Telework revolution still on track

Some employers say teleworking makes staff more engaged

Around the world, the proliferation of broadband and the elusive search for work-life balance have encouraged an exodus of teleworkers out of corporate towers and back to their home offices.

So it was a surprise last month when Hewlett-Packard pulled the plug on a long-standing telework scheme for thousands of staff in its IT department. The company told them they had until next month to report for work at one of 25 offices around the world.

HP's slap in the face for telework was unexpected for two reasons: businesses are increasingly realising the benefits of having staff working out of the office - at least for part of the week - and IT giants like HP are among those who have embraced the practice most whole-heartedly.

The IT industry's leading stance on telework is in part a marketing exercise. As a promoter of tools aimed at boosting business productivity, it realises its own staff - happily and industriously working from remote locations - are its best advertisement for its own technology.

Although as consultant Bevis England points out, telework does not need to involve sophisticated technology. England, who has been working on telework issues since 1989 and is managing director of consultancy Telework New Zealand, says much of the telework that gets done in this country involves a low-tech approach.

While many teleworkers may be spending several days a week working from home via a high-speed DSL link back to their company's server, others might just spend half a day at home reading briefs and transcribing letters - their own use of technology being a dictaphone, says England.

In between are those using a "sneaker-net" - editing files on their home PC which they then transfer to disc and carry back to the office.

England says a well established telework programme will typically deliver a business $300,000 per 100 employees per year in cost savings and benefits.

"As a percentage of the total costs it might not appear to be significant but is does make a huge difference to many organisations," he says.

"Increasingly staff are demanding flexibility. That's being driven by things like work-life balance. It's also being driven by the newer generations that are entering the workforce. The result is that employers that don't offer flexibility could lose staff.

"Where it costs between 100 and 250 per cent of salary to recruit staff, that's a significant cost to a company. If you've got maybe 20 per cent of your workforce prepared to leave to get flexibility - and that figure is backed up by US research - then the cumulative cost to the enterprise could be a few million."

England says the decision by new HP chief information officer Randy Mott to rescind the long-running telework scheme within HP's IT department was a surprise move which he puts down to Mott's likely inexperience with such programmes.

"The general feeling is that they [HP] are going to suffer a lot of teething problems with this. Sun, for example, has something like 83 per cent of its 17,000 workforce teleworking so an awful lot of disgruntled HP workers could find somewhere else to work."

England says telework programmes work best when there are formal policies in place.

"Ad hoc telework doesn't give you scope to reduce your space, for example - everybody could still turn up on the same day. You really need to know how many people are going to be out of the office on any one day and then you can get the space savings," he says.

"Formal teleworking also implies a measure of monitoring and evaluating on an ongoing basis so that the programme and the arrangements can be regularly tweaked and improved. It's that monitoring and evaluation that ensures you do get the productivity benefits."

Vodafone is among the IT companies using telework to showcase their technology. The company ramped up its telework policies last year with the opening of its new Auckland headquarters. In the new building 60 per cent of staff no longer have a permanent desk.

"The technology is just part of the step,"says Vodafone general manager of human resources Rowan Tonkin. "A lot of this is around your work practices and the way in which you engage with your people.

"One of the main things you've got to get your head around is that you're not going to see everybody. At the moment I don't know where my team are ... Two of them are working from home. The rest of them are scattered about this building and one's working out at Manukau. So you've got to trust them. You've got to know that just because you don't see them that they are still working."

Tonkin believes telework programmes do not need to be over-governed.

"We've got polices around these things but we don't set hard and fast guidelines. It's a discussion between the manager and the person. Because each person's circumstances are slightly different, there's no point trying to govern it through a policy."

He says the company's flexible approach is helping it attract staff, and employee turnover has dropped significantly over the past year.

"The payback is probably not so much from the increased performance but probably from the increased engagement. People really enjoy having that flexibility and also they know we trust them. There's a really good and tangible payback we get from that point of view."

IBM staffer Sarah Brown manages a transtasman human resources team of 50 staff from her home office in Nelson. During a typical month she might spend two full weeks working at home, a part-week in IBM's Wellington office and a few days in Sydney.

"For me to manage my team, I have to take quite a different approach than the kind of approach I might have taken 15 years ago when we all sat in the same office together," she says.

"My situation is no different from most managers in IBM [who are typically managing teams across a number of offices]."

As a supplier of portable technology, IBM obviously has an upper hand - and an incentive - when it comes to showcasing its staff as mobile workers.

The company's New Zealand IT manager, Doug Stuart, says almost all staff are equipped with company notebooks and more than 700 of the 970 employees have access to IBM's systems through a broadband connection.

He says because working from home or a client's office is a long-standing part of the company's culture, its IT support services are geared to accommodate remote workers.

Home work

* An estimated 3 - 3.5 per cent of workers occasionally work from home.

* This is low by international standards: in the US the figure is about 11 per cent.

* Only an estimated 1000 workers work under a "formal" telework agreement with their employer.

* One estimate is that if 20 per cent of the workforce teleworked, national productivity could increase by 10 to 20 per cent.

Source: Telework New Zealand Telework revolution still on track