Ann All of IT Business Edge recently reported on how small and medium size businesses (SMB’s) are less likely to have employees telecommute than are larger companies. According to a recent survey by Citrix Online, 40 percent of SMB’s allow employees to work from home, compared to 76% of larger companies. It seems that the main barrier in the way to doing this is technological: while employing remote workers can lead to higher productivity and job satisfaction, it also requires the expenditure of initial investment in the proper technology to support these workers. Without being able to fully and securely integrate into the office remotely, telecommuting is often not worthwhile. Correspondingly, according to the survey cited above, 43% of SMB’s have the technology framework in place to support remote workers, compared with 76% of larger businesses.  As the different technologies needed for telework become cheaper and easier to implement, the percentage of small businesses supporting telecommuting should rise.

In the meantime, if you work for a small or medium-size business and want to pursue telecommuting, consider the following options:

• Build up the trust - Small businesses that are not used to employees working from outside of the office will tend to be more reluctant to let you out of their sphere of influence than would be a larger corporation that has internal policy and technology built to do just that. Although the company can theoretically gain in productivity from employees working where they are most comfortable, they also risk more by giving up on direct oversight. To overcome this, give them good reason to be able to trust you in the scenario where you would be working from outside of the office. Only with this trust in place will they feel more comfortable investing in the technology needed to make it work.
• Do your own research - Though a small business may be more open to change and innovation than a corporate behemoth that has dozens of people employed to set corporate policies, and thus a small business may be the ideal candidate to make the move towards supporting telecommuting, small businesses are also less likely to have extra man hours available to set up and support telecommuting policy and technology. If you feel that it is appropriate, take the initiative yourself. Research the pros and cons of telecommuting for your company and for your position. Look into the different technology requirements (you would be surprised how many free or relatively inexpensive solutions are out there that can help make the technology work for you). Present your findings to your managers. This saves them the work, shows them that it may be a very worthwhile proposition for them financially, and is an indicator that you are taking it seriously.
• Start Small - There is no need to go all-in from the start. Suggest that you start telecommuting one day a week. Keep a log of how your work is going, how it affects your productivity, commute and overall job satisfaction. One day every week or two is much more palatable as it does not require that every last piece of technology be in place and allows management to see first-hand how it is affecting you.

Hunter Arnold states that telecommuting is not all that it is hyped up to be and that it will really lead to less productivity than if the same people had gone into an office instead of going home:

So many modern workers are “telecommuting” or “working from home” that these days that it seems like no one shows up to the office at all.  If working at home worked was as productive as coming to the office and helped me avoid traffic, I’d be the first one to jump on the band wagon. But the problem is, there isn’t much evidence  that “working from home” or “virtual officing” is even close to as effective as showing up at the office.

Why is this?

Despite my determination and drive, I’m the first to admit that if I’m working from my kitchen, I’m probably not as productive as I am in the office.  When I’m in the office, I’m more likely to be focused and committed. There’s no doorbell or TV or pantry to distract me.  More importantly, I’m surrounded by my contemporaries, who stimulate and challenge me to give my work my all.  So why is working at home so popular?  Because it’s a major excuse not to work at all.

I would like to respectfully disagree with this blanket assessment of productivity in home vs. office as well as the conclusions that are reached. There are definitely situations and industries where people are better off in the office. When person-to-person interaction is required, there is no substitute for being the same room as a coworker. And even in industries where telecommuting might make sense, if you are someone who requires being “surrounded by your contemporaries, who stimulate and challenge you to give your work your all” in order to be productive, then you definitely should not work from home.

(And if as Hunter suggests, everyone who telecommuted worked from their kitchens, than I would have to agree with many of his assessments. A kitchen is not a place that is conducive to reducing distractions or providing an environment suitable for working productively. However, there are other places in the house where a person can work, and there are strategies and methods that one can use in order to create a place in your home that can serve as a proper work environment.)

However, if you are someone who wastes 4-5 hours a week in worthless meetings, 1-2 hours a week rifling through your desk, 5-10 hours a week in a car shuttling back and forth from the office; If you are someone who may only really accomplish 1.5 hours of solid work a day, and for you, one of the main sources of wasted time is your commute and the office environment (unfortunately, but not everyone is lucky enough to have a job and coworkers who consistently stimulate and challenge you to give work your all), and if you are in a job which permits it and you yourself are able to handle it, then by telecommuting, you will almost certainly be able to achieve higher levels of productivity and job satisfaction than if you were at the office.

Rameikis writes about some of the social aspects of work that she feels are lacking for telecommuters (my emphasis):

Working from home and conducting all of your business by phone and through email is not an easy thing. For all the fact that telecommuting has been touted as the way of the future since the early 80s, industry has been very slow in developing effective attitudes, strategies and policies for creating a environment where effective working relationships can be both built and maintained over long distances and across time zones (where some team members are going to bed just as others are getting up).

What invariably suffers from the fairly outdated management principles still in practice is the sense of community. There is no water cooler. No photocopier or coffee station. Developing and maintaining personal connections with the people you work ‘beside’ is not nearly as natural when you have never actually met as it is when you can meet face to face on an almost daily basis. The team building and moral boosting plans they come up with invariably require proximity: you must work at head office to participate in any of them, which leaves the remote workers (more than half of the company’s employees) feeling like second class citizens within the corporation.

I can definitely identify with what Rameikis is talking about here. In some ways, there really is no substitute for face-to-face contact. So much of communication is based on visual clues that even if you make it a point to speak on the phone with colleagues (instead of using email and IM exclusively) you will never have the same level of personal connection with your coworkers than if you were sitting next to them in the same room. (I do not have so much experience with video conferencing, but I have been told that the same holds true there as well).

While chatting on IM is nice, I do not think that this problem will be easily solved, even if some “outdated management principles” are changed to fit some of the needs of today’s remote worker. For the time being, it is something that a person has to be aware of if they are going to be working outside of the office for an extended amount of time. And if you need it, it is up to you to find some other type of social outlet that you would have otherwise sought at the water cooler or coffee station.

John Wesley writes (Why the 9 to 5 Office Worker Will Become a Thing of the Past, found via War-N) about how the traditional work day (”9-5″) is very inefficient for many of today’s workers, and ends up with less productive, less satisfied employees.

A continuous 8 hour work day is a relic of the past. It makes sense for physical labor and manufacturing work, but with information workers it doesn’t account for the mental energy cycle…In the case of the modern information worker, nearly all tasks involve creative or strategic thinking…

I can’t speak for all workers, but I’ve observed that productivity levels generally peak twice a day — first thing in the morning and shortly after lunch. The most productive period is the beginning of the day. People are capable of creative tasks like writing and solving complex technical problems. After a couple hours of intense work, energy levels drop and workers downgrade to less demanding tasks like responding to email and tinkering with existing creations. Towards the end of the cycle, the mind is so cluttered and drained that workers resort to “work related activities” that appear productive but don’t contribute to the bottom line. The afternoon cycle is similar but the productivity peak isn’t as high. For different people the peaks and valleys will vary, but overall I’d estimate only 3-4 hours a day could be classified as highly productive. This number isn’t caused by slacking. You can’t force an information worker to be highly productive when the energy isn’t there.

While the 9-5 work day is a relic of manufacturing labor, it does also make sense if there is a need for people to all be present at one location at one time. (Though I do remember a partial solution at a company where I once interviewed: Everyone had to work 8 hours a day, and everyone had to be present on-site between the hours of 11am and 2pm. Thus there is a time when everyone can have meetings, and there are also accommodations in place for those who are early or late risers.)

Wesley suggests as a solution that the work day should be planned around times when the worker’s mental energies are at their peaks. This means that the 8 hours may not be consecutive, and will most probably be scattered in bursts throughout the day. As a computer programmer, I personally find this to be very true - I often find myself reading blogs (or playing DTD) during the middle of the day not as a way to avoid work, but rather as a way to regroup my mental energy after one task, in preparation for the next.

The solution that makes the most sense is a remote work arrangement because it reduces employer costs and allows employees to adjust their work schedule to their mental energy cycle. When a worker becomes mentally fatigued, they can go off the clock and engage in recharge activities that are personally productive like exercise or relaxation. When energy returns, the worker can start working again at a high level, effectively cutting out the low productivity period of the cycle. Employers don’t pay for unproductive time and employees get to work in a more natural pattern that adjusts to their personal lives.

A good point is made at the end of the article that the biggest barrier to larger scale adoption to telecommuting is inertia and office politics. I would contend though that there will always be certain industries that are better suited towards telecommuting (and outsourcing), such as computer programming, and certain industries that will never fully transition to this (hospitals, psychologists, universities and schools, power plants, manufacturing, etc).

Mike Gunderloy comments on how currently telecommuting is viewed as a suitable response to a disaster (like a freeway collapsing, in which case it may be necessary for people to telecommute to avoid unacceptable commutes to work), but in other cases is still looked down upon.

But I’m starting to wonder how long we’re going to have to watch telecommuting (and by extension, other forms of web work) be marginalized this way. Implicit in the “telecommute in case of disaster” message is the other message that no sensible person would do this in normal times. Given the choice, of course everyone would prefer to get up an hour earlier in the morning and join all the other commuters in their giant vehicles, jockeying for position in the multiple lanes of a still-intact I-80 to I-580 connector in order to have the pleasure of being tied to a desk, wearing a suit and tie, for eight hours.

What’s it going to take to make telecommuters first-class citizens of the working world, rather than the crazy uncles that most companies don’t really want to talk about?

He then goes on to describe business, government, technology and personal factors and tendencies that would need to change in order for this to occur. Read more on Web Worker Daily.

An article by Dave McGinn (The failed revolution) just published in the Financial Post of Canada (found via Northern Telework) talks about how overall, the telecommuting phenomenon is not living up to expectations:

THE PROMISE With the advent of the Internet and tools such as e-mail, the notion of getting up in the morning and actually travelling to some far-away office seemed totally unnecessary. Back in the ’90s, companies were buying that idea. “Telecommuting is hot among businesses small and large,” BusinessWeek magazine noted in April, 1999. Advocates were quick to point out telework’s many advantages: companies would save on reduced office space costs, employees would benefit by not having to waste time or money commuting to work and all parties would enjoy a more flexible, productive workplace.

THE REALITY While the Canadian Telework Association estimates that some 1.5 million Canadians now telecommute in one form or another, up from 600,000 a decade ago, working off-site still carries the stigma it did back in 1999: “There are many managers who think that if they let one person do it then they have to let everyone do it, or that telework doesn’t work for teamwork or that management is too difficult with people working off-site,” says Bob Fortier, CTA president. Even organizations that have instituted telework programs, including Bell Canada, Inco Ltd., Bank of Montreal and IBM, are aware of telecommuting’s bad reputation. “There is definitely still skepticism and a question of ‘are you really working?’” says Deenah Patel, manager of corporate diversity at IBM Canada.

It seems that the expectations were that telecommuting was a solution that could be applied to everyone in every situation. I think that this does not quite jive with reality. As more people become educated regarding the pros and cons of telecommuting, and in what situations, industries (and types of workers) it is best applied, look to see levels of disappointment lower.

HR Daily Advisor has posted an article by Jay Schleifer (Telecommuters: Why They’re Suing Their Employers) reporting that as telecommuting is becoming more popular (up 40% in a single year), instances of remote workers suing their employers are becoming more common.

The crux of the issue is control. Without direct on-site supervision, employers simply don’t have it over how many hours employees work, whether they’re following company policy, and even whether home offices are properly set up so that workers don’t lose client information or injure themselves using ergonomically unsound equipment.

The solution appears to be in thinking through and implementing a set of solid policies to resolve the issues above, at the start of any telecommuting relationship.

According to Schleifer, some of the different issues that should be fleshed out include:

• Wage and Hours - determine exactly when the employee should be working. How is this reported, how is overtime to be handled?
• Enforce work schedules - make sure that agreements about overtime (or the non-approval of overtime) are followed
• Travel Expenses and Equipment - who buys it, who is responsible for its maintenance, what will happen to it if the employee leaves the company, how much will be the company’s responsibility, how much the employee’s (ie: the company may by the computer, but what about headphones? desk? surge protector? phone bill?)
• Proprietary Information - how should this be controlled and safeguarded when stored primarily in the employees home
• ADA Compliance - If applicable, how will the company work with disabled employees who are working from home

Although the $65 million dollar lawsuits will tend to happen more with extremely large companies like IBM (who have much more ingrained bureaucracy), many of these issues are still extremely relevant for smaller companies who employee remote workers. While any good employer-employee relationship must be based on trust (and even more so for telecommuters), potentially disruptive issues like the ones described above are best handled at the outset rather than after the fact.

In a recent article published in Business Week (The Importance of Being There, reg. required), Jack and Suzy Welch write about one aspect of telecommuting that can be very detrimental for the development and success of one’s overall career:

But what you can’t do very well from home is lead. To lead, it’s no good blowing into town for important meetings and showing up at retreats. You have to muddle in the muck in between. People have to see how calm you stay in a PR crisis, how decent you are to new employees who don’t have the hang of things, how much you sweat during a tough deal, and how hard you work on a deadline without bitching and moaning. Or how you don’t do any or all of the above.

Which brings us back to face time. Companies rarely promote people into leadership roles who haven’t been consistently seen and measured. It’s a familiarity thing, and it’s a trust thing. We’re not saying that the people who get promoted are stars during every “crucible” moment at the office, but at least they’re present and accounted for. And their presence says: Work is my top priority. I’m committed to this company. I want to lead. And I can.

As they correctly point out, nowadays one can accomplish nearly every task related to one’s job (especially when closer to entry-level and farther away from management) away from the office. In some ways, one can even work better away from the hustle and bustle. But if you are interested in becoming a “leader” (as Welch was at GE), you will never be able to succeed if you are not there every day, being active and in-person.

Obviously, if management is your number-one career goal, then telecommuting can only be a short-term solution for you. However, for many types of jobs (especially those that are very techno-centered) and for people who are happy with what they are doing and do not have ambitions of leadership and management, telecommuting may very well turn out to be a much longer-term solution than described by the Welch’s in their article (Robert Mitchell makes a similar point in his blog post on the subject).