Telework good for business

by Brenda Boughton

Whether you call it “telecommuting” or “telework,” a growing number of employees and their employers are calling it a very good idea.

At a time in the evolution of work when individuals are looking to reduce stress and enjoy more flexibility in their daily schedules, companies large and small are looking to go green, cut real estate costs, and improve productivity while keeping valued employees on the payroll. In some cases, telework has the potential to make all these things possible.

Telecommuting or telework, simply defined, is work done from home or a site away from the corporate office. While some jobs in today’s high-tech world can be performed completely offsite, it is more common for employees to telework for a portion of their work week.

“Telework is a concept that applies in a custom-fit way to employers and individuals,” says Bob Fortier, president of the Canadian Telework Association and Canada’s leading expert on the topic. “It’s not for everyone. But for a great many, and in increasing numbers, it is a very good option. It’s about giving people flexibility.”

And it’s often about family. For Ellen Kornelsen, a graphic designer with the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce, telecommuting allows her to have a career while being a mostly stay-at-home mom for her three young children. She works from home three days a week and is in the office for one. “It’s nice to be with the kids after school and not have to worry about child care in the summer,” she says.  “It’s also saved me a lot of money on child care, parking, work clothes, and other work-related expenses.”

For others, home is where the office is, each and every work day. Cathy Litchfield has worked at home for IBM for nearly 10 years as a communications manager supporting their global sales organization. She no longer thinks of herself as a telecommuter. “I simply work here in Winnipeg, doing a global job for IBM,” she says. “Once I moved into national and global roles, I was no longer working with local colleagues. It didn’t make sense to commute to an office where you didn’t work with anyone.”

IBM is at the cutting edge of telework. They believe people should be able to work anywhere at anytime with the right tools, and currently 32 per cent of their Canadian workforce is mobile. Their advanced information technology infrastructure–and their belief that employees can best determine how, where, and when their work is performed–has allowed them to be at the forefront of the telework wave.

Telework is really just in its infant stage. Fortier says our global business model still harkens back to the industrial revolution, when people left the agrarian lifestyle behind for life in the city where the work was. Now, the new values of the information technology revolution are clashing with those of that earlier age. We can choose to move back to the country if we want because we can bank, shop, get educated, find employers, and communicate with others without ever coming face to face with them. “We’ve come untethered,” he says. “We are seeing the tremendous impact of this on many fronts, and it’s bringing all kinds of change with it.”

Younger people, those who have grown up with “instant everything,” are partly driving this change, says Jim Brodie, IBM’s Manager for Mobility and Workplace on Demand Programs. “Social networking, plug and play, is how they grew up and how they would prefer to work. It’s an issue of employee retention and attraction of skills.”

So if there is still some resistance by business to the telecommuting idea, it is rapidly diminishing, as increasing numbers of people and their employers reap the benefits. Recent studies, including a large meta-analysis conducted by Ravi Gajendran and David Harrison at Penn State in 2007, debunks the claim that telework is bad for business. The study, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, reviewed 46 studies involving nearly 13,000 employees. In their results, Gajenran and Harrison identified several positive results of working from home.

These benefits include more autonomy for the employee, less work-family conflict, reduced stress, and increased job satisfaction. One can easily see the ties between these variables. With more control over when and how work gets done, employees minimize the common stresses associated with being away from home for much of the day. These benefits also make teleworkers less likely to quit their jobs.

The study also found that teleworkers are more productive. Litchfield agrees. “You get to focus intently, without the distractions of the office,” she says.

Popular belief holds that telework is damaging to the worker-supervisor relationship, and that it hurts the career prospects of workers who aren’t visible to those making the promotion decisions. Untrue, say Gajendran and Harrison. The supervisor-staff relationship is often improved, and, perhaps because telecommuting staff are more productive, their chances for career advancement remain unhindered.

The study did uncover a downside. Employees who worked away from the office for three or more days a week reported that their relationships with coworkers suffered.

Litchfield advises that you can’t expect your manager to make telecommuting work for you. She books regular one-on-one time with her manager “to discuss work and developmental considerations including successes, roadblocks, and what’s working or not working.” She recommends building virtual relationships and sustaining your visibility by taking on projects that keep you front and centre–ones where you work with other executives or teams.

As the number of virtual workplace relationships grows, carbon footprints get smaller. At IBM, where videoconferencing and instant messaging often replace the face-to-face, “travel budgets are today quite lean,” says Brodie. IBM needs less and less real estate as fewer employees travel to an office, “so the environmental savings accrue.” He says an effective mobility program can reduce a corporation’s carbon footprint by 26 per cent.

A mobile workforce is also a benefit in times of global crisis. Having people work from the safety of their homes is good for employees and the organizations they work for. “Pandemic planning is grabbing headlines these days with H1N1,” Brodie says. “Not having a working mobility program in place is becoming an “inaction” that many CEOs are not prepared to gamble with.”

Given these global considerations, governments in Europe, Japan, Australia, and the U.S. are stepping up to help organizations develop telework programs. “They realize it’s important for the environment, transportation problems, emergency preparedness, and regional economic positioning,” says Fortier. They work to promote the benefits, set targets, and are active in education. In Japan the Prime Minister has set a goal of doubling the country’s teleworking population by the end of next year–to 20 per cent.

Meanwhile, here in Canada, the most wired country on earth, governments for the most part “sit knitting by the guillotine,” says Fortier. Although companies are increasingly pursuing telework as an option, communities could reach critical mass much more quickly with government input, he explains.

“It’s a great benefit for a country, a community, a province, to promote this. It’s important. We have the tools to do this. We can do this, and we can do it now.”