We interviewed Tom Harnish, co-author of Undress for Success: The Naked Truth About Making Money at Home and the co-founder of The Telework Research Network, on the topic of telework and here's what he had to say: 1) Your statistics on telework are frequently quoted in national magazines such as Inc. magazine and others. And unlike many pundits, your knowledge comes from personal experience, as you’ve been working from home for over 20 years. Why did you get started and how?
I began working at home after an office-based career as a scientist, company exec, and business consultant. My wife Kate and I started an aviation business that we eventually built into the largest and oldest of its kind in the U.S.—mostly working from home. We had two open cockpit biplanes from the 1920s, two WW2 warbirds, and two 30-year-old aircrafts we used for simulated air combat. Some amazing pilots, including Marine Corps fighter pilots, Navy test pilots, airline captains, and extraordinary civilian pilots, flew the aircraft. Naturally, everyone always wanted to hang around to talk about the cool airplanes or chat with us and the pilots. So we ran the business for 15 years from a home office because that was the only way we could get any work done.
Kate has a work-at-home story that goes back even farther than mine. She grew up in an entrepreneurial family, and as a kid they always had one business or another they ran out of their home, including a huge news delivery service. Yeah, that's a paper route, but not the way they did it! After college and 10 years as a commercial banker, Kate's boss encouraged her to start her own business. With insider knowledge of how bank decisions were made, she started consulting with small business owners, helping them find financing. She was usually working in someone else's office, going over their books and business plans, so she didn't see any reason to have a 'real' office and worked from a home office.
We saw the recession coming and sold the aviation business about 5 years ago. Since then, we've been working in our office at home, researching and writing about home-based businesses, freelancing, and telecommuting.
2) In Inc. magazine, you talked about the benefits of telework being potentially enormous to companies ($200 billion in productivity gains, and greatly increased retention and employee satisfaction). And yet, many are not taking advantage. What stops companies from taking the plunge, and what advice would you give to such companies to help them?
There are three reasons companies haven't taken advantage of flexible work options, including telework. In order of importance they are trust, trust, and trust.
Everyone used to work (a verb) at home. Some chased bison for a living, others figured out how to grow bushes they could eat. They knew who they could trust. Later they discovered if they had a little meat or leaves left over they could sell it to a neighbor. So they'd get together in a central location and sell or trade their goods to each other. A few dishonest wheeler-dealers showed up, and you had to be careful you got your money’s worth. Then some entrepreneurs had the idea of making a permanent place to market stuff, and offered to do that for others in exchange for a piece of the action—sometimes far too much. Shopkeepers still lived upstairs or in a back room, so they still worked at home, but the Industrial Revolution came along and changed all that.
Industry, for the most part, meant building stuff such as ships and cars and pots and pans. And that required big machines, so the owners needed a place to put them. Big machines are expensive and required a workforce to keep them busy, so lots of workers needed to go to work (a noun). Lots of workers were expensive, and made commuting a pain, even when they were paid a pittance and drove a Model A. Managers starting looking for ways to make them more productive so they'd need fewer of them, and what the experts figured out was that an assembly line was the most efficient way to make things. But in the process, they made workers just another cog in a big machine, a manufacturing system. No more creativity, no more job satisfaction, and no more working at home. Sweatshops and typing pools were the way to get work done. Workers hated it, and learned to mistrust company management, usually for good reasons.
Advances in computer science produced the information age and knowledge workers. But management didn't pay attention to advances in management science. The same guys who thought assembly lines were the answer learned that productivity and creativity came from happy workers, and happy workers were ones who had the opportunity to determine what and how their work should get done. But bosses apparently missed the memo and, even today, many manage by counting butts in seats and rewarding people simply because they stay late at work (the noun).
If I can't see them I can't tell if they're working, managers say. How’s that keep-an-eye-on-them method working? Not so good. Today employees admit to wasting 2 hours a day, not counting lunch and breaks. And surveys show that about 70 per cent of the workforce is not really engaged, they're just going through the motions or, worse, actively trying to undermine other people's efforts.
Kate talked about this issue of trust recently at a meeting of Silicon Valley executives, and from the back of the room, I had an inkling that the lack of trust that's causing all the problems is managers who don't trust themselves to keep people pointed in the right direction. They want a simple butts-in-seats kind of compass. Happily, there's just such a navigation aid and it always points to the right place—results-based management.
And that would be my advice to companies who want to be successful in a mobile, global marketplace: adopt a results-based management strategy and offer your workers flexible options. Most of your people are working someplace else anyway. HP, for example found that their real-estate utilization in one location was only 20% because their people we perpetually on the road. (By the way, just offering flex options, even it they don't use them, will make people happier.)
Anyway, when you identify—from the top of the organization to your bottom line—what results you want, you can forget about where, when, and how work gets done. If you think about it, results—not process—are/is what really matters. And you can stop worrying about trust. Either the results happen or they don't. At result-based organizations, voluntary turnover goes down because people are happier, and involuntary turnover goes up because slackers can't hide.
3) Which industries do you feel are best for allowing employees to telework?
Any industry that has workers sitting in front of a computer display is suited for telework. We just finished a study sponsored by Citrix Online to see how telework has changed over the last five years. We dug through government and private sector data and found that most teleworkers work for non-profits. That makes sense because when times are tough people stop giving, and non-profits can't just change their product mix or expand into a new market. They have to be more productive at a lower cost, and telework is the answer.
We found that the largest percentage of people who work at home (and aren’t self-employed) are in professional, scientific and technical services industries. Health care and social assistance comes in as the second largest population. Surprisingly, people who work in the manufacturing industry are the third largest group who work at home. No, I'm not talking about those work-at-home-and-make-millions-in-your-spare-time assembly scams. These are people who, as I said, sit in front of a computer all day...and they can handle accounting jobs, for example, just as well from home as they can in an office.
Which suggests another way to answer your question: what occupations are best suited to telework? The answer is management, professional and related jobs; sales and office work; and service industry work. Farming, fishing, and forestry are at the bottom of the list of jobs you can do at home, you might guess.
4) If I’m a traditional employee and want to convince my boss to let me telework, what should I say to him or her?
The way to convince a reluctant boss is to consider the problem from their point of view. If you think they're worried that you won't get the job done, pick a small project and ask if you can do it at home. Under promise and over deliver. With that success on the books, ask to try a little bigger or longer project. Again, with successful results (see, there's that results thing again) propose a trial where you work at home, say, two days a week for a couple or three months. Be prepared with a list of measurable results you will accomplish, make it clear you aren't going to disappear, that you'll be flexible if office schedules require, and that you "want to be sure it works for both of us, so let's talk specifically about how it's going every week."
Do not imply that you expect this trial to lead to a full-time work from home gig. For one thing, that's not realistic; the average home worker is there 2.4 days a week. Sure, some companies have sent everyone home and sold the building, and there are start-ups that have never had an office, but such circumstances are still rare. The other reason you don’t want to pitch the trial as test before a full-time work at home arrangement is that you want it to be your boss' idea, not yours. You can help that along by sending your boss the whitepaper we wrote on results-based management. It lays out all the advantages with specific examples of successful companies that are using it.
5) How can employers ensure their employees are working effectively from home?
An employer could mount a webcam on an employee's computer and point it at their face, and even record keystrokes. But that's the same old 'butts-in-seats' approach and doesn't prove anything except that they're sitting in front of the camera and they're moving their fingers. Even if you pay by the hour, all that a camera assures is that they worked for an hour. Did they get anything done?
The answer is to establish clear outcomes-based performance measures for your department, division, or organization. Then establish individual performance goals for each employee (remote or not) and hold them accountable. Manage for results, not activity. It really doesn't matter where or when the work gets done, just that it does. It’s empowering when you know you’re in charge, or said another way—if you treat people like children they’ll act like them.
You have to be sure the goals are aligned with your organizational priorities, of course. They have to be driven by the company's understanding of who they are and what they're trying to do. Ford and Ferrari both make engines. United and Southwest both operate airliners. Walmart and Tiffany's both sell jewelry. But they each do what they do very differently, so managers' and employees' measure of success has to be based on very different results.
6) You mention greater job satisfaction for employees who telework, yet some critics argue that telework actually leads to less satisfaction since it creates a divide between those employees working in the office and those working from home. What can employees do to stay in the loop and work as team when teleworking?
There's no evidence that telework leads to less job satisfaction, although people talk about that issue a lot. Sure, if flexible work options are treated as a perk and unfairly assigned, that will cause issues. But that's a favoritism issue, not a telework issue.
In any event, a good manager can ensure such jealousy is not a problem by making it clear why someone has (or hasn't) been selected for a telework position. Is it a performance issue? Make sure the employee understands what they have to do to join the work-at-home team. Is it a security issue? Make sure they understand the nature of the risk, and invite their participation in finding a solution. (Security, by the way, is much more of an issue for so-called ad-hoc teleworkers—people just taking stuff home—than it is for people with a formal telework arrangement.) Is the reason they can't telework because they have a customer facing job? Yes, it's tough for a retail sales clerk to work at home, but we know of a hotel concierge that works for several hotels virtually thanks to a computer, camera, and HD display. 'Think out side the box' can also mean outside a box made of four walls and a ceiling.
Employees can make sure their work at home arrangement is not a problem by communicating with their colleagues and manager about any tensions. If you happen to be the first one to do a work-at-home trial, for example, make sure your coworkers understand that they could be the beneficiaries of the test too.
But having said all that, have you noticed that what we're discussing isn't anything unique? These are the usual business management issues with all the usual management solutions—fairness, open communication, honest concern and interest for each other, leadership.
7) Working from home is not for everyone. What kinds of people would you recommend *not* do it?
You're right; working from home isn't for everyone. If you go to work because it's your time away from small fry at a place where people talk in full sentences, and for the most part act like adults, you don't want to take your work home. Conversely, telework is not a solution to day- or elder-care problems.
If you're the kind of person that needs what we called in the Navy a "plan of the day"—the kind of person that needs a lot of direction, or has trouble staying focused—home is not for you. If you're one of the 70% of employees that doesn't really give a rodent's buttocks (that’s a Kate-ism) about what you're doing, hate to go to work and can't wait to get home, working at home won't improve your outlook. If you love the social interaction you have at work, home can be a lonely planet. That said, we know several work-at-home call center operators who love their work and all the virtual friends they made with other operators, there to help when they need them.
If you have any '-oholic' tendencies such as work-oholic or soap-oholic or alc-oholic problems, you don't want to hanging around the house fighting the urge. Over working, in fact, is one of the biggest problems people have when they work at home.
If you have any performance issues, working ‘out of sight and out of mind’ probably isn't a good idea. Again, we talking basic management issues that aren't specific to telework—the solution is to understand the problem and what actions need to be taken to solve it.
You might be surprised, in conclusion, to hear about a major league baseball club that offered their second baseman a chance to work from home. Not the kind of job you’d expect could be done from home. But it worked. They made him a catcher.
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