Last week I wrote a blog entry about a federal agency that was in a somewhat sticky situation with respect to telecommuting policies. This week I’d like to talk more about that.

As you know if you read my previous blog entry, this agency had to allow *all* employees to telework 3 days/week. I already discussed the problems with that.

The other problem with their arrangement is they had to follow the policy of not requiring any personal information from the employee. So the managers could not demand their employees’ home or cell phone numbers. This meant that when a manager need to quickly contact a telecommuting staff member, he couldn’t just pick up the phone. The manager’s best choices were to leave the employee a voicemail on his work number and wait for him to pick it up, or send an email and wait, similarly, for a response. The policy required the employee to check for voicemails/emails every 2 hours but, as you know, when you need an urgent piece of information from an employee, 2 hours is a long time to wait!

When you combine this with the previously discussed problem that there were many telecommuters whose roles or skills weren’t suited to telecommuting, you can see what a burden this becomes.

While I suggested IM (Instant Messaging) as a tool to reach an employee quickly, there was ambiguity about the managers’ abilities to require this. If the employee had up to 2 hours to respond, they said, then didn’t they have the same privilege for IM? Couldn’t they just ignore the IM for 2 hours? Clearly now you can see we’ve gone beyond the intent of the rules here. The policy to check for messages every 2 hours (at most) is not to give the telecommuter the freedom of waiting a few hours before having to respond to their managers or coworkers, but rather to make sure the telecommuter is checking in without overburdening him to check voicemail every 10 minutes. IM, however, is a tool that actively notifies you (through a popup window) immediately when someone is trying to reach you. However, bad relationships between the managers and telecommuters, including a serious lack of trust, had degraded the situation to the point where some telecommuters were holding the managers to the letter of the law (rather than the spirit) of every policy and managers were paralyzed into inaction for fear of being reported.

All these problems seem quite extreme so I should probably clarify. In the room full of managers I was training, there were some whose employees were willing to give out their home phone numbers. Similarly there were some who used IM without complaint. However, there’s always a couple of bad seeds, as they say, that can ruin it for everyone. These were the folks who caused the general frustration and lack of trust amongst the managers, and some managers had more of these than others (and perhaps these managers’ frustrated actions exacerbated the problem making other more neutral staff members behave more extremely too).

Again, there simply isn’t a magic bullet to solve this problem. I still believe IM is the right answer in this situation (well, ok, if you work from home I actually believe giving out your home # is appropriate, but short of that, IM is the best answer). However, to make use of the proper tools the relationship between the managers, the telecommuters, and the policymakers needs to be improved to the point where frank discussions about the best way to operate can take place, and open-minded interpretations of policies can ensure the best environment for getting the work done.

I have one more aspect of the challenges this group faced which I’ll write about next time. Stay tuned!

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.

I’m woefully behind on blogging, but I am making an effort to get back into it. And I have so many new things to write about. As I mentioned previously, I’ve started providing training to the government on managing telecommuters. I’ve done some in-person courses and lots of webinars. I’ve learned so much about the problems and challenges facing government agencies within telecommuting. It’s definitely a different culture than the private sector.

The main difference is simply that whereas telecommuting has been widely accepted into the culture of the private sector (at least in some industries like high tech), it hasn’t yet become pervasive (by any stretch of the imagination) in the public sector. Therefore, they don’t even have the basic elements like trusting that just because someone is at home, that doesn’t mean they’re sitting on the couch eating bon-bons and watching Oprah. All the things that many of us who are used to a telecommuting culture take for granted are all completely new to many in the public sector.  Besides the simple element of trust (which of course, is huge), there’s many other concerns too.

Another big challenge/adjustment is around the question of how to measure people you can’t see. In the public sector, managers are still very much used to measuring someone based on how much time they see them at their desk. Of course, even the most naïve manager understands that just because you’re at your desk doesn’t mean you’re actually working. It’s pretty easy to surf the web or play solitaire or whatever without getting “caught” if you really want to. But when someone is in the office, right near you, you interact with them nearly constantly and can, on a fine-grained basis, see just how much work they’re getting done. With the removal of that direct contact, managers who aren’t used to a more virtual environment simply don’t have the tools (and experience/confidence) to determine how much of the time people are really working. Of course the solution lies in measuring the results that are produced, but this doesn’t come naturally to many.

Yet another big area of concern I see is around team dynamics and cohesiveness. Never having faced a telecommuting environment, it can be quite intimidating to imagine how you will make sure your team continues to work together as the finely-oiled machine you’ve built them into thus far!  If you, as a manager, don’t know how you’ll keep track of what your telecommuters are doing, how can you expect your non-telecommuting team members to do the same? And if they can’t, how will they collaborate, handle dependencies within a project, etc?  

This is just a small sampling of the concerns that arise in an environment that hasn’t integrated telecommuting and other virtual work styles. The public sector has other issues around policy that don’t arise in the private sector. In particular, there’s a big push to integrate telecommuting into Continuity of Operations (COOP) in the federal government. COOP is simply the ability of the government to continue running in the face of severe weather, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or other events that can shut down their offices.

Keep reading – I plan on blogging about all these topics. And as you know, I always have a lot to say!