Telework: It’s the law
February 8th, 2008 by Cali & Jody
We’ve been sitting on this story for two weeks now because we kept waiting for it to surface in other news outlets. But it hasn’t so we’re going to bust this whole thing wide open.
The gist of the story is that, according to Public Law 106-846, federal workers should be allowed to telecommute “to the maximum extent possible without diminished employee performance.” And yet it took a federal arbitration panel to get the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to allow some of its workers the chance to telework “on a pilot basis.”
Now we realize that there are all kinds of laws on the books that go unenforced. And we won’t nitpick to death the bit about “diminished employee performance” and telecommuting pilots and all that. Instead, we’d just like to note the fact that a better way of working and living isn’t going to happen from the top down. You cannot write a law that changes what people believe about work.
We’re glad that the arbitration panel ruled in the workers’ favor, and while we don’t have any of the details, we can imagine that it took somebody standing up for their legal rights and, more importantly, for what’s right. We’re glad you did.
You’re going to take my missive as odd, because I think I’m almost a paragon of “The New Employee” of “The New Workplace”. I encourage myself and my employees to work in whatever context works best for us as an organization. We are a very “flat” organization that stresses people over roles, results over procedures and we really don’t like hierarchies. That being said, I’m going out on a limb here, laws notwithstanding, telecommuting doesn’t make sense in a lot of situations.
We as a team choose to work together in the same room as often as possible simply because leveraging face-to-face communication works better. It makes us able to move faster as an organization and it helps maintain work / life balance for the people. And get this: we write software! The most “virtual” of products. You would think this would be a natural for telecommuting. It isn’t. In general, telecommuting limits communication, slows down vital messaging and lowers the fidelity of the communications when they do happen.
Now I realize your book points to a different kind of culture than ours; a culture of “command and control”, or “top down” of “I like to pay my employees only when I can see them typing” kind of B.S. that is as old and tired as Fredrick Winslow Taylor’s “Principles of Scientific Management”. Keep fighting the good fight, but telecommuting rarely works as well for many kinds of work. The whole reason why organizations exists is to pool experts under an umbrella of a mission or purpose. Sometimes that can be furthered by allowing things like telecommuting. But I would argue that it’s a lot less viable than is seems at first glance.
I agree. Telecommuting isn’t the answer for every company. And, there are different levels of telecommuting that may work. My assistant works from home 2 days a week and she selects those days on a weekly basis by what her schedule and my schedule dictate. That allows her to save 4 hours of commute time a week. That is a good balance for her, me and our company.
Telecommuting, with the right technology and mindset can be very effective in certain situations. For me, I find that I can get much more done in a nice quiet place without the commute time and the constant interuptions that can occur in an office of 500 employees.
I think the issue that Cali & Jody are posing is not that telecommuting is the solution, but the fact that lawmakers believe that just putting it on record as a “law” will make it happen and be acceptable. Other groups still struggle with understanding how an assistant can assist from 30 miles away. It gets to the point that even a law from the top can’t make people “believe”… That is the change that needs to take place in corporate America…the changing of the image of “workplace”. Telecommuting is a step for some to break the 9-5 office time mold.