Workforce Insights: Telecommuting: Why Managing People You Can´t See Is Visionary

February 1 2006

As many of you know, my work environment is such that when I'm not travelling to customers or conferences, I work from my residence.  This home office setup has been in place for over five years, through four different jobs within IBM Lotus.  While I realize it doesn't work as a work style for everyone, for me it's been a great way to adapt my job to the way that I personally function best.

A few weeks ago, a few of my Lotus colleagues and I were interviewed about telecommuting.  Ironically, the interview took place on the first day that I was sick with my January ailments...illustrating that the concept of a "sick day" is disappearing in the new world of work.  When you don't work in an office to begin with, what does "out of the office" mean?  For me, it meant as many calls as I could muster in between rest periods and attempts to recover.

Still, the benefits of telecommuting are immeasurable, and I find it difficult to ever imagine going back to a traditional office environment.  
Of IBM's 300,000 worldwide employees, 40 percent have no office at the company. IBM equips the home offices of all employees, whether they telecommute part- or full-time, a small price to pay for $100 million savings in on-site office costs.

With employees abandoning their cubes since IBM introduced telecommuting as an option in 1995, telecommuting has become an integral part of IBM's culture. Coworkers rely on IBM technology, including IBM Lotus Sametime Instant Messaging and Web conferencing, to stay connected.
...

Attracting the best talent is another key benefit. "It's all about finding the right employees. With location not a barrier, it allows us to excel," says Penny Scharfman, program director, Lotus Notes and Domino products, who has managed a staff of remote employees for five years from her office in Cambridge, Mass, where she spends 80 percent of her time. "You really do learn to let go of the need for face-to-face contact," she says.
Link: Workforce Insights: Telecommuting: Why Managing People You Can't See Is Visionary >

Ed Brill Highland Park, IL USA Category:  IBM  Add/View Comments [8]

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  1. 1  ck  | 2/1/2006 2:52:36 PM

    Hi Ed, I've been reading your blog for some time now, and this is the first time that I've actually responded. Actually, I have your blog as my home page on several machines. With my current job I'm able to work from home two days a week, and it's been great. I've been doing this for about 5 years as well. I say it's been great because it's going to come to a close soon. I appreciate the foresite that IBM has and since telecommuting can be done from anywhere, I was wondering if there are any opportunities for developers to come to work in a telecommute situation. I'm very interested in telecommuting, as it fits my style as well. Since it seems to be part of IBM the culture, I would be interested in any possibilities. Well, if there is any interest, please send me an email. Keep up the good work!! The blog is great!

  1. 2  Carl Tyler http://www.iminstant.com | 2/1/2006 4:45:52 PM

    Although IM, Online Meetings and conference calls are great, there are times when you can't beat a physical meeting, even a passing conversation in the corridor, body language is such an important part of human communication, that sometimes you just need to see it.

    When working in a remote office no matter how hard you try, there are still things discussed in corridors that are never discussed in forums, IMs or conference calls, so trips to the head office are always useful.

    It has long been a concern of mine that companies like IBM are heading towards a point where they have too many people working from home and new ideas are not exchanged, and hot issues aren't as easily acknowledged, even as a big advocate of IM and online conferencing, I still can't help but feel that human interaction is still really important and starts to get lost when you whole day is spent at home interacting over the telephone.

  1. 3  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 2/1/2006 5:52:34 PM

    @1 Hard to figure out how to start without knowing what kind of job you are looking for. So check out. { Link }

  1. 4  Chris Bordeleau http://chris.bordeleau.net | 2/1/2006 6:27:42 PM

    I wish we could work from home... In my office it is in our contract the working from home is forbidden... It does happen from time to time but it can not be regular thing and it is not "offical".

    But being a public employee I think many people would see it in a bad light. I could see some higher level officials using it to keep friends & family employeed without actually doing anything. I just think of the money on office space we could save. I already work 60 hours a week... atleast I could do it from home...

  1. 5  Jamie Houston  | 2/1/2006 6:38:30 PM

    @2, it's amazing, but i find that our sametime community actually does make new ideas get exchanged, and things happen faster. You think of a question you need to ask someone.. and you ping them and ask. It's even faster than getting out of your chair, and wandering over to their cube. You can access people anywhere in the company.. and it's a great equalizer; you can approach people you might not know how to, if wandering in the corridors. I cover a territory that includes 20 countries in the Caribbean. I can now actually have meetings in 4 or 5 of those places in one day. When it became more important for me to be close to the airport than it was for me to sit in an arbitrary cube in an arbitrary office building in an arbitrary business centre, i moved to home office/mobile. It works really well for me too.

    There is no doubt.. face to face meetings are also very important.. and there are aspects of the social side of things that are missing (sametime at this time, does not allow attachments of chocolate chip cookies .. baked by your colleague.. or birthday cake.. or other fun things that you have to be in the office to enjoy.. maybe the next version will..)

  1. 6  Bob http://www.bobcongdon.com/blog | 2/1/2006 7:06:36 PM

    @2, @5: I think it really depends on your corporate culture, job, role and group. The issue goes beyond telecommuting. When a team is geographically distributed it doesn't matter whether you work from home or in an office. It's terrific for the individual to have that flexibility but can have negative consequences. It's very hard to develop a sense of "group culture" when a group is distributed. Also when a group is spread across many time zones, the entire team may not even be awake at the same time. IM and conference calls are great for many things but are an inadequate substitute when people have to work closely together.

    By the way, if you have to do conference calls, one way to "level the playing field" is to make sure that everyone dials into the call rather than mixture of a group in a conference room and everyone else dialed in. That way, the non-verbal communication goes away and everyone has to speak up in order to be heard. There's nothing worse than dialing into a conference call and not being able to hear everyone or noticing that there are side conversations going on that you can't follow.

  1. 7  Alan Lepofsky http://www.alanlepofsky.net | 2/1/2006 8:25:54 PM

    I am a 95% of the time work at home IBM employee. During the course of my day I use many of IBM's collaboration tools such as Notes mail, TeamRooms, Discussion Forums, SameTime (including a ton of the functions you are now going to be seeing externally in 7.5), our fantastic Intranet, blogs, and more to stay connected. There are times when I feel closer than I would if I were just sitting in my office with a dozen or so people nearby, so clearly IBM's Collaboration products work, and work well! I'm in Cambridge, my manager is in New York, I have teammates in Dallas and Boulder, and I speak with Ed in Chicago (or wherever he happens to be!) all the time. I love having my own kitchen, my own washroom, and having a 0 minute commute. Also anyone who says that don't take care of personal things like laundry, bills, cleaning, etc during the day is lying! However, the down side, and this is huge for me, is that it can be so lonely at times. I'm not married, so no spouse and kids at home. Thank goodness for the gym, dating, and the sports teams I play on at night... they keep me sane! The need to be around others is one of the things that led to my sabbatical. So what is my point... I think a nice mix of office time and working at home can be a great thing, but the mix differs for everyone, so your company (or manager) needs to be flexible. For example, while both Ed and I are "mobile workers" his job often keeps him in customer contact, my current job does not, so I end up "at home" more than he does. Working at home a few days a week and in the office a few days seems right, providing the days you are the office are not the same days that your coworkers are at home! I think Mon and Friday at home, Tue - Thu in the office sounds good. Than again, I'd like a job that pays me 9/12 of what I get now, and gives me 3 months off to travel! Also, I think brain storming meetings, highly technical discussions, and education sessions are more effective live, no offense to the white-boarding capabilities of Sametime.

  1. 8  Turtle http://www.weightlessdog.com/msxsux.html | 2/2/2006 1:28:17 PM

    To say that the whole issue of opposition to alternative workplaces is maddening is a massive understatement on my part. In my day job, I work with one of the largest, most dysfunctional bureaucracies on the planet, and there are literally hundreds of old-school Taylor-time-study sort of white-shirt "managers" who have it in their bones that if they can't see you sitting in some preappointed space at some preappointed time, you will be assumed to be goofing off... never mind that for me at least, even if they CAN see me actually "work," they'd have no understanding whatever of what I'm actually doing.

    This is the single biggest obstacle to widespread use of alternative workplaces: the comfort factor of small-minded "managers" who are little more than supervisors, whose extremely limited value-add in their corporate culture is to be seen as "controlling" their staff.

    I've been in this environment for 14 years now. While yes, there are a tiny, tiny minority of face-to-face interactions that should and do take place, it's a far smaller number than people think. I'd say that for 85% of the people in them, "meetings" are a staggering waste of time 85% of the time. Meetings where people sit silently in a room listening to one person reading from a sheet of paper notes from some other meeting where they sat listening to some higher-up read from a sheet of paper. None of these meetings should exist, and in the public sector, they should be actually illegal.

    We've spent more than a decade building tools to put people in touch with other people when and where they need it, but far too many "managers" see these tools only as a way to prepare for, schedule or follow up on conventional meetings, not as a way to make conventional meetings as superfluous as they really are.

    My standard response, when someone calls me and asks, "when can I set up a meeting to talk with you about..." is to say, "never."

    Turtle