If you do a Google search for remote workers, you will see an enormous spike in interest on or around the end of February. That's when Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, sent out an internal memo alerting all employees that Yahoo would no longer allow people to work from outside the Yahoo offices.
The news raised a storm of controversy almost immediately. Press and pundits alike chimed in with their opinions about the implications for Yahoo, and the actual value of remote work in the modern workplace. Most of them saw this as a negative sign for Yahoo, indicating it was having trouble adapting to a networked, cloud-based reality which its own technologies helped create. And all that discussion is one of the best things to happen to the emerging informal economy, and to remote workers (outside of Yahoo) for years.
Managing Remote Workers
Remote work has always been a difficult concept for some managers to grasp. It challenges their leadership skills and flies in the face of traditional concepts of corporate team building. One of the main reasons cited by Mayer for discontinuing the practice at Yahoo was that managers were losing track of their workers, and productivity was suffering. It's not an easy thing for a traditional, hierarchical organization to accommodate the degree of flexibility that remote work provides.
But the key issue, even according to Yahoo, was not the productivity of remote workers. Remote work is challenging to manage within a traditional organization. The failure at Yahoo was not a decline in worker productivity, but a failure to train management in effective communication strategies for remote teams. According to the company's own letter to employees announcing the change, "to become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side."
The Positive and Negative Issues of Remote Work
Studies such as a 2011 World at Work report continue to come out showing that remote work is a net positive for most companies that adopt it. Remote work provides so many benefits for a company that it's understandable that many of them try to incorporate it:
● it is often seen as a benefit for attracting and retaining key talent ● it frees up expensive physical resources in high-rent cities ● it increases a worker's productive hours without commute time ● it encourages a stronger focus on documentation and communication ● it allows work to be distributed around the world seamlessly
But it's not all positive. With any change in a social institution as significant as the common workplace, there will always be repercussions.
As the informal economy encroaches on the formal one, there are people who will find their familiar office-based roles put at risk.
The practice is so beneficial to the organization, it risks being vilified as a challenge to the traditional office worker, afraid of seeing his position "outsourced" to another country.
Another 2011 report out of Cornell points out that there is a potential negative side to remote work for many workers who don't understand the implications of working outside of a structured environment. This is largely due to the compromises a worker has to make in order to adapt to the necessary lifestyle changes.
Among the key complaints that full-time remote workers have are the lack of social contact with colleagues, the sense that the work and home are not adequately separated, and the endless nature of a work day that is not constrained by the traditional office hours.
New Responsibilities
Despite the benefits to companies, remote work is still not the way most managers have been trained to develop and oversee their teams. The added responsibilities put on the shoulders of the manager are significant. A remote workforce requires a manager to put positive effort into developing new communication strategies, and doing the type of supervision and collaboration that most managers have been trained to deal with in a face-to-face environment. At the same time, workers need a new set of skills to cope with the issues that can come up around remote work. Often time management can be difficult for someone used to the conventions of going to an office to work and coming home to rest. Remote workers also need to be adept users of new networked productivity tools, and able to document and report on what they have accomplished effectively to keep their manager, clients and customers aware of their progress. Because of these new responsibilities, it is critical for a company considering remote work policies to develop the leadership skills of managers and the work habits of employees, in a way that supports corporate team building across remote work teams. Ironically, Yahoo was one of the pioneers in building collaborative online productivity tools, although their current suite is less rich than some, such as Google Documents, Zoho Office, Basecamp from 37 Signals, and Salesforce's cloud-based CRM Tools, to list only a few. With so many tools and options, and such universal access to them available online around the world, there has never been a better time to work remotely and productively.
Flexibility and the Modern Economy
The modern economy is becoming more hostile to rigidity. A world in which technology changes as rapidly as it does today is not structured to support a centralized, hierarchical approach to management. The remote worker is already on the cutting edge of this trend, operating in a world of shared documents and networked communications tools designed to support collaboration and cooperation regardless of physical proximity.
There is a new skill set needed to work remotely, and the workers who adapt fastest will be in the best position to take advantage of this shift.
It's the ability to manage and develop a team in this environment which will differentiate the flexible, agile organization from the rigid, hierarchical one. And ultimately, the more agile and responsive a company can be to the changing environment, the better able it will be to adapt and grow as times change.
Positive Attention to the Issues
So Marissa Mayer's decision, and the response it generated, is a very good sign for remote workers around the world.
For people living and working in the informal economy, the ability to take their jobs with them as they travel and pursue their personal and professional growth is an essential component of their lifestyles.
Working with employers, clients, and customers who are able to take advantage of that agility provides remote workers with the tools and the resources they need to succeed, while producing valuable benefits for the economy as a whole. In the early days of computing, there was a myth that eventually we would see a paperless office. In practice, that hasn't come to pass, and the myth of the universal remote workforce is probably just as impractical for the moment. But with proper training, and with the evolution of new tools to take advantage of distributed human resources, the advantages of integrating remote workers into both new and existing companies will certainly continue to push the trend forward. Guest post written by M. David Green.
Online social networking has been a strong interest of mine since I started researching the subject more than two decades ago, while studying the Social Sciences at UC Berkeley. What I saw in those early online communities showed me that the human instinct to network is vital enough to thrive in any medium which allows one person to connect to another. photo credit: splorp via photopincc