Why telework can be a lifesaver for growing SMEs
June 6, 2010
Business is starting to pick up and there are signs of tentative growth in many areas of the economy, but it would be unwise to assume the worst is over.
Telework and other flexible working methods can help a young company avoid painful and sometimes fatal growing pains. I have seen many a successful micro-enterprise founder as it tries to grow, most often this is either due to the founder being unable to adapt to managing a larger organisation or the cumulative effects of infrastructure changes imposing constraints on company resources.
In the latter case the growth pattern is not governed by sales or staffing, but by infrastructure. The point is that moving offices is time and resource consuming, expensive, and generally intensely irritating for all involved. Although good planning and project management can significantly reduce the disruption of a move, don’t forget that the person responsible will be using their time and resources, probably to the detriment of other activities.
Some of the issues that commonly arise when the business premises are nearing capacity:
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Postpone recruitment until new premises are available.
A lack of office space means that it is difficult to recruit the people you want, when you need them. Trying to pack people into an already crowded environment is not a great incentive, and generally impacts the productivity of all concerned. Postponing essential recruitment until space is available can mean lost opportunities in markets and recruiting talent.
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Recruit too many new staff because space is available
The aftermath of the first issue. Having moved into a larger office, there is a temptation to be too lax in recruitment criteria which can result in underemployed and unsuitable staff.
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Moving office can result in a 5% reduction in annual productivity.
Just consider the process of moving, even using professional movers. Preparing key papers and documents, securing key electronic data, finding lost items, resolving unforeseen infrastructure problems, and re-establishing a workable comfort zone. If something can go wrong it will, and if disruption lasts for less than 5 days you will have done well.
I have known fast growing companies that have been forced to move 4 times in two years, and the cumulative strain on business has been significant.
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Opening a branch office causes management crises
To exploit new geographic opportunities some organisations feel it necessary to open a branch office. This can often result in duplication not only of infrastructure but administration as well. The challenge of suddenly having to manage a team remotely can be catastrophic due to lack of experience with remote management.
Flexible working methods offer remedies
Cramped conditions are not conducive to productivity, so why not use hot-desking and telework for established employees and free up some real estate to enable the new recruits to spend their induction in less cramped surroundings. At minimum it will provide time to find the best possible accommodation for the future, at best it will enable a seamless path for expansion without the need for new premises.
Telework from home, or the office?
April 5, 2009
With Telework very much on the agenda again driven by the desire to be a good corporate citizen and reduce commuting carbon footprint, reduce real estate costs and improve general productivity. The only problem is that many home environments are unsuitable for dedicated teleworkers, and in some cases local legislation can be very unfriendly to home offices, insisting that they comply with health and safety regulations applicable to formal office environments.
Home environments can be unsuitable for several reasons:
- A simple lack of space.
The kitchen table may be good for a couple of hours but not as a permanent environment. - A family at home.
The excitement of having a key family member permanently accessible can prove too much of a temptation for some partners, and the discipline involved can cause family strains. - Infrastructure.
Despite massive investments many areas still do not have access to consistently good broadband communications. This can give problems with video conferences, and SaaS environments. - Your home may be fine but neighbours may not be adapted to a working environment. It is surprising how distracting lawnmowers, pumps, drills, barking dogs, pools etc. can be when trying to work.
- An office at home can lead to being always accessible. For many this is not an issue or can easily be controlled, but continual binge working can be dangerous for your health both physical and social.
Now this may sound like I’m rubbishing telework, no far from it, it means that the telework location needs to be carefully thought out. In the early days of the telework movement there was a lot of focus on telecentres or telecottages. These would be centres local to the teleworkers’ homes where they could work, share expensive equipment, high speed internet connections and at the same time have access to shared expertise and training. There were variations on this, satellite offices operated by employers close to where the employees lived, office centres where facilities could be rented by the hour, day, week or whatever period is needed, or more recently individual companies offering to rent out one or more desks in their own underutilised office environment.
For various reason the telecentre has not become a major part of the telework scenario, although in some countries it is stronger than others. The main reason is that technology costs have come down to the level where they do not need to be shared, and the systems and communications are sufficiently reliable not to need a technician at hand all the time. However shared office centres have gained a lot of custom especially for the mobile teleworkers who need to have access to quality facilities in many locations, but in general these facilities can be expensive to justify for many would be teleworkers.
The final category is that of office sharing, and this is gaining increased attention as companies need to cover the costs of unused office space. This may be because it was surplus to requirements anyway, or their own telework programme had liberated space, or because of staff reductions, whatever the reason it makes sense to use it rather than just let it be an overhead. There are quite a few web-sites offering information on these offers, and in many cases the costs involved are similar to the real cost of setting up and maintaining a home office.
If you are putting together a telework program, considering requesting telework from your employer or just setting out on your own business, I suggest you take a look at the sharing option, it overcomes a lot of issues associated with working from home whist retaining many of the advantages.
Here are a couple of sites as an example:
If anyone know of other sites around the world offering similar services, or have experience of using them, do let me know.
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Information Addiction
February 20, 2009
Like an addiction to speed, dangerous pursuits, gambling etc., the current trend for sharing seems quite self destructive. Not that sharing in itself is a bad thing, far from it; but the processes and mechanisms needed are present in such abundance as to make recovery across the many channels needed, a real chore, like finding a soul-mate at a party where everyone is blindly reciting their life story.
In fact I would suggest we are perilously close to meltdown, with the real benefits of sharing being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of emails, feeds, blogs, postings, twitters etc.; like an indecisive man starving to death in a restaurant, or a decisive one having a Monty Python moment (Mr. Creosote in the Meaning of Life).
At various times in the past analogous situations have arisen. Originally the postal service carried real and meaningful communications and information. Friends, family, customers, suppliers, and the volume just grew to the point where a moderately busy individual could not find time, and finally junk mail (yes it did originally apply to snail mail), killed it. The secretary or PA was entrusted with the job of sorting the wheat from the chaff, and making sure only the important stuff got through.
Many people used to ridicule the managers who had their secretaries read their emails for them and were labelled technophobes. In fact they were just applying good information filtering as applied to letters and telephone calls. The PA wasn’t just a filter, they were a search engine too.
“Contact John Smith and find out who is the best expert to evaluate this, then get his cv and contract conditions, by tomorrow morning” -
Next morning “John Smith is away on vacation, but his PA said he uses Bill Jones – so I contacted him, and by the way he a weekend package that might be appropriate for your anniversary next month, when you have the time to look” etc.
Problem solved and a bit of serendipity thrown in.
If we substitute John Smith with all the different ways that information can be imparted, the size of the problem becomes apparent.
Someone somewhere has probably just discovered the piece of information I need, in a website somewhere. What are the chances of me finding it? I need it in the next couple of hours. Well let’s hit the traditional search engines. I find 2000 potential items, and the tenth one I open appears to have what I need, except the source is dated 2003 and I need a very recent source. Well lets look at my feeds, time is running out. I can check Delicious, Digg, and Twitter. I could spend time searching the tweets, following the links, searching the articles etc., but unless I was very lucky it would be a couple of hours wasted. I already spend almost 50% of my work time searching for information, if it goes much higher then my productive time will dimish rapidly.
What I want is the immediacy of Twitter, the depth of the search engine, the accumulated experiences within Delicious, the topicality of Digg, and a twist of serendipity.
In fact what I really want is a PA with a PhD in Business practice, a Masters in social sciences , and an Engineering degree in IT, the willingness to be paid a pittance and be able to make great coffee. Failing that a single interface that can handle my favourite topics, my favourite people, their favourite people, whilst providing me with element of discovery provided by social platforms.
Then perhaps I can get some work done, or just handle even more information.
Am I asking for too much?
Perhaps not.
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Portfolio Workers on the march
February 17, 2009
Portfolio Worker (Charles Handy, The Age of Unreason, McGraw-Hill, December 1990 ) , whereby independent workers serve multiple clients using their skills in different areas of expertise, indeed in many cases just out of necessity to make ends meet.
A portfolio worker might make 30% of his income from consultancy, 20% from writing, 30% from selling via eBay, and 20% singing round folk clubs. I remember bumping into an IBMer in the early 90s who worked as a consultant some of the time, but also as a landscape gardener which exercised a completely different side of his interests and physique. He exalted the virtues of such a balance in life, and indeed managed to preserve his health and sanity well beyond that of some of his peers.
This also connects back to my post “Too old to rock n’ roll too young to retire” where typically those making the 3rd age switch from employment become portfolio workers, reliant on their clients and contacts rather than employers.
Just as many people will have two part-time jobs to provide full employment, the portfolio worker makes his from a variety of skills. There is nothing new about this, but what is beginning to draw attention is the extent to which this is beginning to happen. The New American Job Newsweek, they refer to it as the Gig Economy. It seems to consider it a passing phase but I am less sure.
In reality many find this portfolio existence more satisfying than the normal employment situation, with the main challenge being finding clients and the evident lack of security in that scenario.With a single employer/customer you are reliant on that source, but spreading the load means spreading the risk.
With the current lay-offs occurring across the board, many people are trying the portfolio approach for the first time and employers are looking to fill gaps in their internal skills inventory with external sources. Of course they have used freelancers and agency staff for ages, but now cash-strapped managers are looking for skills on an individual project basis, sometimes for only a few hours here or there.
How to find them? Independent registers of consultants and professionals have existed on the internet for years, or an open market place such as Bobex now operating in Western Europe, however traditionally these have been price oriented and have no real mechanism for factoring-in trust. This is where the social media plays an important part. Networks such as LinkedIn play an important role, and the recommendation feature is fine up to a point, but it somehow does not convey trust, any more than a reference letter does. More frequently these days the portfolio skills are being recruited via personal recommendation of a friend or an employee, hence the increased value of the social network in maintaining these relationships.
Many new entrants to the portfolio working arena will lack some critical skills to enable them to function totally as an independent entity, if you did all your own accounting, web work, marketing, ongoing skill maintenance, and strategic thinking you would soon find there was not much time to generate revenues – let alone have a familly life. Hence a renewed interest in localised skill sharing. The telecottage or telecentre was touted for years as a technical solution for teleworkers and portfolio workers, giving access to high speed internet and expensive local IT resources. They were successful in some European environments, Sweden, UK, Central Europe (where the community and educational aspect is strong), but in general they did not catch on, partly because the needs to share costly IT infrastructure largely disappeared. However the explosion in virtual contact has also highlighted the benefits of cooperation and sharing physically.
This is leading to renewed interest in places where virtual collaborators can get together on a regular basis to exchange skills, market intelligence, and get help etc. Some of these may be purely informal like a coffee shop or bar, others may resemble a shared office facility. Some SMEs are even considering hosting such facilities during these troubled times, partly to help micro start-ups, partly to use excess office capacity.
The recent success of the Twestival (Twitter users getting together and raising money for charity) highlights the power of ad hoc cooperation at a local level, largely driven bya real desire to share and participate.
The Portfolio Worker is on the march, and social networks are an integral part of maintaining knowledge, contacts, and the very necessary human relationships to build trust and ensure opportunities for their skills are generated.
I’d be interested in hearing about any mutual help activities you know of for independents and new portfolio workers active on a local basis, working with social networks especially Twitter.
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Prejudice and Social Networks
February 15, 2009
The price of prejudice Jan 15th 2009 From The Economist print edition “It’s what you do that counts-not what you say you’d do”, got me thinking about the effect of prejudice in the workplace and the potential role of Enterprise 2.0 and social networking.
Finding an genuinely unprejudiced person is going to be pretty hard. We all have prejudices about things forcing us to make judgements on people before we know them, or misinterpreting their actions when we do. Prejudice can apply to so many areas, gender, age, religion, race, education, social background, sexuality, nationality, lifestyle, stereotypes, etc….. Here I don’t want to examine the prejudices fuelled by mindless xenophobia, or homophobia, but those which most of us keep under control intellectually but which may subtly undermine an organisation whilst not actually leading to active discrimination.
Most of us gain our first impressions of people via the primary senses, mostly visual and aural, but others come into play as well especially those that infringe our personal space ie touch and smell. Appearance, level of education, cultural background (e.g. regional accents) all influence the weight we give to an unfamiliar collaborator. We are also affected by what others say, and most of us are able to some degree to separate gossip from objective comment, but prejudice will affect this ability.
When using a social network the first impressions are usually generated by the content of the contact, although some of us may not be able to look past spelling and grammar.
I recently looked for a review on a particular smart phone, and after reading several unhelpful reviews, I watched a couple of video reviews. These were equally superficial, however the last one was in depth, factual and informative. However I had to watch it twice as the first time I was overly focussed o the fact that the presenter looked and sounded like a gangster rap artist, however that prejudice being quickly overcome I was able to focus on the content quality. In a face to face environment the chances are that we would never have reached the stage of a meaningful information exchange.
Even going back to the forums on Compuserve, I encountered and exchanged posts with people for some time, and upon meeting them for the first time immediately felt as though they were friends or close colleagues. That doesn’t mean there were not some surprises. One fellow who projected an image of an enthusiastic teenage geek actually turned out to be a rather elderly enthusiastic expert. Others however were instantly identifiable across a crowded room without having even seen a photograph.
The point is that prejudice puts barriers in the way of effective communication at all levels within an organisation, or with suppliers and customers. Social networks have some potential in bypassing some of our natural prejudices helping information to flow.
There have certainly been cases of employers or potential employers using social networks as a form of pre employment vetting, and some where employees have been discriminated against because of their online activities outside of work, but in general the call to common sense from all involved could be enabling the openness of social networks to have a favourable impact on the way in which we work together.
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Too Old to Rock ‘n Roll, too Young to Retire
January 28, 2009
- Konrad Adenauer Image via Wikipedia
The chances are that those of you in your 20s and early 30s will have to continue working until 70 so as to qualify for a full state pension. That is if you can find a job. Of course there are plenty of examples of those reachin
g their pinnacle of success in later life, De Gaulle was president of France between the ages of 68 and 78. Konrad Adenauer stayed in power in Germany for 14 years between the ages of 73 and 87, Ronald Reagan was president between the ages of 69 and 78, etc.
In 1980, 45% of CEOs in the 300 largest U.S. companies were aged between 60-69; however things are changing, by 2002 only 25% of CEOs were in that age group (Spencer Stuart), and probably that percentage has decreased even further today. Even the political world is changing: Sarkozy became president at 53, Blair became Prime Minister at 43, Obama president at 45, Merkel Chancellor at 51.
OK JFK was young too but a real rarity at that time. It is fair to say that in many fields people are reaching the top positions 20-25 years earlier than 40 years ago. Although a top politician might expect to be in power for no longer than 8-10 years, most are now generally young enough to have a second successful (and lucrative) career post politics. Many business leaders are bowing out earlier as well, Bill Gates has retired from his business activities at the age of 53 to focus on his second career.
Amongst mere mortals things are rather different. In Belgium the average retirement age is with 57 and only 25% of the male population aged 55-64 are still in the workforce, even the European average retirement age is only just over 60.
Currently EU life expectancy is 74.7 years for men and 82.5 for women, although those surviving until 60 can expect to survive at least another 20-25 years. In Europe-12, life expectancy has increased by 1.8 years over the last 10 years, and so in 40 years time when Gen-Y retire, it is conceivable that this will have increased by another 10 years. This means that a sixty year old will likely to survive until 90. and healthy life expectancy is usually estimated at 10 years less than the total, so one would hope that this extension of life expectancy would be associated with a similar extension of active life expectancy.
In cyclic downturns (every 8-10 years) voluntary redundancies are most likely to affect two categories:
- those older who see final payment as rounding off pension needs, and
- those younger ones who feel confident of getting a new job and use capital for home/investment.
Those not going for the offer tend to be more constrained by family and mortgage commitments, typically in the 40-50 age band, however these are exactly the people who are most likely to be hit with compulsory redundancies. The point is that those being made redundant from their late 40s onwards (kids still at school or college, house not yet paid off) have a significantly reduced chance of re-entering the employment market in a position to make full use of their accumulated knowledge and experience, whereas the top dogs are just beginning to capitalise on theirs.
Dr John Philpott, CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development ) Chief Economist comments, “but the business performance of organisations will be strengthened if they have the right people and skills in place to prepare them for the upturn in the economy, whenever it comes.” In the current wave of redundancies in the UK around 38% are amongst Managers and Professionals with 23% being amongst Skilled non-manual workers, indicating that in the current environment the majority of redundancies in the UK are amongst knowledge intensive positions. It is reasonable to assume that this will be replicated in other economies.
An interesting aside: research has also shown that retiring early at 55 or 60 is not associated with better survival rates than retiring at 65 in a group of past employees of the petrochemical industry. Mortality was higher in employees who retired at 55 than in those who continued working (BMJ) (text). So work really is good for you!
Given the above, it is reasonably safe to assume that a large amount of potentially shareable knowledge is lost to employers when putting large scale early retirement and compulsory redundancy programs in place. There is real and valuable knowledge (aka experience) being put to one side in favour of stacking supermarket shelves, driving a taxi, or gently vegetating at the 19th hole or similar establishments. It is quite understandable that managers find that some employees in their 50s are providing diminishing returns in terms of classical bottom line and this involves many factors including seniority based salary structures, less inclination to binge work, etc.
However it is an established trend for many hitting the job market in later life to launch into new business ventures and usually with a higher degree of success than their younger counterparts. This can be attributed to several factors, the first is that of course they have greater experience and another important consideration is that perhaps they have more realistic projects which can be self funded rather than relying on external funding which can be fickle to say the least.
Certainly the USA and UK have significant influxes of mature entrepreneurs but sadly in many parts of Europe there is far less encouragement. For example, early retirement benefits can be lost if an official business is formed, whilst training and investment programs tend to be focussed on the young. There are some good examples of the parent organisation encouraging entrepreneurship in the groups being made redundant e.g. Philips in Austria, but still a rarity.
Whilst many of us understand that the new working environment places new requirements on society, many of the policy makers seem to either not understand or choose to ignore the need to re-engineer the whole education, work, retirement continuum, being content to leave it to the forces of the market, which we now know to be rather short-sighted. Our young need exposure to work environments before quitting the educational hallows, whilst all of us need training throughout our lives, and finally retirement should be a gradual transition, not a sudden cold shower.
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Telework? Forget it and think again.
January 11, 2009
From the coining of the term in 1972 by Jack Nilles, until the mid 90s, Telework was always an idea whose time had not yet come. Management styles were too inflexible, technology and telecommunications costs generally too high, and the unions too suspicious. Of course there were exceptions, but the advocacy that went on during that period paved the way for acceptance when the prevailing conditions were right. The advent of readily available broadband connections provided those conditions.
Within a few years the market for home PCs had outstripped the corporate market, and internet access is now on the agenda for universal access, putting it on a par with utilities such as water, electricity & telephone, as a citizen’s right.
It is hardly surprising that for most knowledge workers, telework has become a non-issue. PDAs, Portable PCs, GSMs (cell phones), mean working on the move is a natural part of daily life, and yes, either working at home for at least a couple of days a week or working really flexible hours has become common-place. In the event of poor weather, transport disruption, security alerts, hangovers, and other inexplicable ailments etc., telework has become the norm.
You must have noticed that the traditional rush hour, has now expanded to almost 4 hours in the morning (6:30 – 10:30) and another 4 hours in the evening (15:00 – 19:00) sometimes longer.That’s because a lot people engage in flexible work practices, either doing tasks at home prior to going in to the office, or leaving early and finishing off tasks at home.
Whilst a lot of companies now support flexible working, a lot of teleworking is still carried out ad-hoc without any formal recognition or much support, either logistically or financially.
Essentially telework involves removing distance as a barrier to work, and it has some great benefits that are well documented. The danger is that by successfully implementing telework within an organisation and getting good results, management will consider the job done without looking at the even greater potential for restructuring work patterns.
You can certainly see the trend in younger and those more dynamic environments, where formal structures are disintegrating in favour of ad-hoc structures based around the needs of the task in hand. The company does not need to be that small. In ’98 I had the good fortune to be invited by Cisco to a small gathering of 30-40 consultants in Nice. The information day was topped off by John Chambers flying in to share his vision. Much of his vision and the processes under way in Cisco then, are now being reflected in Enterprise 2.0. I was impressed at the time and continue to be impressed by the approach of Cisco.
These days any organisation can follow a similar path.
With a minimum amount of guidance and control, teams can self select and self organise. The emerging Enterprise 2.0 tools and platforms support individuals and teams in a variety of ways that are inherently flexible and adaptable to new circumstances.
Although collaborative platforms have been around for some time it is only recently that they began to make a serious impact being able not only facilitate task sharing effectively, but also enabling the sharing and retention of knowledge. These integrated platforms that go way beyond sharing are still young and have a long way to go, but they are proving more user friendly and flexible than their predecessors thus gaining greater acceptance from the user.
It is not unusual to find a project team working together from several different continents, so that processes flow in such a way as to permit continuous advancement rather than just a single 8 hour slice, like a factory working on a full 3 shift system but with each shift in a different time zone. Such teams may be working on engineering developments, proposal developments, software development and testing, etc. The platform not only enables the current project, but also benefits other projects with the knowledge accumulated.
If your organisation has not yet come to grips with telework, perhaps you should think about leapfrogging that stage and looking at new work structures and methods from which the benefits of telework will naturally flow. You may never have a better opportunity to restructure working methods.
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