Telecommuting

Telecommuting, teleworking, remote working, distributed workforce; Call it what you will, the bottom line is that you have a group of workers who are not all located centrally in your office. It sounds like an old term and in fact telecommuting and teleworking were first coined decades ago. Actually doing this in a modern environment is becoming easier and easier, and indeed is being encouraged by governments and green advocates.

With the terrible floods in Brisbane and surrounds this week, our remote working policy has been fully tested. The office has been closed for the last 4 days so we’ve all been working from home (or in some cases, other people’s homes!). As pretty much all of our infrastructure is in the cloud, we have been able to continue working with barely any deviation from business as usual really. We have been talking about increasing our remote working time and when we review the week, it will be interesting to see how it changes our views and what is possible and reasonable.

But what does it mean to you and your company?

The biggest single factor restricting the growth of telecommuting is trust. Do you trust your staff to actually do what you are paying them for, when they are not sat in the next cubicle? Or do you expect them to be playing Farmville or Call of Duty? In the past, this would have been difficult but technology should be making this less of an issue. And I’m not talking about spy cameras!

So what do you need?

• Firstly I would say good staff but it’s not quite as simple as that. You need to foster a culture where your team are motivated to work for the company and understand its goals. How you do that is a topic for another day - though feel free to leave comments with your ideas and opinions. Communication is key. speak to the team, make sure they have the tools and information they need and understand the tasks they have been given. Even the most motivated and dedicated worker can tie themselves in knots when working alone by trying to figure things out where they would normally just ask their co-workers. So you need to make sure they have what they need or are able to ask for it.
• Secondly, you need a steady stream of work - interesting work as much as you can - to keep their attention. Communication comes into play here too. You really have to make sure that the team understands the tasks allocated and what outcomes are expected.
• Thirdly - and depending on the line of work you are in - some system of logging and tracking time. This is straightforward for us, as a percentage of our engineers time is charged to customers on an hourly basis, so the team has been drilled and drilled on how important it is to track time. And we have a software platform designed exactly for that. They understand that this is not to play Big Brother but that it is a necessity for the company to get paid.
• Lastly you will need systems. Your team needs to be able to communicate with you, with their co-workers and with your customers. These days this may be via mobile phone but you may also have a Voice over IP (VoIP) phone system that allows them to log in and handle phone calls in the same way as if they are in the office. They will need access to email, CRM, documents, etc. You may have web based applications for this or maybe a Terminal Server so your staff can access a full desktop experience that looks and feels just like their office desktop.

For me personally, I feel that being out of a noisy office increases my productivity. I can just get on with things and end up completing far more jobs out of the office than when in it. Downsides are a bit of a lack of visibility of what’s going on in the company and the office, and knowing that there are certain things that do just have to be done while in the thick of it.

Telecommuting is a no-brainer for me, at least on a part-time basis. How does it work for you?