Archive for the ‘teleworking’ Category

The “Enabling” Remote Working Conundrum

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

In order for office workers to be able to work remotely, what do you need? The first answer usually given is “broadband”. Broadband is the life blood of remote working, no question about that. Once you’ve got your high-speed Internet connection, the next thing you need is secure access to your organisation’s data and applications. This is where remote access tools, virtual desktops and virtual private networks come in.

Now the remote worker has all of the systems he/she has in the main office as their remote office. Thanks to technology, they now are now no longer commuting to sit in front of a PC – they can do it without the commuting. They can save on gas/petrol, have a better work-life-balance and their employers can save on office space, lighting and heating to boot.

The problem is that there is more to office work than just the technology – there are people. People have roles and people have jobs to complete. People interact with each other. In the office environment, there are a multitude of roles, for individuals, teams and managers. Managers can easily determine how a piece of work is progressing – sometimes even without asking. Employees know when they’re well thought of and their work is appreciated.

In the remote office, things are different. There’s little or no human interaction except phone calls, email and IM. As a manager, it’s easy to forget about the person working from home today. As a remote worker, it’s easy to forget about the work that has to be done today. Managers find it difficult to “feel” how something is progressing and workers get very little feedback on how they’re doing.

Thus to be “enabled” for remote working, doesn’t mean a person is actually working and doesn’t mean that their manager considers them as part of the team. Solving this isn’t trivial. Some solutions suggest that the remote worker should spend time and effort on being more responsive when out of the office. This entails fast replies to emails, more regular phone updates and IM chats.

This seems counter-productive to me. Just for starters, working remotely shouldn’t incur more effort. However, many remote workers opt for this to justify the fact that they are working remotely.

This is the problem that we at RWorks are addressing – how to make sure a (remote) worker remains key to the success of an organisation while at the same time making sure an organisation gets the very best from its employees. We’re not about “enabling” remote working, we’re about making it it a success.

Posted in e-working, flexible working, remote working, technology, teleworking, virtual working, work-life balance | No Comments »

RWorks Focuses on Remote Working Advocates Part 1 – John Berry and remembers ‘Snowmageddon’, Winter 09/10

Monday, March 8th, 2010

In his nomination statement before the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, in March 2009, before his appointment as Director of the Office of Personnel Management was confirmed, John Berry stated that ‘we need to provide competitive pay and benefits, healthy model workplace environments, and sensitivity to employees’ responsibilities to family and loved ones’.

The following month, Berry issued a news release announcing an ambitious and comprehensive plan to significantly increase the number of American federal workers who work from home. At that time, just over 5% of America’s 1.9 million Federal employees were teleworking (103,000 employees).

The news release states that ‘ Increased adoption of telework in Federal offices across the country…would have tremendous economic and social value. These programs would enable the uninterrupted delivery of government services if employees were instructed to work from home due to natural disaster or conditions that threaten human health, including concerns related to the spread of influenza. To facilitate agency business during emergencies, managers have authority to implement new telework agreements to the fullest extent possible’.

This obviously allows for improved Continuity of Operations Planning (COOP) .

Less than a year later, Washington D.C. found itself under several feet of snow, nick-named ‘Snowmageddon’ by President Barack Obama, as the dreadful weather conditions all but shut down the city.
On Wednesday 10th February 2010, John Berry was interviewed on 1500 AM Federal News Radio. It was his birthday that day, and President Obama had called him that morning to wish him a ‘Happy Birthday’. The conversation between President Obama and John Berry then turned to the hot topic of teleworking, because despite the fact that the Federal Government had been closed for several days, both men were delighted that approximately 30% of federal workers were managing to do their work remotely, from home.
Berry says during this interview that both himself and President Obama have realised that the snowstorms created a ‘watershed moment for the importance of teleworking….it will grow from here’, and also that  ‘Technology does work…it does advance, and the government have taken advantage of that and it can only get better. Technology allows us to be unchained from our desk, and unchained from the office setting, and still get the job done’.


To listen to the entire interview, go to:
http://ow.ly/165TK

Posted in American federal workers, Barack Obama, COOP, John Berry, Office of Personnel Management, Snowmageddon, technology, teleworking | No Comments »

Remote Worker Performance Analysis RWorks- A Missing Link in the Productivity Paradox

Monday, March 1st, 2010

The OECD defines productivity as ‘the ratio of a volume measure of output to a volume measure of input’.
By extension, workforce productivity is the amount of goods and services that a labourer produces in a given amount of time. However, as well as being simply quantative, many authors now agree that in order to be truly meaningful, the definition of productivity needs to encompass concepts such as quality changes, innovation, and efficiency.
So, what is your return on investment? How much ‘bang’ are you and your organization getting for your ‘buck’? Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent globally in investing in IT, and after growing strongly in the 1960’s, there was an alarming slow-down in productivity increases in the 1970’s and 1980’s, prompting the famous statement in 1987, by Robert Solow, a highly esteemed American economist and nobel laureate that ‘you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics”.

This concept is sometimes referred to as the Solow computer paradox, but is now more popularly known as the Productivity Paradox, following an article by Erik Brynjolfsson from MIT in 1992.

Simply put, the productivity paradox is that there has historically been a massive discrepancy between the amount of investment in IT and the productivity returned. This has implications at organizational, national and global levels. It poses the question: why has the enormous investments in IT not historically resulted in increased productivity in organizations beyond a certain level?

‘Organizational Linkages: Understanding the Productivity Paradox’ (1994) is one of the very many books, research projects and articles that are available on this particular topic.

http://www.nap.edu/

In Chapter 5, William Ruch recognises the complexity of the relationships between the productivity of the individual worker and the total performance of the organisation.

He states that ‘ within the organization, individual workers performing specific jobs form the base level of all productive endeavour’. He illustrates this using the diagram below:

Figure 1- The Goal Alignment Model

This diagram has thought processes travelling laterally and vertically, but to choose one element for now:

Reading horizontally across the bottom of this diagram, the Goal Alignment model indicates that the individual and group productivity results would sum to the productivity of the next higher business unit, and ultimately to the productivity of the organization.

And so it can be seen that individual worker performance is essential to the overall performance of the organisation. When those individual workers are remote workers, does this create a whole lot of issues? Not really.. because whether the worker is right there in front of you in head office, or in their virtual office 100 miles away, the issue is the same – the need to measure individual-level productivity.

In RWorks, we have addressed this by allowing:

  • Workers to see their own productivity at all times
  • Managers to see the productivity of individuals and of the entire team

For example, when a worker is assigned a task, RWorks determines when they are working on that task, how much time they spend on that task, what tools they are using to complete the task, and also updates the progress information for the project. In turn, managers can see instantly the detailed productivity of an individual worker, or the progress of an entire team on all of their assigned tasks.

In Chapter 6 of the book mentioned above, D.Scott Sink and George L. Smith Jr. state that this measurement and analysis of individual-level productivity is of paramount importance.

They write that productivity measurement:

  • provides specific direction, and guides the worker towards productive activities,
  • that a measurement system provides a means to check progress towards the objective, which can be additionally a major part of the employees evaluation leading to rewards or disciplinary action,
  • that the examination of trends helps to identify problems before they become crises and permits early adjustment and corrective action,
  • that productivity measurement provides information on costs, time, output rate and resource usage to allow decision making,
  • and finally that productivity measurement supports innovation. This is because productivity analysis combined with cost data aids in the evaluation of proposed changes to existing products or processed and the introduction of new ones. This is one of the primary foundations for the continuous improvement efforts that are both popular and necessary for survival in business firms today.

I have written in my previous article that remote working has many benefits for employees and employers, that it  is on the increase, and I highlighted the challenge of geography in managing a remote team. A really effective communication system incorporating remote management software such as RWorks, is of paramount importance to doing this successfully. The measurement of individual and group productivity is a key part of that communication system, relaying information to the worker about how they are spending their time and what progress they are making on their assigned tasks, and also relaying very detailed information to the manager about how the various projects are progressing.

In using an effective system of measuring worker performance analysis such as RWorks, intuitive software is employed to remove another barrier to successfully employing workers remotely .

Posted in Uncategorized, flexible working, telecommuting, teleworking, virtual working | No Comments »

Remote Leadership-Are you ready for the challenge of Geography?

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

Remote working, flexible working (where an employee works remotely some of the time), virtual working, e-working, telecommuting…it is happening, its commonplace and it is on the increase.

The benefits of remote working are many and varied, for both the organisation and the employee. Not only has remote working demonstrated significant cost-saving benefits for companies in reduction of deskspace, equipment, running expenses and real estate costs, and also higher levels of productivity , but now increasingly remote working is used as an incentive to retain skilled staff and attract new talent.

For employees, remote working has the immediate advantage of the absence of long commutes, and remote workers report a better work-life balance, and greater job satisfaction.

However, with the benefits of implementing a remote working programme in your organisation, there are challenges, and these benefits can only be enjoyed by identifying and meeting these challenges head- on.
Telecommuting, virtual working, remote working- Whatever you choose to call it, the challenge is this- you as a project manager or team leader cannot walk out of your office and see your team at work. Your team has been separated and is situated in virtual offices in remote locations. They are working in their own homes in the same city as head office, in other cities, possibly even in other countries internationally.

In actual fact, where they are is absolutely and totally irrelevant. The distance between a manager and members of a remote team may be 1 mile or 10,000 miles, and the challenges are the same.
The problem requiring a solution is lack of face-to-face interaction in the office environment, both between managers and employees, and between the employees themselves. There are well documented issues around trust, communication, consistency, collaboration, focus, security and career advancement, among others.
With the ongoing upsurge in remote working, managers must adapt their skills accordingly.
‘Remote leadership is not rocket science-it is more difficult. A leader must possess the passion, wisdom and tenacity to prevail’, ( Kennedy Group, 2006). The article highlights the fostering of trust-based relationships as the best way to build performance across distance, and cites geography as a main enemy of leading a virtual team, as it ‘makes individuals see themselves as separate from one another’.
The author emphasises the vital role that the remote leader has in re-defining the team dynamic so that geography is removed as a barrier to effective team work. A really effective communication system is seen as key.
The article recommends periodic face-to-face meetings to develop team unity, that each team members role and accountabilities by very clearly defined at the outset and reviewed at intervals, and a total communication system with agreed mechanisms for the different types of information. For example, e-mail can be used for routine announcements,updates, accomplishments, ideas and learnings; audio-conferencing for regular, informal, non-agenda meetings for the whole team to problem solve and share ideas; and conflict or misunderstanding should never be addressed by e-mail or voice-mail, but always by direct contact.


And so it is clear that effective Remote Leadership lies in the marriage of human resources and technology- excellent people and project management skills, and keen utilisation of a really well designed communication strategy, where hardware and intuitive soft ware are employed to your best advantage.
In stepping up to the plate as a Remote Leader, for every challenge, there is a solution. In implementing appropriate solutions, your employees, your team leaders and project managers, and your whole organisation, will reap the many rewards that remote working delivers.

References
The Kennedy Group: ‘Remote Leadership’, 2006. Accessed 17th January 2010.

Posted in e-working, flexible working, remote leadership, remote working, staff retention, telecommuting, teleworking, virtual working, work-life balance | No Comments »