Rearview Mirror
Telecommuting and the "virtual office" have been part of the IT conceptual vocabulary
for many years - without either clarity or realization. For most observers, telecommuting
conjures up images of a desperate housewife keying data from ragged piles of paper
forms while her sick mother sleeps. Or perhaps a superprogrammer calmly working on
complex code while two small children chase the madly barking dog in tight circles
around his feet. Or the help desk operator (presumably) providing customer service over
her cordless while planting tomatoes. All noticeably unsupervised, of course.
Needless to say, such misguided adventures more often stem from corporate conceit than from proper analysis of business benefits and productivity expectations. And in such instances, investments in infrastructure technology, process management, or management technique are usually half-hearted and amateurish. The results match the shoddy underpinnings.
At Hewlett Packard, telecommuting became a strong component of the mythical “HP Way” forty years ago, as David Packard wrote in 1995: "To my mind, flextime is the essence of respect for and trust in people. It says we both appreciate that our people have busy personal lives and we trust them to devise, with their supervisor and work group, schedules that are personally convenient and yet fair to others." Nobly stated. But a more jaundiced view of the HP Way is more prevalent today.
On June 1 2006, CIO Randy Mott cancelled telecommuting for one thousand IT workers, mandating that most employees move into HP satellite offices. The stated objective was to foster teamwork and greater collaboration. But recent reports that "a few employees abused the flexible work arrangements and could be heard washing dishes or admitted to driving a tractor during conference calls about project updates [hardly helped]…Telecommuting had morphed from a strategic tool used to keep exceptional talent to a right that employees claimed." (Mercury News, June 3 2006)
Such vignettes play to a pop press images: distracted and uncommitted employees lazily lounging about in their bathrobes. Or worse. Consider this tidbit: "According to a recent government survey, almost half the federal workforce telecommutes at least occasionally. According to another survey by industry groups, about 10 percent of American telecommuters acknowledge they work naked. To extrapolate, right now as many as 150,000 Federal workers might be naked including, statistically speaking, Condolezza Rice." (The Washington Post, April 9, 2006)
Many people actually prefer the office, witness Manhattan office workers overcoming all obstacles and gamely trudging to their offices during last winter’s messy transit strike. Bringing this lugubrious observation: "Why has telecommuting never really been embraced as futurists said it would? The answer is less about logistical difficulties and more about tribal phenomena like status, fear and ritual. It’s also true that, even in a digital age, in cities from New York to San Francisco, people just like to lay eyes on one another." (New York Times, December 25, 2005)
Nor should we ignore management hesitancy and/or realism about losing control: "While the technology required is basic and readily available, people remain the major barrier to working at home. The corporate mentality needs to change from the Industrial Age's management-by-watching-you-work to the Information Age’s management-byobjectives." (Computerworld, May 11, 2006)
In addition to all these fears, telecommuting opens new revenue opportunities for our reawakened tax authorities. A "convenience of the employer rule" allows states to tax telecommuters toiling away in another state. A Tennessee man telecommuting to New York was charged by New York for taxes on all his income. The Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal. Other states, emboldened by New York’s success, could enact similar rules, taxing out-or-state telecommuters. (The Wall Street Journal>, November 1, 2005) To end this practice, Senator Chris Dodd (D) and Representative Chris Shays (R) have introduced the Telecommuter Tax Fairness Act. Stay tuned.
Several CIOSE members also have real reservations about formalized telecommuting in their companies - beyond incidental usage or in a few obvious niches. It may be culturally distasteful to their senior executives, who want workers in their offices or cubicles where they can be directly supervised. A potent deterrent.
Even so, there are inexorable trends pulling the virtual office in their wake. With the
general explosion in mobility, many employees are naturally at work outside their offices
for extended periods. Another driver is process globalization. How can employees
collaborate across distant time zones at night? Only with a robust home-based
infrastructure that provides simultaneous access to common computerized tools and data.
And as "hoteling" (where workers don't have permanently assigned desks) becomes
more common, isn't the end of the employee and boss' physical proximity near at hand?
That implies a need for new and different management techniques, anyway, and these
will be equally applicable to telecommuters.
But we’ll start with the more cautious responses from our friends.