Best Practices of Managing Telecommuters

As stated in my previous post, telecommuting is becoming a normal part of the modern workplace due to several reasons, such as cost saving and workplace flexibility aimed at improving employees’ work-life balance. However, I also mentioned that there are several drawbacks to these employment practices, which mainly stem from the fact that telecommuters are physically dispersed.

In general, being physically dispersed leads to feelings of social isolation. In addition, telecommuting implies being available by means of technology, and the traditional assumption of leaving one’s job worries behind when leaving the workplace may not work here: the workplace in the form of telephones and computers is always around and usually switched on. Hence, the two main managerial concerns should be trying to identify ways of keeping distant employees engaged and, at the same time, keeping them from burning out.

A recent white paper (2010) prepared by Kirsten Sundin from the Cornell Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies (CAHRS) identifies some of the best practices on that matter.

First of all, due to the specific conditions of telework, it is important to emphasize recruiting the right people. Not everyone has enough self-discipline to make working from home or any other out-of-office place efficient; not everyone would enjoy the lack of face-to-face communication with colleagues; and finally, not everyone would find telework beneficial for one’s work-life balance. Drawing on conclusion from a large-scale study of mobile workers commissioned by Cisco Systems Inc. in March 2007, Sundin (2010) identifies several characteristics favoring telework such as adaptability, flexibility, good organizing and self-motivation skills, low levels of neuroticism, openness to experience and resilience, extraversion and self-confidence. However, not only employees need to be suitable for telework, but managers of remote teams must also possess specific leadership qualities to be successful.

Most importantly, managers of telecommuters have to be effective communicators. Not that communication skills would be an unimportant asset to traditional leaders, but there are some common and often unnoticed parts of face-to-face communication that are critical yet are missing from virtual communication. For example, to make up for essential informal small interactions, which would normally take place in the hallways or lunchrooms, distance leaders should learn quick relationship building techniques and engage in short but frequent contacts with their remote team members. Likewise, normally informal short feedback during the ‘hallway interactions’ should be replaced by planned and emphasized feedback to remote workers to keep them feeling engaged and valuable for the whole organization. Scholars also argue that distant managers must find time for personal interactions in order to compensate for the impersonal means of communication. Indeed, if you were to talk to your manager only about business matters within a traditional employment settings, you would quickly perceive this relationship as impersonal, cold and unsatisfying. However, trying to be productive and ‘straight to a point’ in e-mails or short phone calls is quite natural and thus an easy trap to fall into when managing telecommuting employees. Hence, distant leaders should invest time into the ‘virtual relationships’ with their employees, and make themselves available for contact with remote employees. One practical solution to this matter could be using social networking tools (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace), which can help in keeping local and remote employees connected and engaged.

Having said all that, it becomes evident that managers should be very organized to meet all the demands of virtual communication. Managers must be able to keep to their commitments towards remote employees, otherwise they risk losing their trust and engagement. Apart from building confidence by keeping to an agreed schedule, trust can be enhanced by letting remote employees self-manage themselves. It is thus important to maintain a clear line between holding on to an arranged communication schedule and ‘looking over the shoulder’ or engaging in overt control. The Cisco report (2007) states that remote employees thrive when trusted to perform their job well. Important here is to agree how the performance of telecommuters will be assessed and measured, which gives both employees and their leaders confidence and clarity on the expectations towards such a working alliance.

Finally, coming back to the burnout issues, managers should be helping remote employees to set priorities and have frequent breaks. The main sources for teleworking employees to develop burnout stress stem from feelings of isolation, lack of personal contact, feelings that their work is not valued, and from difficulties in drawing clear boundaries between their work and personal life, especially when working from home. Similar to the previously discussed recommendations, a remedy for avoiding burnout in telecommuters lies also within effective, constant and committed communication from the manager. Managers are responsible for creating such a virtual environment that would replicate the informal and personalized approach a traditional work setting provides.