Put your firm on the road to telecommuting success

In this edited excerpt from the book, Anywhere Working and the New Era of Telecommuting, co-author Yvette Blount discusses some of the factors to consider when a firm offers employees the chance to work flexibly via telecommuting.

In Australia, organisations including PricewaterhouseCoopers, Telstra, the Australian Stock Exchange, ANZ and Westpac have introduced flexible work policies that effectively allow workers to choose where and how they work.

These organisations have introduced policies that, in effect, mandate flexible work arrangements, thereby removing discretion from individual managers for rejecting a worker’s request for a flexible work arrangement. Mandating flexibility is a significant trend because the Fair Work Act provides managers with the power to refuse a flexible work request on reasonable business grounds such as the arrangement being too costly; impracticalities around changing other employees’ working arrangements or hiring new employees to accommodate the request; the request resulting in a significant loss of productivity or having a significant negative impact on customer service.

Information and communication technology has provided the flexibility and freedom for employees to work anywhere by facilitating communication and collaboration with colleagues, managers and clients. Once the technology issues are resolved, the non-technical issues need to be managed for ‘anywhere working’ to gain traction. It needs to be integrated into the business strategy to be successful. Here are some issues that need to be addressed.

Framing the job design

Human resource management practices and policies are essential for the successful management of workers, regardless of the work location and the location of the client. Specifically, job design is an essential component for anywhere work.

One of the most important components of job design is the level of job autonomy employees get and their freedom to make decisions about work. Remember, if job autonomy is high, employees experience a higher level of job satisfaction. A high level of job autonomy is associated with enhanced worker well-being, including improved vitality, psychological flexibility and self-realisation. However, jobs with tasks that interlink with other team members may not be suitable for anywhere working, or at least not all the time. Aside from job tasks, the design of the telecommuting arrangement should also consider the level of autonomy of a job, the skills required, the workload, career progression and performance management, the cultural context as well as the individual characteristics of workers.

Avoiding worker isolation

Mitigation of social and professional isolation and employee engagement may be resolved by offering workers two or three days of home-based telework a week rather than full-time telework. Another strategy is to include remote workers in team meetings and events. Alternatively, co-working hubs may be an option for some organisations and workers. A caveat here is that work that involves confidential or otherwise sensitive information may not be suitable for co-working environments.

Combatting overwork

Overwork may be a consequence of anywhere working, particularly if employees work from a home office, because the physical and temporal boundaries of working in a central office are removed. Such overwork may harm workers and families. Management has a significant role to play in ensuring that there are policies in place for shutting down technology, or following a strict routine to manage tendencies for overwork. Researcher Josh Fear has used the term ‘polluted time’ to refer to periods or moments where work pressures or commitments prevent someone from making the most of their non-work time. When working at home is a requirement or a constraint on workers, it does not necessarily contribute to work-life balance. That is, anywhere working may only support work-life balance if it is offered as a choice.

Analysing the benefits

The true benefits of telework may be difficult to ascertain. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that not all hidden costs are taken into account when measuring benefits.   Benefits include decreased office costs, employee retention and less sick leave.  One key benefit cited is increased productivity, however measuring the productivity of teleworkers is problematic. It may be that the employees with an anywhere working arrangement may already be motivated and productive.

Many studies have reported that increased productivity because of fewer distractions and greater autonomy is a driving factor in adopting anywhere working programs. However, the reasons for this reported increase in productivity may be due to longer work hours (because the employee is using the commute time to work instead of doing something else) and work intensification. Also, productivity improvements are mostly self-reported, so they are open to critique. Another reason may be that some managers may be more experienced at managing remote workers.

Other points to consider:

• Management of employee availability expectations – there should be clear communication policies that explicitly outline the expectation of a worker’s availability on their mobiles and email, particularly after hours. This is particularly important for organisations that supply laptops, mobiles and tablets to their employees.
• Appropriate email policies – email is an example of a technology that can be overwhelming, particularly if workers have email notifications turned on. Is there an expectation to respond immediately? Should emails be checked on weekends and after hours? What are the responsibilities of managers to ensure that technologies such as email are used appropriately? Some organisations are setting clear policies for email use in the workplace. For example, in 2012, European auto company Volkswagen, for some workers in Germany, stopped its Blackberry servers 30 minutes after an employee’s shift and restarted them again 30 minutes before the employee’s shift. In January this year, in what shapes as a significant move, France passed a law establishing workers’ “right to disconnect”. The law requires companies with more than 50 employees to establish hours when staff should not send or answer emails.
• Impacts on work-life balance – being connected anytime, anywhere can be detrimental to work-life balance. Many employees working from home try to distinguish between home and work by allocating specific times to work activity and a separate area for work. Bring your own device (BYOD) environments where workers use their own technology to access organisational databases and email raises some organisational policy issues, including privacy (who can access data on the smartphone/tablet/laptop) and how much access the IT department has or should have to personal devices. For example, does the IT department have access or authority to monitor communications and wipe the phone or tablet if it is lost or stolen?

From a strategic perspective, adopting anywhere working across the organisation can improve emergency response and prevention. Importantly, home-based telework has been used by organisations and governments for continuity of services during disasters and extreme weather events.

Although processes and systems to support anywhere working are important, what is more important is line managers’ skills in developing a telecommuting culture that can lead to successful organisational and worker outcomes.

Yvette Blount is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University’s Faculty of Business and Economics. She is the co-author of Anywhere Working and the New Era of Telecommuting. Click here for more details on the book.