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!