According to a survey conducted by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) in 2008, “Companies that give their workers the option of telecommuting are benefitting from greater productivity, lower costs, more options for finding and retaining qualified staff and improved employee health.“

Even though the concept of managing virtual workers can have negative connotations, the aging of generation Y and advent of millennial workers are impacting the workplace in profound ways. These workers are demanding control over their personal work-life balance and are willing to leave their employers if they don’t get it…even in this economy.

The good news is that if you do it right, your organization will benefit greatly by reducing turnover, improving morale and increasing productivity – without increasing costs. In fact, costs are often reduced.

The successful creation of virtual positions in your organization has three key aspects.

Operational

Look at all the things your organization is doing operationally and determine whether those activities must be done in a central location or if they can be done remotely through electronic connectivity. Identify the jobs and tasks that are well suited to being done electronically.

Shifting a position, or part of a position from in-house to virtual requires a number of actions to ensure all parties benefit. The two most important are to establish clear “virtual work” policies and procedures and to create hardware and software support mechanisms.

Compliance must be handled up front to ensure you are obeying all laws and minimizing potential liability. Wage and hour laws, Occupational Safety & Health Administration, workers’ compensation issues, the Americans with Disabilities Act and leave of absence policies are just a few  of them.

Virtual work also requires a different approach to confidentiality and protection of proprietary information. Discrimination is another area to be careful with as it is easy to unwittingly create a virtual work policy that discriminates even though there was no intent to do so.

Financial

While the creation of virtual work programs can appear to be a lot of work, setting them up is a onetime activity while the benefits last for years.

Virtual employees need no centralized space, so office space requirements shrink with every task that transitions to virtual. Besides physical space, virtual workers don’t use electricity, heat or air conditioning in the employers office.

A virtual workforce reduces demand for direct supervision, leading to a reduction in middle management and fixed overhead.

One of the most often overlooked benefits is reduction of turnover. Studies have consistently shown that the reason most employees leave their job is an inability to develop a good working relationship with their manager. Working virtually changes the entire managerial paradigm and eliminates the opportunity for the type of friction often cited as the reason for these poor relationships.

Managing a virtual workforce does require enhanced skills. But these skills are easily taught, learned and implemented by competent managers, which leads to yet another benefit.

Developing a virtual program helps to identify and weed out the least efficient managers while increasing the skills of the best ones. Fewer managers can then provide oversight and accountability for larger groups of workers, thereby creating a greater return on all management level positions.

The simplest way to think about implementing a virtual position for your organization is:

• Diminishing up front one time setup costs
• Ongoing reduction of overhead and labor costs through economies of scale
• Increased profitability resulting from increased productivity

Cultural

Perhaps the greatest benefit of a virtual program is the positive emotional changes that result from eliminating micro-management and trusting workers to deliver the results they were hired to deliver.

Most companies that have tried virtual positions benefit from fewer internal politics and better relationships among co-workers. Having a virtual element in an organization promotes concise and precise communications resulting in fewer mistakes, a phenomenon often attributed to less socializing in the office.

The subtly of these benefits can hide their far-reaching effects. It becomes easier to hire better people and more difficult for underachievers to survive. In other words, it helps to elevate the internal sense of quality and pride throughout the organization.

Bottom Line

Telecommuting has grown strong roots and is going to be a part of your future if you want to stay in business. You won’t be able to avoid it much longer and there’s certainly nothing you can do to stop it. Telecommuting is coming to a place near you. The decision you will be forced to make is not if, but when, to start implementing it.

Clearly a simple answer is of little value, since the complexity of any organization regardless of size eliminates any chance of simple or clear cut answers. Nonetheless, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to figure it out and come up with a strategy or approach that minimizes these failures.

Back to Adizes.  He says “Organizations go through the normal struggles and difficulties accompanying growth and are faced with the transitional problems of moving from one phase of development to the next.  Organizations learn to deal with these problems by themselves or they develop abnormal ‘diseases’ that stymie growth. These are problems that usually cannot be resolved without professional external intervention.”

Sounds like a marriage in trouble, yes? In fact, there is a great deal of truth and meaning in Adizes’ comments. Actions that are healthy and productive in the early stages of a start-up could very quickly become institutionalized in a manner that eventually harms the organization because of internal and external changes.

Take for example using friends and family to save cash. This works well if you are small enough, but as your organization matures, you must have the ability to treat employees like employees. You need to be able to discipline, direct, praise, reward, and yes, even terminate. This doesn’t work so well with a spouse, cousin, aunt, etc.

So the point is, what is going to be happening in your organization over the coming months and years is 100% predictable. Yes, that’s right, 100%. I’m not saying you can’t control or change it, but it’s all right there for you if you take the time to step back and look. You know the saying, work on your business, not in it?

Stay tuned for more on this subject. In the near future, I will be posting an assessment tool to help.

Good selling!

The first person I spoke to I made the mistake of assuming they were a business that wanted to grow. The owner snapped back at me ‘What do you mean by growth? Are you talking about revenues, # of employees, or growing in terms of quality? Maybe you mean growing the number of services we offer, or the number of clients we serve. Maybe you mean the number of employees we have, or the number of markets or products and services are available in. Just exactly what do you mean?!?!?!?’

I was quite unprepared for such a  heated response. It wasn’t that I had made him mad, just that he thought the idea of me assuming he wanted to grow his business was a totally stupid assumption, particularly since I hadn’t even bothered to ask what growth meant to him. I stopped asking that question and started asking people what growth meant to them.

One of the more interesting ways to grow was in terms of quality. Quality of product, service, customer, vendor, facility, equipment, marketing material, and the list goes on and on. As Mark Twain so eloquently said, ‘The biggest problem with communication is the perception that it is actually occurring.’

I’ve identified a few different ideas about what growth means to me and those I have been talking to recently. What does growth mean to you? Please share your thoughts. I am working on a way to measure the ability (or capacity) of an organization to measure its ability to grow using leading, non-financial indicators. To create such an assessment tool, I need to have a much broader understanding of what growth means to you.

Share your thoughts, won’t you please? Thanks…