Home on the range

The trend to send employees home to work is slowly gathering momentum, both locally and internationally. The drivers are obvious: traffic (and the time wasted sitting in it), the high cost of office space, demand from employees seeking better work/home life balance, and environmental concerns (fewer cars on the road equals less pollution). Technology has caught up, too. Today, you can set up shop with a cellphone and a laptop, and work whenever you wish, wherever you are. South African management, however, appears to be lagging.

"Of primary concern," says Intel country manager Devan Naidoo, "is the lack of proper policies to manage [telecommuting]. There are benefits in terms of savings on fuel costs, increased time with family, and reduced stress levels for people who don't need to travel. But how do you chose who should telecommute? Is it specific to a job or a job level? The other thing is: how do you monitor performance? This is a new challenge for HR management in a very broad sense."

Says Becky Mosehle, MD of Landelahni Professional and Technical Appointments: "I believe there needs to be a change of mindset in order for [telecommuting] to work. As managers, we need to be in control. If we see a person at their desk, we assume they are working. And we fear that if they're not there, the work won't get done."

Certain local companies have taken the plunge - from HP, to Intel and Vodacom. HP SA recently sent some of its staff home, while Vodacom has 40 teleworkers, and a flexi-time system available to employees who still need to be office-bound.

We rely on people's IP rather than their presence.

Devan Naidoo, country manager, Intel

Says Intel's Naidoo: "In our offices locally, more than 80% of our staff are connected at home (Intel has just over 30 people in SA). We've been doing this in SA for at least the last two years. We prefer people to work from home," he adds. "We rely on their IP rather than their presence and it definitely works for our business."

Therein lies the rub. What do you pay your people for? Factory workers will most definitely need to stay on site but information workers frequently do not. Sales and consulting staff are seldom in the office, giving rise in recent years to the hot-desking concept, where companies have a small pool of desks available for their mobile employees to use whenever they're not on-site or at clients. Telecommuting is, in many ways, the next step up from hot-desking. And while almost everyone understands what it means, few have considered the full ramifications.

For a start, you need to ensure teleworkers are adequately supported, and not just in terms of telephones and PCs. Says Landelahni's Mosehle: "You need to be results-oriented in terms of work being delivered. You need to ensure expectations are clearly communicated. Consistent reviews must be done to evaluate performance.

"The most critical thing," she notes, "is to make teleworkers feel like they are still part of the team. Schedule regular check-in calls, be they daily or weekly. Invite them to attend meetings. Include them in company events and ensure they receive company news and announcements. You have to ensure there is regular interpersonal communication with the teleworker."

The most critical thing is to make teleworkers feel like they are still part of the team.

Becky Mosehle, MD, Landelahni Appointments

Teleworkers also need logistical support. Sending them home with a laptop, Internet connection and phone line will ensure they stay in touch, but what if they need a 300-page colour proposal printed and bound? For more senior staffers, is there a PA available to manage the executives' lives? You need not have one PA per executive, despite local attitudes towards status. Intel's Naidoo, for example, shares a PA with two other executives.

Aside from selecting which job functions are suitable for teleworking, companies also need to consider individual personalities. "Potential teleworkers need to be self-motivated, must be able to work independently with minimal supervision and should be above-average performers," says Mosehle. The best positions for teleworking, she says, are those roles that are not dependent on other departments, and are results-oriented, with outcomes that can be easily measured.

Hein Koen's company Habitatz provides workspace and facilities for teleworkers, be they independent professionals or remote workers. The company provides everything from a postal address for the professional, to a delivery service, to a virtual PA, who will do everything, including taking minutes from tele- or video-conferences. In other words, it supplies everything you would ordinarily get from an office, including connectivity, remote file-sharing and backup facilities, which not all companies provide. Proving that teleworking is possible today, Habitatz counts a 50-person consulting company as one of its clients. All 50 staff members work remotely.

Says Koen: "The reasons people go to the office are changing. You used to go for your desk, PC, telephone, connectivity or to have face-to-face meetings. Now your telephone is in your pocket, your PC is a laptop, your connectivity is in the air. You can teleconference via Skype or video-conference if face-to-face interaction is required. The days of providing permanent office space for people are dying. Work is what you do, not a place you go to."

And while setting up remote workers has cost implications, the savings can be substantial. Vodacom has set up home offices for its field staff who are responsible for repairs and maintenance on base stations. While they're waiting for something to break, they can be at home, doing other things.

Says Vodacom COO Pieter Uys: "It saves a lot of time and money. To send technicians out from a central location to a remote station costs a lot of money and network downtime. All of them are permanently connected via HSDPA, so they automatically get failure information, and then update the network immediately on their return. We have GPS systems in all of their cars so we can see where they are at any time, and people don't take chances any more. It was a risk initially but it is working."

The company has also implemented a flexi-time policy, allowing staff to arrive at work earlier or later and leave earlier or later. Or they may, for example, work at home for the first two hours of the day and then go to the office, or leave early and be on call for the final two hours of the day. "This was done because of the traffic, really," says Uys. "More and more companies have to do that."

Research commissioned by Citrix into teleworking in SA (and four European countries*) reveals that 84% of local companies surveyed still feel that trust is a key impediment to the successful implementation of mobile working. That there are some local examples, however, is heartening and proves that some companies, at least, are prepared to make the leap, go through the learning curve and ultimately benefit from the experience.

* Citrix i-Forum Project survey undertaken by Coleman Parkes Research in June 2006. Results based on 500 interviews with medium and large organisations in the UK, Belgium, SA, Ireland and the Netherlands.