Some smarty pants said that “Work is something you do, and not something you have to travel to”. Almost certainly correct in the essence that many employees drive to work, and as soon as they get in the door, they grab a cup of tea and read the paper for fifteen minutes. This mythical word “work” has become correlated with a place we go to, rather than an action we have to execute. “Honey I’m off to work.” or “That’s the work calling” are expressions which have seeped into our subconscious over the years. Anyway the positions are changing as more and more office staff in Online Jobs are being made to Work From Home.
With this exodus from the office, managers are now confronted with no physical staff in the building and therefore no immediate way of discerning what their workers are working on(or not working on) as is the case. Internet Business has always been like this, so maybe other market sectors need to evaluate how these web based companies supervise their workers. Chances are that they have taken on board “Management by Objectives” to set goals and review their staff by. It makes sense, as managers cannot see what their workers are working on if they now Work From Home some thirty odd miles away.
This move to remote working is a huge adjustment for managers as well as staff. The perception that many managers will have, is that their workers will be less hard working if they have no face to face supervision. Evidently that may be the case, but in a normal office it is calculated that over an hour a day is squandered by staff yakking at the photocopier or with smoking breaks etc. It is actually up to the manager and the member of staff to sit down before they leave the office and set out some modus operandi, some goals and some recurring times to review progress. Whether you see eye to eye with Management by Objectives or not, it does look like a way of ensuring both groups know what must be done and by when. How it is accomplished is another matter, and I think some leeway needs to be given to staff who Work From Home. It is a big transformation for them, particularly if their previous Online Jobs were in a big office with lots going on and lots of social relations.
Unquestionably without some type of suitable appraisal scheme, personnel that work in some type of the Internet Business, may be discounted for promotion, because they are no longer seen back at HQ. That is where decent MBO’s can be utilized to compare personnel doing comparable work, regardless whether their Online Jobs are in the main city office or miles away in a suburban semi-detached house. It is a new method of working so there will be errors, but with any luck lessons will be learnt. After the initial bedding in period, managers might find that remote employees are in reality more productive. One such study from CompTIA found that two thirds of ventures indicated that productivity had increased.
So although not beyond question, it does seem that productivity may well not be as big an issue as managers believed. One thing is for sure managers in any kind of Internet Business will have to rely on their staff to do what is called for and it’s up to them to manage them accordingly through “Management by Objectives”.