Slashdot has some interesting commentary on this Computerweek article entitled Get tough on telecommuting: 6 questions to ask before you say yes. The article is pretty worthless unless someone has been living under a rock and has just heard about telecommuting for the very first time. The six questions rehash the same lame arguments against telecommuting that have been around for a decade, signaling that the thinking hasn’t changed much.
So why hasn’t the thinking changed very much. I’ll tell you. The resistance to telecommuting is about one thing and only one thing: Control.
Managers with a workforce of telecommuters might find they have nothing to do with their time during the day. The more workers who telecommute, the fewer people they have to bird dog; the fewer people they have to blame for their fuckups; the fewer people they have to give their shit work too; and the fewer sycophants they have to kiss their ass. Having your ass kissed over the Internet is no fun. In other words, the manager’s very existence begins to come unraveled. For low and mid level managers telecommuting is the harbinger of unemployment and is to be resisted and fought with every ounce of their strength.
From the Computerweek article.
Most experienced managers stress that you must establish “well-defined deliverables” for teleworkers, and then judge performance accordingly.
People eligible for telecommuting should already know what their deliverables are. If a professional must always have their deliverables defined for them they should be not be working remotely and they probably should not be called a professional.
On the face of it, that approach seems simple enough. For task-oriented jobs, it’s easy to measure performance in terms of output. For an IT support person, for example, you might track how many tickets he handled per day and whether problems were successfully solved.
But such an approach implies that it doesn’t matter how much or little time it takes to do the job. And that raises a sometimes thorny question: Are you paying employees for their output, their time, or both? Some people work faster or more efficiently than others, especially when working from home. If an employee hits his output working only four hours a day, is that a win-win situation or poor use of a company’s business asset?
First, businesses must quit thinking of their employees as business assets. I am not a business asset, I am a person. If employees were treated as people instead of as things to be managed and used and then thrown away, a lot of the productivity and performance issues would simply disappear.
Second, the question raised in the excerpt is not “thorny” and would not even be raised if it weren’t for greedy corporations trying to take advantage of their employees. The implied premise is that employees who can work faster at home (or who simply choose to do so in order to free up some extra personal time) will work as fast or faster at the office because a manager is bird-dogging them. This is simply not the case. Without a commensurate benefit the opposite is actually true.
Professionals are paid for the value of their knowledge and expertise, not their time. Even professionals who bill by the hour are still selling the value of their time, not the actual time, because they get paid for brainpower not for time spent toiling on the clock. The price/performance value is either there or it is not there. If the value is there, efforts to coerce an employee into producing more value in the same amount of time is impractical, immoral, and for the most part futile. Furthermore, such practices cause undue stress, grief, job dissatisfaction, and ultimately job turnover. In short, it is extremely counterproductive and could even lead to vindictiveness on the part of the employee.
Here it is in a nutshell: The manager says I am not working fast enough and I tell him I can do it faster, but it will cost more. The manager says the quality of my work product is not up to par and I tell her I can do better, but it will take more time. The manager says I need to deliver a better product in a shorter time frame for the same price and as any business person would do, I say pfft, go to Hell!
The biggest part of being a professional is knowing the value of your time and demanding to be paid adequately for it. I know the value of my time and I stand firm on the principle of an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. On the flip side I would never expect a client/employer to pay for work not performed. Other than perpetrating a fraud, there is no way to bill 40 hours for 20 hours of work if the client doesn’t perceive 40 hours worth of value. Unless they are incompetent they simply wont buy it.
But lets say a programmer makes 20% more than the average rate and bills the client for 30 hours. The client received work equivalent to 40 hours of an average worker’s output so they are happy. So what difference would it make if as a result of experience, focus, and efficiency it only took the programmer 20 actual hours at the computer to complete the work for which he billed 30 hours? Should the employer benefit from that efficiency or should the worker? Why in the world would the client care how long it actually took the programmer to do the work if they are satisfied that they are getting good value for their money? The honest observer will be able to come up with only one answer: The client wouldn’t care unless they were interested in only paying for the actual 20 hours spent at the terminal even though they received a 40 hour value.
Furthermore, the time of exempt professionals who are typically creative problem solvers can not fairly be pigeonholed into either “working” or “not working.” A highly skilled professional can be walking on a treadmill and thinking about how to solve a highly complex problem. Walking may even enhance the problem solving process. Problem solving, aka thinking, is part and parcel of the value for which the the professional bills his client, or employer. A solution derived on the golf course is just as valuable than if the solution was derived while sitting in front of a computer terminal. I might not be able to bill a client for playing golf, but I can and should bill for the value of the solution.
Requiring IT professionals to be onsite for every hour billed is in my opinion an effort to recoup the premium earned by the experienced professional. Resistance to telecommuting trends for the silly reasons mentioned in the article will not change the dynamics of the professional relationship. All it does is waste the professional’s time since he is a professional and thus by definition will not deliver more value than what is paid for.
Market dynamics make the telecommuting arrangement work and corporate suspicion and greed makes it unworkable. The arrangement works for lawyers, accountants, and other professional people but not for IT Professionals. Why is that? My opinion is that it is due to the obstinate refusal to allow highly educated and skilled professionals make the premium wages they deserve. And I think it goes back to control as I mentioned in the opening. People compensated beyond their basic living necessity are not as easy to control as someone living from paycheck to paycheck. Financially secure people are more likely to tell a corporate idiot to take a long walk on a short pier.
In line with everything said, I have a better approach to managing telecommuters: Place a value on the telecommuter’s time that can be expressed as an hourly rate. A senior guy gets a 20% premium and a junior guy gets a 20% discount. The telecommuter invoices the employer for services rendered each day by listing all the stuff they did and the time spent doing all the stuff, including documenting all the stuff. This is a highly effective form of accountability and high-performance professionals do not have any qualms with being accountable since they probably already keep up with all this stuff anyway.
The employer then accepts or disputes the bill based on the work product received. At the end of the year if you are paying an employee $100,000 in annual salary and have accepted more than $100,000 in invoices from him there exists a mutually beneficial relationship that makes economic sense. If the amount of invoices accepted is less than $100,000, there is a problem. Statistical analysis will show whether the problem lies with the telecommuter or with the employer’s processes. If the telecommuter’s value is low but is within a standard deviation of the other telecommuter’s value then the problem is with the employer. If the value deficit is more than a standard deviation from the other telecommuters, then there is a problem with the telecommuter.
In a client vendor relationship it is usually sufficient that the value received is at least equal to the amount paid. In the employer-employee relationship, receiving value that surpasses what was paid for is not good enough. If the employee can contribute more, then the employee must contribute more. Working 7 hours when being paid for 8 is unacceptable even when 9 hours of productivity is being delivered. Corporations have line management and middle management to enforce these codes. The employer position is one of entitlement because they view the employee as a corporate asset. If the employee is required to be at the office, managers mistakenly think they can squeeze out that extra productivity when in actuality all they are doing is robbing valuable time from the employee which the employee could spend on something more personally rewarding than sitting in a cube taking crap from a retarded manager.
In theory, for exempt professional employees the amount of time spent working is supposed to be irrelevant but in practice the whole concept of an exempt employee is a fiction. Employers still tend towards maximize production based on time even though it is against the law and counterproductive.
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There is a follow up post with commentary here.
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