I’d like to tackle a sticky subject today. Some time ago I taught a “Managing Teleworkers” 2-day course for a US Federal Government agency located in California. I came to find through the course of the 2 days that they had a few major challenges they were facing. I will focus on just one today and revisit the topic another time to discuss the others.

This agency’s biggest challenge was that a labor union representative had helped negotiate some very strong pro-telecommuting agreements which included the rights for all workers to telecommute 3 days/week.

As I teach in my courses, there are 2 major factors to determining if someone should telecommute: their role and their skills. By saying that across the board, all employees who want to can telecommute, means there are people telecommuting whose roles really require them to be in the office. Additionally there are people telecommuting who sorely lack the proper organizational and communication skills to be effective. The managers of this agency had their hands tied and were struggling to balance the demands of the office with the lack of physically-present staff. In addition, since they couldn’t choose based on skills who could telecommute, they had poor performers or just people who weren’t well equipped for the telecommuting work style. While I’m sure many of the employees had the best of intentions, the managers were left worrying if any or all of the employees were really working to their full capacity.

Unfortunately I simply don’t have a silver bullet for cases like this. Of course I made suggestions as to how to help balance the workload between the in-office workers and the telecommuters but there were further restrictions there (I’ll cover this more later) which prevented a simple solution (nothing is ever simple, is it?). The other tools and techniques I teach should help them with their difficulties measuring the employees’ performance. However, when measurement throws up red flags and other means of resolving performance problems fail, the option to reduce or remove the benefit of telecommuting is not available (or at least, very difficult to exercise) to this particular group of managers. This of course is a real challenge that will require some easing of the policies to really accomplish a workable long-term solution.

Stay tuned for my next blog entry where I’ll discuss the other challenges facing this group of managers and their teleworkers.