First Yahoo orders all its remote
workers into the office, then Best Buy cuts back hard on telecommuting… If you just glanced at the headlines, you’d think working at home was becoming a thing of the past. In reality, only a few companies have made radical changes to their remote work policies, but those few announcements have sent shock waves through home offices all over the country. That’s because for years now, the trend has been in the opposite direction, with more and more employees permitted, even encouraged, to work remotely at least part of the time.
Some industry observers, and many mainstream journalists, have presented the Yahoo and Best Buy decisions as the beginning of the end of telecommuting and other remote work practices. It’s hard to understand why. Both companies are deeply troubled, struggling to turn themselves around after years of disappointing performance. They’re dealing with unique problems and unique corporate cultures. And there’s no reason to believe that many other companies are going to follow their example.
And why would they want to? Study after study has shown that employees who are given the flexibility to work from home — or from the neighborhood coffee shop, or wherever — are more satisfied with their jobs, more fulfilled in their personal lives, and above all, more productive. That’s why so many companies, from small startups to midsize concerns to the biggest enterprises, have introduced remote work policies. According to a recent TeleworkResearchNetwork.com study, 3.1 million U.S. employees (2.5% of the total workforce) were telecommuting some of the time in 2011 — an extraordinary 72% increase just since 2006.
Everybody knows employees like having the choice to work at home. The freedom to choose your own hours, the opportunity to work where you want to, the ability to deal with childcare issues…there are as many reasons as there are employees. But what’s even more interesting, and more meaningful, is the number of employers who see value — real-world business value — in giving their employees that choice. This isn’t about being nice for the sake of being nice. Employers, all of them hardnosed businesspeople, think remote work is good for the bottom line. And there’s an ever-growing body of research that says they’re right.
Nothing is more important in today’s business world than developing and cultivating a corporate culture that values collaboration, teamwork, productive…all the qualities that make for success. But that corporate culture doesn’t require that people sit in cramped cubicles all day, or meet in airless conference rooms, or even be in the same zip code. What matters is that they have the opportunity to interact with one another, in whatever way works best for them. And technology — especially unified communication and collaboration (UCC) technology — is making that easier all the time.
Face-to-face meetings are still happening, but the faces are streamed live on video. (And don’t think managers haven’t noticed that a video connection is cheaper than a plane ticket.) Whiteboards have been replaced by shared PowerPoint presentations. And business-critical documents are being revised, updated and communicated using Microsoft Lync and other user-friendly collaboration platforms. It’s the team-oriented corporate culture that everybody wants, but it doesn’t require that anyone be in the office — or anywhere in particular — at any given time.
So remote work is working, for more and more employees and for more and more companies. But no one should underestimate the challenges of delivering UCC technologies to a large, geographically distributed workforce with widely varying personal and technical requirements. Bandwidth demands can bring entire corporate networks down, and system downtime can bring important meetings to a grinding halt. Complex, heterogeneous IT systems — made ever more complex by “bring your own device” policies that let employees choose their own smartphones, tablets, computers and operating systems — strain IT organizations to the breaking point. And the communications methods employees want to use, from VoIP phones to Skype, are becoming more diverse and more difficult to manage all the time.
These are just a few of the reasons many businesses are turning to cloud- or software-as-a-service- (SaaS-)based providers to deliver the UCC capabilities they need to maintain a collaborative and productive working environment. The reality is that many, if not most, in-house IT organizations lack the technical skills to maintain and optimize a UCC platform. And even if they do, they’ll need to take valuable resources away from other projects to make it happen. A dedicated UCC provider, leveraging advanced technical capabilities and massive economies of scale, is far better positioned to deliver these services — and do it cost-effectively — and free up the business to do what it does best.
And that’s really what everybody, employers and employees alike, really want — the opportunity to get to work, in a productive, collaborative environment. Yahoo and Best Buy may be doing what they need to do to turn themselves around. Only time will tell. But it’s clear that the rest of the business world is moving in a very different direction.
The post What Do Yahoo’s and Best Buy’s New Remote Work Policies Mean to You? Nothing, if You Don’t Work for Them… appeared first on ConnectSolutions.