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Telecommuting And Its Impact On Workers Compensation And Safety
(Part 2 of 2)

Pros and Cons of Telecommuting

Beyond workers compensation costs and home-ergonomics considerations, there are a lot of positive aspects to telecommuting, but there are also negative aspects. From the management perspective, you need to analyze the benefits and the costs and determine if the pros outweigh the cons. Following are some of the issues you should consider.

Employee Productivity

Employees who telecommute generally state that they get more work done at home than they would in the office. Office environments often include frequent interruptions by fellow employees and other sources. And these interruptions cost the employee more time than the actual time spent chatting, responding to questions, and so on. When you stop in the middle of a task and then return to it, you generally need a little time to reorient yourself and get back up to speed. Even if that “reentry” takes a minute or less, when multiplied by the number of daily interruptions, the additional lost productivity accumulates.

Employees who telecommute do not suffer from office interruptions. However, there may be other distractions. For example, children — particularly younger children — may be a source of interruption as they have difficulty understanding that “Daddy” or “Mommy” is at work when the parent is dressed in casual clothes and sitting at the computer in the den.

Another downside to working at home may be the isolation. As time-consuming as those office interruptions may seem to be, they also serve to bond employees into a cohesive unit. The group spirit that often leads employees to “pitch in” and help one another meet deadlines and accomplish goals may wane if those employees now interact mostly by e-mail or telephone. This can be partially overcome by allowing only two or three days per week of telecommuting, requiring the telecommuter to come into the office on the other days.

Schedule Flexibility

One aspect of telecommuting that allows greater productivity is that employees can schedule their actual work time more effectively. Each individual’s circadian rhythms are slightly different. Some of us are most productive in the morning. Others do their best work in the afternoon. There are even those who are in top form at 3:00 a.m.

When managing your telecommuters, the scheduling flexibility requires you to change your mindset from time served to work performed. You are probably accustomed to having the majority of your employees on-site. Everyone comes in at 9:00 a.m. and leaves at 5:00 p.m., or some other eight-hour time frame. You may even walk through from time to time, making a mental note of who is at his or her desk, at the photocopy machine, and so on. Management can see that the employees are hard at work (or at least creating that illusion). Both management and employees have come, over time, to view the job as “putting in eight hours,” even though at least part of that time may not be spent productively.

With many jobs, however, the critical component is not how many hours are spent, but how much work is accomplished. There are any number of measures of work output that can be used to measure performance: number of sales calls made, number of pages written or edited, number of widgets sold, number of ad layouts completed, etc. In fact, if an employee is meeting your performance standards in six hours instead of seven, isn’t that more important than the number of hours spent creating or achieving that output?

More Time for Work

Commuting to and from work chews up valuable time. Employees who come into the office on a regular basis may spend upwards of an hour getting there — and another hour getting back home. Some are sufficiently frazzled by traffic problems that they've already lost their edge by the time they reach the office. At that point, time is spent calming down and changing gears from traffic to work.

Other time that ends up being unproductive is sick days. Employees who come into the office every day will sometimes stay home when they have a cold, upset stomach, or other minor ailment. Often, by the afternoon, they are much improved and could work. However, it may seem pointless to come in to work for half a day. Telecommuters, on the other hand, can easily go right to work once they feel up to it.

Even more frustrating are snow days and other absences forced by inclement weather. Even if employees are willing to come to work in such situations, some are forced to stay home with children not going to school because the schools have been closed. Again, telecommuters don’t have to go to work to get to work.

Another waste of productive time is paid sick or personal days when employees are, in fact, at home taking care of a sick child, waiting for a repair person to show up, or waiting for delivery of a new piece of furniture or appliance. Telecommuters don’t have to “call in sick” for such contingencies. They're already home and can be productive on your behalf, spending only a few minutes here and there to attend to personal matters.

There is a downside, however: the workaholic who doesn’t know when to quit. This is particularly problematic for employees working on computers. It is extremely easy to lose track of time while at a keyboard — particularly when there are no distractions from fellow employees. This can lead to telecommuters suffering stress and burn-out because they do not get proper rest, take sufficient breaks, and spend enough time with friends and family to maintain a positive approach to their jobs.

The opposite might also be a concern: employees who fritter away a considerable portion of the workday with nonproductive activities. Chances are such employees might be even less productive in a home-office environment.

Your telecommuters should determine work periods and stick to them, within reason. If there is a separate location in the home where the employee “goes to work,” the telecommuter should go there for work and leave there whenever the workday is over.

Reduced Overhead

Companies have traditionally provided space — a cubicle or an office — to each employee. If your organization introduces telecommuting, it may no longer need to do so. If, for example, you have several telemarketing units, you can stagger the days when each group of employees comes into the office. On the remaining days, they can make their calls from home. With this staggered attendance, as many as five separate groups of people can share the same office space. This decreases the amount of total office space you need and, with that reduction, the overhead for maintaining that space.

Another aspect is the reduction in employee turnover. Telecommuters are less likely to leave their jobs, as the telecommuting gives them the flexibility they need and more control over their work environments. This reduction in turnover means you are spending less for recruiting, hiring, and training new employees. And you do not have that “ramping up” phase of new employees when they have been trained, but are not yet up-to-speed and fully productive.

The downside of this scheme is the proprietary feelings most employees have about their offices: “my desk,” “my office,” “my computer” — even though all of these items technically belong to the employer. When telecommuters realize that this is the trade-off for working from home several days per week, they should be able to accept the fact that someone else will be sitting in “their” chairs when they are not.

Managing the Telecommuter

Managing telecommuters, at first glance, seems to be a difficult proposition. In reality, it is not that different from managing employees on-site. Management includes the following skills:

• setting goals;
• assessing progress;
• giving regular feedback; and
• judging work based on outcomes.

All of these aspects of management can be accomplished either by telephone or in periodic face-to-face meetings.

Work Output

Telecommuting requires some faith in the telecommuters that they will be working, not playing computer games or watching soap operas. But this should not be blind faith. You need to focus on the quality (and, perhaps, the quantity) of the work they are producing. If standards are being met, that should be sufficient.

As noted previously, your mindset should be work performed, not time spent performing work. If a telecommuting employee can accomplish in six hours at home the same amount of work that would have taken seven hours in the office, so be it!

Home Visits

You may want to — and probably should — visit your telecommuters' home offices at least once or twice per year. If you have provided some of the home-office equipment, you want to be certain that it has been set up correctly and is properly protected from any hazards that may exist in the home.

Whether the equipment is owned by the company or by the telecommuter, you will want to verify that the home-office ergonomic guidelines have been followed. Remember: An OUECTD incurred in a home-office environment would be just as compensable as an OUECTD incurred in the company’s office.

But be considerate of your telecommuters: Never drop in on them unannounced. In fact, never visit them without at least 24 hours’ notice. This simple courtesy may save both you and your telecommuter embarrassment. One of the attractions of telecommuting is being able to go “to work” in your pajamas, without having combed your hair. And not all of us keep our homes impeccably neat and clean at all times. Just as you would clean up the conference room before a client came to visit, so will the telecommuter clean up the living room and the workspace before you come to visit.

Selecting Telecommuters

We recommend that, at least at the beginning of your first venture into telecommuting, you choose your telecommuters with extreme care. If you are committed to the success of telecommuting, you want to pick the employees most likely to succeed. Consider the following criteria for telecommuters:

• Telecommuters should have been employees for at least six months, long enough for you to know them fairly well and long enough for them to understand their jobs well enough to perform them without intense supervision and assistance.
• Telecommuting should be offered only to employees who want to try this alternate work mode; it should not be forced on entire departments without regard to individual preferences.
• Telecommuters need to have strong organizational skills, an ability to prioritize their work, and good time-management skills.
• Telecommuters need to be self-motivated. They should have demonstrated that they are self-starters capable of working independently.
• Telecommuting should be offered only to individuals who can function as team players, who understand the importance of their work and how it fits in the “grand scheme of things” at your company.
• Telecommuters should have demonstrated that they are dependable and complete their work on time.

Final Thoughts

Telecommuting is not for every employer — or for every employee. Some jobs obviously must be done at the workplace. And some employees are just not cut out for telecommuting. Working at home requires a certain amount of maturity and self-discipline. Some of your employees may prefer not to telecommute, knowing themselves well enough to know they would not succeed in such an unstructured environment.

Don’t be pushed into telecommuting if it truly does not meet your needs and your management style. If your employees need to interact with one another on a constant basis, don’t opt for telecommuting just because it’s the current trend. But if telecommuting will work for you and your organization, don’t be afraid to try it.

Read Telecommuting And Its Impact On Workers Compensation And Safety (Part 1)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Journal of Workers Compensation is a quarterly review of risk management and cost containment strategies published by Standard Publishing in Boston, Massachusetts. For more information, please visit our web site, www.standardpublishingcorp.com, or contact the editor at 800-682-5759, extension 222, or subscription services at extension 228.

riskVue | The webzine for risk management profesionals
March 2002