Management Toolkit

Teleworking: What you can learn from Nationwide

Mark Vernon Tech Republic

Published: 05 Oct 2005 12:15 BST

There are plenty of cheerleaders for telecommuting workers. Gurus herald it as the way to redress the modern work/life imbalance. Senior management see it as a way of meeting the demands of 24×7 customers and markets. The tech industry loves it as a way of selling new technologies. But what do home workers and their managers think of the new online ways of working? Banks may not have thought through the full implications of equipping staff with mobile technology or allowing them to log in from home.

The drawbacks for telecommuters
For example, research from the Economist Intelligence Unit and IBM has found that nearly half of mobile workers feel they lack access to what might be called corporate social capital, that is "coffee machine conversations" and the informal networks at the office. In other words, it may just not suit some.

"This informal collaboration is vital to get ahead and to form relationships with colleagues," explains Eric Lesser, IBM Human Capital Management Leader. "In addition, workers can feel alienated and underappreciated when working away from the office because of a lack of appropriate managerial support, technologies, skills, and performance measurements necessary to work effectively and productively."

The problems compound for those telecommuters lacking confidence. They feel they have to be more available than they would be in the office, resulting in "email addiction", the compulsive checking of messages in the evenings and on weekends. Other telecommuters feel that they work harder than their in-office counterparts.

Nationwide's telecommuting challenge
These were questions that confronted Nationwide, the UK's largest building society. Home and mobile working was adopted as an important way of extending staff work patterns. However, internal surveys showed that it was not an automatic panacea.

The surveys showed that some managers were too controlling of people working at home by monitoring connection periods to corporate systems. Conversely, home workers felt that they had to be seen to be viewed as productive and therefore sent emails at times outside...

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