Distant dangers for staff

I was at the Henley Management College recently for a seminar on Managing Tomorrow’s Worker. One of the speakers was Peter Thompson, manager of Microsoft UK’s business productivity solutions group. He said his firm has arranged for each employee’s incoming calls to be routed to wherever they may be in any particular building.

Jacqui Sasserath, an independent project consultant to Microsoft, likewise extolled the benefits of hot-desking and teleworking. For example, she said they can help to create a more loyal workforce because they enable staff to achieve a better work/life balance.

But then Peter Thomson, Henley’s resident guru on the future of work, made some hard-hitting points. IT development cycles, he noted, are much shorter than office leases, which can last up to 25 years. Yet while facility managers have difficulty aligning plans for IT with plans for new offices, finance and HR managers ask: “Shouldn’t we outsource a lot of our work anyway?”

Certainly the planning of tomorrow’s work remains a haphazard business. That’s a pity; but it may be wrong to say that a shift to more telework and mobile work in Britain is being impeded by old-fashioned attitudes.

Of course such attitudes still exist. The dinosaur manager can be reluctant to lose his wasteful habit of looking over employees’ shoulders in order to control them. However, in my experience this kind of manager is very nearly extinct.

Instead, today’s typical manager probably values the ability to manage a crisis more than the ability to control people. He may only want to have employees working right next to him if he feels that he might need to shout instructions to them urgently.

Anyway, IT can now help. Lay instant messaging out in tiers, like an organisation chart. Then add high-quality video conference pictures that capture desks and rooms alongside faces. Result: on-the-fly meetings can easily embrace remote workers.

Back at the seminar, Ian Brooks, head of internet strategy at HP, took a similar view. One day, he hinted, Europeans will be as chatty in conference calls as Americans – and all those for whom English is a second language will be able to contribute through instant messaging.

For me the problem with organisations wanting to go over to remote working isn’t Britain’s immutable culture of “presenteeism”. What I fear is a veritable rush to remoteness, accompanied by liberal rhetoric, irrational work methods, and increased government regulation. “I don’t care how you do it, but I’ll only pay for results” will be the manager’s mantra for remote workers in the future – as if, in a drive to Victorian piecework, ignoring Adam Smith’s division of labour will somehow be OK.

Then, as John Philpott, chief economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, noted, government will step in – not to assist the production of wealth, but to control the seating, lighting and everything else about working from home.

IT-assisted remoteness, then, clearly has many merits. But the pitfalls that go with it may be quite surprising.