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[April 12, 2006]

Alienated Teleworker Plight

(Business & Finance Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)Alienated Teleworker Plight

Telecommuting often means a loss of skills and career promotion for its 100 million-strong workforce. Working from home may also threaten social cohesion and public health, writes Kevin Conroy.

Management guru Charles Handy's prediction that a buffer of contingent workers would be needed for flexibility in the global economy has come true. He said half the population of the industrialised world would have to develop "portfolio lives". Now, two out of three Fortune 500 companies employ telecommuters, who work from remote locations and communicate electronically. The Gartner Group estimates more than 100 million people worldwide are working outside traditional offices. It is not simply a case of the transformation to a service economy. In 50 years, the largest increase has been in the professional and technical occupations.


Hewlett and Packard's (HP) model of doing business, summarised in Rules of the Garage, is spreading. One rule advises "Work quickly, keep the tools unlocked, work whenever". HP offers flexible working to its employees, contributing to the quadrupling of telecommuters. We are seeing the emergence of a "matrixed economy" where mobile high- and low-skilled knowledge workers and itinerant professionals are relegating the rules of the bureaucratic organisation to a secondary place. There is a blurring of the boundaries of firms.

Within organisations, employees are gravitating towards the periphery in virtual teams, and towards the temporary in project teams. Project teams with limited life-spans and temporary concentration of resources are no longer found only in high-tech. The growth of virtual teams - people with different functional skills, located at a distance from each other, who must collaborate on important organisational tasks - is exponential. Sabre, the inventor of electronic commerce for the travel industry, makes over 40% of the world's travel reservations. Functional silos were limiting its growth. So, in 1999, it switched to virtual crossfunctional teams of around eight members each. Customer satisfaction rose from 68% to 85% in three years, with increased bookings and market share. Both project teams and virtual teams are now in banking, healthcare, advertising, insurance and education.

The need to tap the talents, experience, and special skills of employees working in distant locations is increasing. However, creating, supporting and working in virtual teams - whether with free agent professionals, or tele-employees, home-based or in farflung small offices - raises difficult problems.

These changes are altering the nature of employment, managing, and career development. Companies choose virtual employees and freelancers to create flatter, leaner organisations but outsourcing makes them less self-sufficient.

As a consequence, the need for strategic alliances has increased. Individuals choose virtual working as they see employment security unravelling. Many believe that the pact of improved "employability" between company and employee - through the development of transferable competencies - is more honoured in the breach than the observance. It is not surprising that virtual jobs and mobile workers are increasingly rejecting the familiar pains and comforts of organisational life in favour of the lifestyle freedom and risks on the periphery. Ultramobility is no longer the preserve of seasonal industries such as agriculture, tourism and lowskilled workers in food production and construction. It increasingly embraces knowledge-based workers.

Many futurists, HR consultants and recruiters tend to laud "free agents" as heroes and heroines of post-industrialism. They are the source of many upbeat surveys. Are they right to encourage turning your boss into a customer? One problem is that their view, described by William Bridges in Job Shift, works mainly for the highly skilled elite. And only as long as their skills are marketable. The everyday reality of contracting for low skills is of isolation, lower pay, longer work hours, mindnumbing routine and constant if intermittent work demands on a 24/7 basis. Their rebellion against "office politics and whims of incompetent managers" simply sets them up for exploitation as a vendor. Erratic and inconsistent job changes erode qualifications. Short-term choices and short-sighted work-life balance calculations can end up a blind alley. Many virtual workers discover too late that extra time to gain skills, experience and promotion is needed early in a career, so that the balance can be enjoyed later.

"Institutionalists" warn that large increases in peripheral workers oppress minorities, increase the demand on social welfare and ultimately undermine the security, benefits and career ladders of primary labour. They decry the Schumpeterian economics of "creative destruction", where no value is put on the social disruption and communities fractured and replaced by non-involved or self-absorbed transients. Louis Uchitelle's new book, The Disposable American, describing these hidden costs as a threat to public health, could also be describing disposable workers anywhere. Whether they are executives, working class or middle class, they are all the new "anxious class".

Despite the difficulties, most of the elite freelancing professionals prefer to live as outsiders with initiative. Most do not want to return as company employees. But they are surprised at how important social skills become - as the basis for agreement, trust and interactions in their new work life. They face three issues: maintaining their expertise, building client relationships and ensuring long-term security. First, free agents are more frequently evaluated in the marketplace and have fewer protections against obsolescence - often using the variety and type of work itself as a credentialing process.

They must absorb the costs of obsolete skills and orphaned technologies.

Second, acquiring the social skills to rise above the clamour of the marketplace is essential. Even highly skilled knowledge workers must package their expertise in terms the client wants to hear. They must build networks of hiring managers, agencies and fellow contractors. They must also add the additional skills of negotiating three-way deals with hiring managers and agents to their original expertise that was sufficient for reward in the traditional office.

Third, ensuring economic security rests on their ability to network and maintain skills that others will buy. This will fix the first two problems. Those networks include agencies that provide specialised pension and insurance cover.

Companies are also learning that simplistic "lean-and-mean" behaviours don't work well at their blurred boundaries. Five key areas for management attention and investment were found at Sabre: trust, synergy, detachment, selection, and assessment. Trust at a distance can grow from reliable, responsive performance. Synergy needs significant investment in online training.

Feelings of detachment and isolation were addressed by the team leaders' styles, by meeting with customers from time to time and companysponsored conferences held at least once a year. Selection must counter the bias of favouring technical over team-working skills and offer a realistic preview of virtual working. Online evidence of ideageneration, problem-solving, and leadership is used to help subjective evaluations and cue development needs.

All are based in respecting and treating people well - "Share tools, ideas. Trust your colleagues." - another maxim from HP's Rules of the Garage and a principle that the "HP way" has not forgotten. Kevin Conroy is director ofExecutive Coaching and Organisational Development at DBM IRELAND.

DBM is a leading global provider of innovative leadership development and organisational change solutions. www.dbm.com; info@dbm.ie

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