According to a recent study commissioned by Cisco, mobile workers are expected to account for a quarter of the world’s working population by 2009. With this in mind, how:
• Can your organization afford not to drive real performance from your remote workers?
• Can you even attract and retain the people you need if you fight this trend? – Who wants to work for a company that would take personal sacrifices for granted? Hours commuting could be used for personal and company productivity.
Here is my take on answering these questions; I think that it comes down to how you manage and measure the impact that your people are delivering. Simply put; manage potential, measure on output. Face time doesn’t explain real output from peoples’ efforts so you might as well just forget about it. You can’t manage what you can’t see, but do you see peoples’ work just because you see their faces in the office? I doubt it.
Of course there are tasks and times that completely merit people being physically together but not all tasks all the time. Would software that helps you align the goals and monitor performance be helpful for managers to focus on the goals and the execution of these? I think so. Individual contributors, irrespective of where they work and how they are technically being compensated, can get a clear line of sight and produce while being accountable for the output.
Our friends and research partners from the Future of Work are doing research into this area and Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham will unveil their knowledge on this topic in a SuccessFactors Research webinar on September 12.
A very great post from Max Goldman at SuccessFactors questions productivity and measurement in a remote work environment. As Generations X & Y increase their impact on the workplace it will become more critical for employers to support the trend of working from home as well as flexible schedules. Employers will have to invest in new technologies that allow for increased efficiency in collaboration. The technology is developing extremely rapidly to support these trends with the injection of Social Networking, Wikis, and other Web 2.0 technologies, companies will simply have to adapt. Once People are equipped with the technology to do their job more efficiently, they can begin to focus on how they can leverage technology as well as develop new technology to accomplish their goals more efficiently. As a result, People are asking themselves “if I figured out a new way for my company to do a 10 hour task in 1 hour, I should be able to take advantage of some of that time”. Companies that reward efficiency and innovation with flexibility will always be able to attract the best employees and will continue to outpace their competition. The trick is structuring your organization in a way that promotes efficiencies in processes and that allow People to allocate some of their time to improve on the technology surrounding those processes. Companies will find that with the proper structure and flexibility, employee productivity will increase even though the traditional 9 to 5, 40 hour work week will disappear.
What a great question Roderick is bringing up in response to my blog post here.
Are people sandbagging their productivity gains to make sure they get personal benefits out of it? Are people shy of making improvements since they don’t get any recognition for it?
First, thanks to Erik for plugging our work. We’ve published several white papers on distributed work that are available on our website. And we look forward to the webinar with SuccessFactors on September 12.
Second, in response to Roderick’s questions about people “gaming” productivity gains – sure, there’s always going to be some of that. But we are very confident, based on years of our own empirical research, that distributed or remote workers are consistently about 15-18% more productive than their office-bound colleagues.
That research focuses on individual performance standards mutually agreed on by the remote workers and their bosses. That’s the only way we know to track productivity and performance of knowledge workers. Each job, and each situation, is so unique that there are no general measures of knowledge worker productivity – and in my humble opinion, there shouldn’t be.
And yes, to make it work well, employers do have to invest in collaboration technologies. There’s no free lunch – you save a lot on workspace costs when you move to a distributed/touchdown work environment, but you’ve got be willing to put some of those savings back in to technology. But have no fear, in our experience companies embracing distributed work typically realize ROI’s of 50% and more on their total investment.
One more thing: the biggest barrier to more distributed work is the very real resistance of front-line managers, who don’t know how to manage people they don’t see regularly. There’s clearly a trust issue there, but it can be overcome with the right training and management oversight.