Telecommuting + Productivity: Is it Working?

I spoke at InnoTech last week — it’s always good to have a chance to spread the coworking word. Overall the gathering was okay — not great but okay. I prefer the more geeky BarCamp and similar events and InnoTech was pretty heavy on the suits. That said, telecommuters were well represented and seemed very into various coworking models presented by the panel I was on.

I was challenged by one guy in the audience who suggested that telecommuters are less productive than their office-bound coworkers. I was pretty sure I had read reports showing the opposite, but I had no facts at my fingertips to offer. He then sent me a follow up email, reasserting his stance, which he backed up with a link to a comment on a post about Sun Microsystems. The comment, from a former Sun employee, suggests that telecommuter is a euphemism for slacker.

The Computer Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) recently released findings of a web based survey among 212 respondents in order “to determine the top benefits and challenges of telecommuting in a wide range of industries, including but not limited to IT, government, education, insurance, and telecommunications.”

Among the findings: “Top benefits of telecommuting to organizations include improved productivity (67%), cost savings (59%), access to more qualified staff (39%), employee retention (37%), and improved employee health (25%).”

An article titled Productivity Measurements and Telecommuting by Sam Miller suggests: “Another myth about productivity measurement and telecommuting is that an employer has no hold on how much an employee works on a set number of days. This is contradicted by the fact that employers enforce deadlines that a telecommuting employee must adhere to.”

Hell, even Donald Trump — while admitting he does like to keep his employees in his sight (no surprise there) — has this to say about telecommuters in a blog post called Management Tips: Trusting Telecommuters: “In the end, it should be easy to tell if telecommuting employees are getting the job done. Their work output should speak for itself. But it’s still difficult for a hands-on manager to loosen the reins, especially when it’s someone who is used to walking into cubicles and stopping by desks for meetings all day long. So there’s a huge trust issue. But if you don’t trust your employees, you shouldn’t have hired them in the first place.”

Which isn’t to say I’m relying on The Donald for management tips — I’ve got my own management style, thank you very much. But I don’t think you can argue that point about trust. As another InnoTech attendee pointed, out, if you’re standing behind your workers monitoring their every move, you’re not a very good manager. Trust coupled with communication is really what inspires dedicated, productive employees.

Plus, let’s be real. Sure there will be some telecommuters who slack, and who don’t meet expectations, quotas or deadlines. But guess what? You can find the same type of deadbeat right there in the office, surfing the day away and taking a tips from Matt Groening’s Work Is Hell book featuring such cartoon gems as How to Kill 8 Hours a Day Without Losing Your Job.

Some people are suited to telecommuting, some aren’t. Some managers are way too uptight to even think about allowing telecommuting without wincing and grinding their teeth. I say too bad for them because the way things are going, working fulltime in an office is rapidly becoming just one way to work, not the end all be all work scenario.