Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 23:36:47 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Mike Meyer <mwm-dated-1014858101.df197b@mired.org> Cc: Mike Doyle <relyod@cooperationireland.org>, chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Telecommuting Message-ID: <3C77468F.F047A13C@mindspring.com> References: <3.0.5.32.20020222105729.025fd568@199.107.2.1> <15478.59893.30992.429026@guru.mired.org>
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Mike Doyle <relyod@cooperationireland.org> types: > My boss has just asked me to come up with a proposal to start allowing > our staff to telecommute. I have to have an interim proposal by > the middle of next week. If any other people out there have done this, > what are the issues I need to be aware of ? You need to ask some questions about your organization, and you need to know what to do with the answers once you get them, before you can give a plan. You are probably going to need more time, or at least, have a staged plan. Here are my rules of thumb, and how at least one staged plan that I thought was successful actually worked. -- There are people who can telecommute, and people who can't. There are managers that can manage people who telecommute, and managers who can't. What's right for your organization really depends on your managers, and the people that are under them. Some people will simply not be productive if they don't have someone breathing down their neck, or if they don't have a work socialization that they expect, e.g. they may have to see other people being productive for them to be productive, or they may simply need a synergy to be effective (sales is often this way: competition between two people within an organization is often more profound than competition with an outside, but less personal organization). There are very few technical jobs for which I would be willing to hire someone who I didn't believe was at least capable of contributing while telecommuting. Regional facetime for sales also requires that ability, or at least partial time in common with internal competition (e.g "salesman of the week/month/quarter", etc.). Likewise, there are managers who are used to managing contractors, and who are simply constitutionally unable to deal with not having weekly or even daily progress reports, counted off against a Microsoft Project schedule in hours. Other managers feel as if it's their job to run interference with the organization, and act as a buffer between outside demands and their employees, and obtain resources, etc., necessary for the employees to do their jobs effectively. Obviously, though, this can be taken to an extreme, as well. Personally, I would not hire someone who needed to be micro-managed. I would also not hire a manager of contractors -- one who felt the need to micromanage -- unless I was dealing with serious budget constraints on the people I could hire in under them, or if I were indeed utilizing contractors. For anything having to do with bottom line value of the company, production of intellectual property, job roles requiring the building of expertise, etc., I simply would not hire contractors, since at the end of the day, you don't own anything tangible, if all your organizational knowledge is invested in people instead of process, or if your ability to reproduce your product walks out the door every 6 months. There are valid reasons for ISOs. This may not seem like an answer to your question, but it is a necessary prefix to the answer. In order to come up with a plan that is correct for your situation, you have to know ahead of time about the employees, and the managers to whom they will be reporting, and how they will react to reduced lines of communication. The easiest way to start without a huge investment of resources is to set aside a couple of offices. The people who are put in these offices are "telecommuters". They are not permitted to interact with other people at work, except by phone, email, etc.: means available to them via telecommuting. If you plan to permit presence at meetings via conference calls, then they should attend via conference calls, even though they are technically in the same building. If there are meetings where you would "fly in" or require mandatory physical attendence, then make that an "office day". Do *not* permit them to use the same office for the test, and for "office days" (for example, if you are allowing them 2 or 3 days a week telecommuting, then if there is a laptop involved, allow it to be moved, but if there's an important paper that was left in one place or the other, it doesn't get retrieved without a "time out", or at least points off). It is very important that shared lunches be disallowed for the test period, unless they plan on commuting in to socialize for lunch anyway, or lunch will turn into a meeting to work around the ground rules. If you have multiple doors, and fire codes permit it, you should consider seperating the offices set aside for this purpose from the rest of the company using cube walls or some other physical partitioning scheme. It's very important that you not hold the productivity of the employee, or their manager, against them for the test period, when it comes time to evaluate the employee. This also needs to be one of the ground rules. Doing it this way permits you several advantages over a "small test" for real telecommuting: o You can determine which people are telecommuters, and which ones can't really work that way, by each time they violate the ground rules of "not being there"; it's not necessary to tell them that that is what you are measuring, as long as you firmly repeat the ground rules up front. o You can determine the managers who are incapable of dealing with telecommuters, the same way. Managers who have to "look in" on the employees (the office door should be shut, and if ther is a window into the office proper, there should be blinds installed and drawn to prevent visual reassurance), or who feel the need for "face time" to be sure that they have communicated what they need to to the employee are not going to be satisfied with telecommuting employees. They will tend to evaluate them lower compared to other employees, and they will feel less regard for them than on site employees, when or if it becomes time to let someone go. Note: This is a risk that telecommuting employees should be aware of, as well. o Being in the "test group" is not considered a "perk" given only to the people chosen, since there's none of the physical advantages to actually telecommuting other than the decrease in lines of communication perhaps aiding productivity by allowing interruptions to be budgeted. This avoids the "why is XXX allowed to telecommute, but not me?!?", as well. o You can test all telecommuting employees, and all managers of telecommuting employees this way, and know if it will work. Realize that you will, minimally, need an ssh server, and may have to set up a full-on VPN, depending on how virtually local their machines need to be to the company network. This will also teach you about the resources you need (28k modem, ISDN, DSL, etc.) to permit a remote employee to get work done. I would be real tempted to include a "dummynet" as well, to simulate the lower available bandwidth... in fact, I highly recommend it. Place these as obstacles between the company network and the offices in which you are testing, so that the pain that they feel will be there before permitting physical telecommuting. After the "test", go back to the "at office" for a week. Then discuss with both the employee(s) and the manager(s), preferrably in a company or department meeting, so that all the employees and managers that might be included in the program, what worked, and what didn't work. Do it in that order and not as a white board of two categories, actually, or people will feel obligated to contradict each other on benefit vs. cost, which can be different from different points of view. Take into account the source (manager vs. employee), however. This will give everyone a better understanding of why you decide as you decide, as well as pointing out to people not offered the option to telecommute that it's not all a "bed of roses". Lastly, a lot of companies are looking at telecommuting for the wrong reasons; whether it's a budgetary thing for a non polluting tax credit, or whether it's so that you don't have to move a branch of the company, or the entire company, to where the work force needed exists, and can hire people in to work remotely that you can't hire in locally (I would fly these people in for a two week "at office" start period and a one week "test", using the local facilities, followed by another week "at office"), telecommuting is not a magic band-aid for cost-cutting or for getting rid of distractions, or for a regional skills shortage. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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