KEY POINTS:
Cut deep and cut fast may be the accepted wisdom for employers facing a recession. However, it's difficult advice to swallow for New Zealand businesses which have spent the past 10 years trying to find the right people. Who wants to let people go, only to see them join a competitor or exit our workforce altogether?
While the need to reduce spending is real, we must look for smart alternatives to slashing and burning our way through human capital. One option which we should be using more is teleworking, replacing unproductive work-related travel with information and communications technology (ICT). The OECD describes this as the use of ICT to carry out work at home or another place which is removed from the physical office infrastructure, colleagues, clients and the employer.
Teleworking is not a new concept by any means. The practice is so entrenched in better-connected countries like the United States, Australia and Britain that it is almost embarrassing to compare our own experience. One Australian study in 2005 found that 30 per cent of individuals employed either in their own or someone else's business teleworked to some extent. One industry estimate puts the rate in New Zealand at just 6 per cent.
The low New Zealand takeup is surprising because the bottom-line benefits are well established. The costs of overheads fall with teleworking.
Unisys New Zealand, which is speaking at the national Teleworking 2008 conference next month, expects to be able to move from four floors to three in its Wellington office as a result of a flexible work programme. Nortel in Australia and British Telecom report productivity increases for home-based workers, compared with office-bound colleagues, of up to 15 per cent and 20 per cent respectively.
Providing teleworking as a standard option can lower recruiting and staffing costs through improved retention as the flexibility of working from home flows through to employee satisfaction and commitment.
An added bonus for businesses may be the lower costs of emissions under an Emissions Trading Scheme if corporate car fleets and work-related travel are reduced when employees work from home.
While teleworking benefits companies, it also contains an element of public good, reducing road congestion and contributing to economic growth in regional areas. Officials from the Ministry of Economic Development are now identifying ways for New Zealand organisations to take advantage of teleworking, including small and medium-sized organisations, part of the Government's commitment to reduce carbon emissions set down in the Digital Strategy 2.0.
There seems to be a raft of very good reasons for teleworking. Maybe they appear to be too good to be true. Why else, one wonders, is it such a hard road convincing local employers to give it a go?
I can understand that one historic barrier has been low broadband penetration. The other, less easy to rationalise, is attitude. When TUANZ commissioned a report into teleworking in New Zealand this year, we found that the greatest inhibitor was the outmoded mind-set of New Zealand employers towards staff performance. Simply put, there is still an old-fashioned view that if people aren't in the office they're "skiving".
In a world facing some dramatic economic challenges, we need to start acting differently. Think what your own employees could achieve at home, unburdened by a commute, with a well-defined work area, access to communications networks and a performance-management model that places emphasis on results rather than "face time". This could be on a part-time, full-time or flexible basis.
Of course there remain practical considerations, as in any workplace, of OSH, security of company information and maintaining working relationships. Yet local companies including Vodafone New Zealand, WorldxChange and Salmat SalesForce are adopting teleworking with positive results. They are building telework into their corporate cultures, finding new ways to trust and open communication between employees who no longer gather regularly for a Friday-night drink.
The fact remains that teleworking is a proven way of working, about as radical in most countries as moving to an open-plan office. Teleworking is not just a technical issue for IT managers or a matter of policy for HR managers, it's a relevant and achievable answer to very real problems for anyone in a corporate environment looking to retain skilled staff and boost productivity.
TUANZ, representing telecommunications users, is committed to encouraging the adoption of teleworking not just for our members but for as many New Zealand companies as possible who can benefit. As such, we will be sharing New Zealand and overseas success stories at the Teleworking 2008 conference on November 11.
* Ernie Newman is chief executive of the Telecommunications Users Association of NZ.
www.tuanz.org.nz
