You Go, Frederick, Maryland

At the risk of getting distracted before I even begin, I feel weird about repeating the term “Board of Aldermen” in this day in age, even for a news story about a fantastic advancement--a thrust forward for the Remote Revolution. 

I suppose it’s because I don’t know exactly what Aldermen are. In my mind, such a collection of hoary elders could only function as middlemen for approvals on things like school board bond issues or whether or not the old lady who lives on the outskirts of town should be tried as a witch by water or fire.

My outdated, stereotypical understanding of Boards of Aldermen is obviously not keeping with their contemporary function. After all, a Board of Aldermen in the honorable hamlet (okay, well it’s actually a pretty damn big city) of Frederick, Maryland have just come one step closer to the Remote Revolution by tentatively passing a sustainability initiative that includes some broad measures to expand telework.

According to this news story that appeared today in the local Frederick News Post, a resounding “yes” ushered in a (tenuous) new age for the town and its greening plan—a plan that includes a telecommuting push. The initiative for Frederick, Maryland states the lofty goal of having “at least 20 percent of employees participate in alternative schedules or telecommuting” in addition to other more direct “green” ideas that include benefits for city employees who “walk, bike, or take mass transit to work.”

 While the “yes” was resounding about the plan, however, the exact degree of expected follow-through was not stated. Instead, these were all recommendations that are meant to serve as guiding lights in future policy. While these ideas are to be given special consideration, I am forced to wonder why so many cities, many of them larger than Frederick, Maryland, are not being more direct in their approach? What on earth are they afraid of?

In his vision statement about the economic revival, President Obama  vowed to make the United States government the gold standard for telecommuting. He wants to set the example and inspire cities and corporations to follow suit. An article by Liza Lowery Massey in Government Technology released this week speaks to the progression of this movement by declaring, “Telework, Telemeetings Gain Popularity in Government” and indeed, the federal government is finally moving toward flexible work schedules and increasingly, to full-time telecommuting when positions permit such a shift.

Good for you, Obama….President Obama. (I still like being able to type that and know it’s real).

I also know that there are many other American cities that do have concrete telecommuting agendas and I will discuss them here as their cases warrant. However, Frederick seems like an important case because it’s a smaller city and thus it seems like it would be slightly easier to implement such changes in working policy here than other places with measures in place such as Portland, Oregon and Salt Lake City, for example.

What size is your community and what’s happening in it? Does it have any remote working initiatives for city workers yet, and if not, isn’t it time you proposed it? Perhaps you can approach a rare Alderman and give him the scoop?

Telecommuting and the Lack of "Face-Time" = No Advancement?

Let me preface this discussion by saying that as far as the Remote Revolution is concerned, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Oh, and change. That too. After all, the two go hand in hand, especially these days when companies that have weathered the economic storm are afraid to kill the mojo by making any kind of switch to anything that’s not already tried, tested, and completely true in any organization-specific way.

While the typical employee—the worker—to be all Marxy and specific about it—is often preternaturally quick to grasp for positive change, if only to relieve a sense of the common or mundane, the employer is so often not. Corporations are superstitious about change. And rightly so. They have likely developed a solid system, a perfect model, an ideal path for progress and if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

Well then, hypothetical corporations, let me offer you some advice. You should fix it because it will save you money, it might even increase productivity and worker satisfaction and this, my organizational darlings, will make you more money.  But it’s time to backtrack to my original point—how quickly I get sidetracked by conversations with invisible CEOS of invisible companies.

Recently, a friend who keeps up with this website expressed some concerns about promoting telecommuting as a “cure all” for many of economic, environmental, and other societal woes. She suggested that the thoughts expressed here were too “big picture” and did not address the concerns that remote workers have quite enough. I agree that there is an obvious bias towards telecommuting here, and while the focus of RemoteRevolution is not on addressing specific remote-work-related issues for those already telecommuting, I feel that one of the things she mentioned is worth discussing here today.

Part of the reason I’ll be addressing the problem of telecommuting and career prospects now is because it does have some rather serious implications in the larger context of promoting a remote revolution. The issue is this: What should we do (or think) if more people decide they want to avoid telecommuting because they feel like face time is far too valuable to career advancement to risk leaving the office and losing it? How valid is this point?

While there are posts coming in droves in coming weeks about stagnant corporate culture and the refusal of many organizations to adapt to telecommuting as a resource-saving measure (if nothing else) this stagnation in old, on-site, traditional management structure ways of working makes her point a valid one indeed. Non-adaptive organizations require this face time because it’s still valued since nothing has come along to take its place. Companies that do not know how to value a remote worker because of a lack of experience will naturally be slower to recognize a telecommuting employee than an employee whom they see show up each day, work along a set schedule, and perhaps have lunch with. Right? Wrong? This is a complex debate…

Even though almost half of the 700 white-collar employees surveyed by a firm called Steelcase were permitted to telecommute (although the full or part time status is unknown) almost one-third of them said they were not willing to take advantage of the opportunity because they were afraid that it might prevent them from enjoying promotions and career advancement (Telecomweb.com). This is not because they were concerned about resume issues or how it might prevent them from finding another job, of course, but instead they worried that the lack of face time might have a negative impact.

Is this something that surprises you? Do you think that facetime with the boss and participating in the office or workplace culture on a full-time basis is directly tied to your possibility to advance? Or conversely, do you already (or can you envision according to your working situation) have evidence that you’ve advanced perfectly without the need for a lot of in-person interaction?

This is not really my area—I would love to know where you stand as it will inform my take on the corporate culture issue in coming posts.

Telecommuting Case Study : Hewlett-Packard and Remote Risk

Employers who are slow to adopt flexible work schedules or full-time telecommuting often have a list as long as your arm detailing the reasons why such a move just wouldn’t be feasible. Since the “well, we just can’t trust our employees to work without direct supervision” doesn’t stand up to the mountain of research that proves just the opposite, the next safest reason they proffer has to do with risk.

This argument is a lot more compelling. When employees are sitting like good boys and girls at their desks where they can be watched there is risk. There are standards. There are safety and compliance issues. But what happens when they take their work home? When they risk tripping over the cat on their way over to their Blackberry? Things do get complicated.

Telecommuting poses some unique problems to employers in terms of “corporate risk since employers are required by law to maintain a safe workplace for employees, even if it is at home” (Banham, 1996). One of the pioneers of the remote revolution, Hewlett-Packard understood this and has proven, over the course of many, many years, that these risks can just as easily managed with remote workers as for on-site workers. It just takes understanding of a different set of standards and the willingness to forge ahead, even if there’s no precedent.

As this telecommuting case study of Hewlett-Packard suggests, the company that led the way in the tenuous move to limited teleworking situations, addressed some of the more practical workers compensation concerns by looking at every possible angle of risk. That is the reason why they are the subject of today’s super-post. And let me warn you, this sucker is a little long.

One aspect of claim risk was that of ergonomics, especially as the increased use of computers in the workplace was leading to a drastic rise in the number of cases of hand and back problems. To seek mitigation of possible claims based on these issues, Hewlett-Packard instituted a number of innovative processes to help teleworking employees make healthy home office decisions. For instance, all employees who were to become telecommuters were given “solid ergonomic training” (Howard, 1998) and the company also provided these employees with access to a “home-office furniture program, which provides discounted, ergonomically certified furniture for those who work at home only occasionally or a furniture allowance for those who work at home full time” (Howard, 1998). Both of these programs are incredibly generous on the face, but are actually important measures to protect the company from possible claims in the future. Another measure of protection comes in a related process of ergonomic assessment which involves “a periodic photograph of the home-office arrangement, just to make sure there wasn’t a major alteration that makes the station less than ergonomically sound” (Howard, 1998).

During the experimental period of the Hewlett-Packard telecommuting trial, company officials and human resources managers examined the possibility of risk from all levels and implemented a written agreement that all employees who were part of the initial teleworking experiment were required to sign. During these initial experiments in the early 1990s, Hewlett-Packard was able to refine their telecommuting agreement to manage the host of complex issues inherent to the employee being at home during the day--outside of a carefully managed and monitored situation. One of the most critical issues that emerged involved general matters of time management and tracking and how to assist and record the amount of time worked without traditional measurements. To remedy the problem of not knowing how employees were managing their time, the company created specific elements in their telework agreement that instituted flexible policies that were of benefit to both the telecommuter and the organization.  Important elements of these agreements included, for example, measures for keeping track of an assigned number of hours the employee was to be working and what those hours were on a daily basis. The company made it clear to employees that they were not locked into a rigid 9 to 5 schedule, however an important component of the agreement was that the employee did need to set an exact schedule and follow through by working those hours at the same pace he or she might do if committed to the office (Howard, 1998).

The time and tracking component of the Hewlett-Packards telecommuter agreement is noteworthy because it directly addresses two of the most prominent concerns for employers and employees alike—time and progress as well as circumstantial scheduling potential. On the one hand, it grants employers some control over the nature of the workday and allows for firm expectations to be set based on the stated schedule. The benefits for the employee are in the area that is stated as being most important when employees crave a teleworking situation—flexibility. In this model, the crucial aspect of flexibility is retained for the employee while still allowing the employer some degree of control over the time spent working. With such an arrangement, a telecommuting parent could decide to take his child into a daycare center at 9:30, run errands and have breakfast and do some general housework until 11:00 a.m. and then begin working at 11:30. In the agreement the employee makes with the company, he begins at the firmly-enforced time of 11:30 and works until he needs his wife arrives home after picking up their child at 7:30. This is certainly not an ideal schedule for everyone, but given the employee’s home situation (perhaps his wife works until 7:00) the flexibility makes life far less stressful and more tailored to the unique circumstances of his family. The issue of telecommuting workers with families, however, comes with its own set of concerns for employers who are often worried about how the balance might be struck if the children are present during the time work is to be completed.

 One of the major provisions in the agreement Hewlett-Packard formed was that teleworkers could not expect the new situation of being at home to mean that they could pull children out of childcare situations and keep them at home in an effort to balance the two duties. According to an assessment of the company’s stance, “telecommuting is not supposed to be a substitute for dependent-care arrangements” (Howard, 1998). To remedy this possible cause for concern, Jerry Cashman, who served as Hewlett-Packard’s work and personal life manager during the experimental phase (and following the shift to an even larger number of telecommuting employees) and the team handling the agreement looked for policy solutions to help guide employees. Cashman stated that “a telecommuter can work within the parameters if dependent care if provided inside the home when the employee is working and the office is separated from the home-care situation” (from interview Howard, 1998) and furthermore, that a home office would have to be an area that was, in every respect, like the traditional office with quiet and organized areas and not being used as a dual child-watching and working station. In other words, by inserting this into the agreement, Hewlett-Packard was suggesting that teleworkers could enjoy time with their families, but this had to be in an area outside of the home office and outside of the hours set aside for work.

I should refresh here and mention that this is before widespread internet use with sophisticated employee and monitoring tools. Risk management for telecommuters is a matter of sense and understanding of what needs to be done but once employers get past the initial hurdle of figuring out these standards, it should be cake, no?

*UPDATE* Just saw I forgot to paste my references in here--will do so after chow tonight.

Looking Backward: Did You Predict a Remote Revolution?

Quick, think...

What were you doing in 1998?

Do you remember when television and radio commercials right around this time began talking about how you should visit their website, making sure to spell or iterate the entire “www-dot” to preface? 

As if you didn’t know, right? ... Well, actually, many people didn’t.

Do you remember the first time you heard of a company called Google? I do, and if I recall, my first thought was that it was a stupid name for a company that wanted to be taken seriously. Now I say it without a forethought and tend to use it more as a verb than the proper noun it is (was).

If you were relatively young, chances are good that within a few years you joined the majority and ushered in your own personal internet age and became, perhaps in part, closely allied with the digital natives of today. If you were not young and had already finished college or were swiftly climbing the ladder of your professional choice, you might have viewed the dawn on the internet age in a much different way.

In 1998, you might have been working in a traditional work environment where telecommuting meant using the phone to call someone to help you lug home a stack of paperwork.  Then again, you might have been involved in the developing technology boom and been one of the minority who had dial-up home internet access.  But I’ll bet that even then, if you did much work from home, paper was very likely involved, no?

What did you think the limitations of internet technology were in 1998? Can you remember? Do you recall feeling that we were on the verge of some paradigm shift or were you more ambivalent; seeing the rapid development of the web as something mysterious and interesting but dangerous and without real world value? Or was it just all about the dawn of a new era of vast, unfathomable numbers of websites offering free glimpses of porn that you used to have to pay good money for?

Whatever the case, human resources, business/management, sociology, and many other cross-disciplinary researchers immediately saw the influence this new age would have on the way we work. Some of them were so far off base that their assumptions were ridiculous, others were right on track and saw things clearly, but isn’t that always the case with futurism? And isn’t that what makes it so interesting to peruse the speculative?

In the 1998 book, The Wired Neighborhood (Yale University Press) author Stephen Doheny-Farina took a speculative view of the future of the internet for workers in a way that is creepily right on. From education to society to other elements of the shift to remote working, he made one astute observation after another. While some of his views are way dated (in case you decide to read The Wired Neighborhood) and some are rather far off, overall, he puts things quite well. One of his most compelling assertions is that “telecommuting completes the movement of social activities from public places to private ones. Radio and television brought home the entertainment that at first simulated the diversions of theatre, dance hall, pub, and nightclub, then either obliterated or transformed them. Every other electronic, from the video cassette tape recorder to interactive networked video games augments the capabilities of these diversions” ( 88).

I haven't seen the word "video cassette recorder" spelled out in its entirety in years. For that matter, I can't even remember saying the word "VCR" in recent memory either. Was 1998 really that long ago?

Over a decade later are we simulating our workplaces as well as our diversions or is the remote revolution against the idea of this sort of simulation? After all, in response to more teleworkers, co-working situations are springing up everywhere to recreate traditional work environments minus the rigid structure. Is there going to be a backlash? How does what’s happening now fit with your view in the late 90s—that is, of course, if you happen to remember those years.

Telecommuting Statistics : The Patchwork Process and Some Introductory Figures

There is no happy medium when it comes to statistics about telecommuters. Figures either tend to range on the side of the ridiculously high (often coming from sources that are actively trying to promote telework for a variety of reasons) or they are so low that seem out of touch and unaware that the internet has arrived and created a wealth of new opportunities for workers. Where then, does one look for reliable information and how can one best wade through the stream of constant conflicting numbers on this topic? The answer is not simple because solid data on this subject doesn’t come from one place. It takes scanning across multiple sources and then matching those figures up with less specific data, including census information and related demographic data.

If I had the resources and the funding (hello, angel investors) I would love to commission a five-part study I already have outlined that culls together several aspects of the telecommuting topic and come up with something that way. As it stands, most sources I have found do not provide the means by which they arrive at their information, which is deplorable. I guess that what I’m saying here is that you cannot ever count on one source for solid telecommuting numbers. To that end, I will provide new statistics here at RemoteRevolution as I find, verify, and consider them and you can do your own piecework putting it together in a way that makes sense and is pertinent to your needs.

The human resources organization WorldatWork, which examines many other issues related to labor—not just telework, released some striking figures in a report from February, 2009 that were based on a telephone-based survey conducted by Dieringer Research Group Inc. While I will discuss some of the potential issues with the data they produced in this study, it is nonetheless a good starting point, mostly because it does seem to strike that elusive happy medium that runs between bias, credibility, and process that many other web-based publicly-available studies (as opposed to those available through database/institutional access) do not have.

To preface, I must say that I am a bit disappointed that the WorldatWork / Deiringer study did not discuss potential limitations or provide a set of the questions used for the study to look for possible inroads for bias. I have looked at several studies that at first seemed bullet-proof, but found that some of the questions they used led to inevitable results. While this was most often the case on work-life balance questions related to telecommuting, I still would prefer to see the set of questions the respondents were asked since it’s damn hard to create objective surveys that garner objective results. No matter what you’re premises for questioning is.

Secondly, I am a little bothered by the relatively small sample size that eventually produces such large numbers. This survey interviewed just over 1000 respondents via phone using questions the reader is not privy to. Furthermore, this research was not based on a calling list of persons known to be employed somewhere, instead respondents were gleaned from a random dialing list. Again. Please take these telecommuting statistics for what they are. I should also mention that the idea of telecommuting for the respondents could mean anything from telecommuting one day per week to full-time, which is an incredibly wide margin of error for coming up with such dramatic, universal numbers.

I am by no means trying to poke holes in this study. After all, it succeeds in its patchwork process of census, demographic, and survey data, despite a small sample. If nothing else, it’s a good starting point for offering some sort of “where we’re at” in terms of telecommuting. Actually, despite its (perhaps overly) grandiose plan for the study, it is most successful when it reveals some of the smaller details about who is telecommuting rather than providing a fully accurate portrayal of the actual number of teleworkers.

All of the respondents for the survey were residents of the United States and when matched with key census data and other demographic factors, the results indicated that the there are roughly 17.2 million employee telecommuters, a number that went up a stunning 29 percent from 2006. Pay careful attention to the fact that these are employee telecommuters—this means that the number is presumably not including those who run their own businesses (for example, remote consultants, designers, developers, etc.) thus this number reflects how many people are employed by an organization that allows telecommuting.

To counter the wide margin of who is working (contract telecommuters, employee commuters, etc) the study noted that in “the five-year period since 2003, the total number of once-a-month telecommuters in the United States has risen by 43 percent, from 23.5 million Americans to 33.7 million” (WorldatWork.org). Another central finding in the study is that occasional telecommuting is on a sharp increase due in response to what they define as more high-speed internet locations offering access in more places, increases in fuel and transportation costs, and a greater willingness on the part of employers to “embrace work-life balance concepts” (WorldatWork.org).

One of the most fascinating, if not divergent, elements of this study is its assertion that a majority of people who are not telecommuting, “think some of their job tasks might be suitable for remote work but they are usually unwilling to give up pay to telecommute” (WorldatWork.org)…Really? Unwilling to give up pay? Don’t most employers who adopt telecommuting programs keep pay consistent? That is almost always the case, thus I am a little bothered that this study even asked a question that prompted respondents to offer conjecture about whether they would be willing to give up consistent pay to work from home. While it’s fine as a hypothetical question, it injects something into the debate for employers considering teleworking that never existed—that reducing or changing pay structures is a consideration. Does this strike anyone else as an unsavory question especially considering the fact this report is likely to be used by employers when making critical teleworking decisions. Eee.

If you were anticipating more in the way of raw data, I apologize but wanted to offer the most sound numbers while providing a more open set of questions about the findings. This was a mere rundown of what I considered to be the most important aspects of the study. There will be elements of it that resurface throughout the blog in coming weeks but honestly, I am holding out for a more complete and more recent study with a larger sample, direct revelation of the survey questions in full, a non-random sample selection, and more demographic data to back up numbers that are far too universal and grandiose than the sample size here allowed.

You can read the full summary of findings here. Pay particularly close attention to the title of the website and remember what I said about bias, limitations, and patchworking. http://www.workingfromanywhere.org/news/Trendlines_2009.pdf