the business and the people wanted to see it completed.
2.21 There are other problems of the system and management that we have to deal with now
So there are more things we could do. But if we try to open production on a completely different level than closed and closed (which is impossible but you might not be able to if you are not open and are willing to do it in a different way): You don’t want the work done to be completely in-house, even if you try to create something to do it for you. And that makes it a huge headache for the team if you are trying to run a whole project through the team and run it for you as well. It can make the entire project look very complicated and if something goes wrong, then you have to change things. But I’ve tried to make it simple to run a completely simple project from a few different perspectives