Management Hardheads

Here's an excellent analysis of some well documented work the State of Virgina has been doing with telecommuting. It makes great sense with fuel at any price but it absolutely makes cents in today's environment.

Adjusting management styles to accommodate telework is more challenging than solving security issues. Chopra contends agency managers must learn to manage based on workers' production rather than the duration they see them at their desks.

The biggest problem they have in rolling out telecommuting to more and more agencies ... and thus saving the state more and more? Hints:

• It ain't budget ... their initiatives pay for themselves
• It ain't the technology ... that's proven and well developed
• It ain't laws and rules ... every senior leader from the governor on down wants the program.
• It certainly ain't the workers ... they benefit a dozen ways
  

It is middle management. people otherwise intelligent who can not conceive that they can manage the output of their direct reports if they can't look out over a sea of worker's backs and heads bent over desks.
My own best guess? I 20 years or so business and management schools will start to teach remote supervision ... US business school have easily been 20 years behind on the Internet for business, server consolidation and such, so why would tenured professors ever get on board the telecommuting band wagon? Hmm, maybe it will take longer ... can you imagine a professor teaching a class without and exspensive classroom and faux colonial brick buildings?

Telecommuting -- Will Its Time Ever Come?

I started this little blog years ago and have been focusing on many other things, so I just left it here as a place holder. See www.retiredpay.com and www.talarsystems.com for a few of the things that have been occupying me.

Quite possibly this was a dumb thing to do. Anyone remember earth Day? No? It was only this past week!

Aside from many, many re-runs of Al Gore and his excellent "Inconvenient Truth" movie, made absolutely horrible by his boring, boring presentation ... why do people so rich and otherwise intelligent baulk at putting an actual actor on screen ... what could be more importnat, the future of the world or Al's ego? ... there was very little notice made.

Matt Cutts noted a few days ago that the domains Earth Day .com and Earth Day .net were parked ... irtually doing nothing. Whate were the owners of those doamins, and the rest of us doing?

You know for all the welcome advances in hybrid cars, fuel cells, bio-fuels, wind power, etc., etc., we seem to be overlooking one very simple fact here....

A huge percentage of the world' sfule costs, and environmental pollution is caused by people commuting to work. For the time being it certainly seems that work will be essential for people to eran aliving from. We could cut the resources, pollution and Global "bill" by a huge percentage ... literally the percentage is completely under our control .. by just doing nothing. Let people work from home!!!. Aside from someone shoveling coal into a furnace there are darn few jobs that can't be done, at least part of the time, remotely.

In many cases the costs and additional equioment required are _nill_. So, may I ask, what the ehck are we waiting for?

Comments are open.

Case Study - The Virtual Travel Agency

...At On-Line travel, there are 40 travel consultants handling between 400 and 1000 calls per day,mostly from people responding to Teletext advertisments. There is no difference between this and most travel agencies, except this one has no retail shop and no visible call centre. On-Line travel is a 'virtual' travel agency founded in 1997 and flourishing...

See the article and more here (free registration required) http://tinyurl.com/8qx4w

Here's a company that's the fourth fastest growing company in the UK. And they've been in operation since 1997 (8 years) and have been making substantial profits for the last 3. Last year's turnover, for example, was more than 110,000,000 Pounds - over 184,000,000 USD.

So next time you're thinking of a business idea, or thinking of ways to expand and improve an exisitng "brick and mortar" operation, think about having no office at all ... instead of saying 'it can't be done. start thinking of "how can i do it?"

Why Aren't We All Working From Home?

Companies say they are ready for more teleworkers

Gas price increases spur interest in telecommuting
News Story by Matt Hamblen and Patrick ThibodeauAUGUST 19, 2005 (COMPUTERWORLD) - As gasoline prices spiked early this week by 10 cents to 20 cents a gallon around the country, telework managers said employees are requesting more hours to work at home via computer and broadband to avoid lengthy and expensive drives to the office.

So why aren't we all working from home? I get up early most mornings, but I have no alarm clock set. Hit the on switch on the coffee maker, sit down to review the email that's come in over night in my shorts and flip-flops. Plan what I'll do during the day, make a list of phone calls to return, wait for my wife to get up on her own schedule and join me in our little office.

Makes sense, and makes cents too ... we've been working from home for more than a year now. But the sad part is, we had to take the risks and go into business for ourselves to make this happen. I worked for years for a huge DoD agency that spent thousands per year to keep me in cubical space, heated and air conditioned, and a first-come, first-served parking space hundreds of yards from the office. They had permission to establish telecommuting for years, and in the last few years I worked there they were under the gun from higher headquarters to show telecommuting progress, but not a single person ever "escaped" before my retirement.

Technology? Hardly ... 90% of most people's work was creating or editing documents in Word and or reading/reviewing/editing simple spreadsheets and Word documents to send out as guidance to field locations. It would have bee trivially easy to have nearly everyone working at home, let's say 4 days a week .. and the fifth day reserved for staff meetings, physical coordination with other offices, etc. My supervisor a cubicle or two away would pick up the phone and ask me questions, make requests, etc., anyway, so my control from her would have been nearly 100% the same had I been at home using my own floor space and climate control.

Only real impediment was antiquated thoughts of a senior supervisor being able to stand at the end of a row of cubicles and know that "his" people were physically present (even though he couldn't see most of "his" people at any given time.

The time has come, and maybe $3.00 gas will help. More as it happens.