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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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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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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