Telecommuting Receives a Bodyblow

With Yahoo and Best Buy's cutting off the practice of telecommuting, the very idea receives a significant setback. The movement and practice was building up with an averring of the technology now widely available and enabling the practice and the reports of its benefits like quality of life improvement, increased efficiency and carbon emissions. Even Maynard Webb's new book, Rebooting Work using this as an enabling foundation for the work anywhere you want as CEO of the individual entrepreneur.

What this all fails to consider is, as manifested by these recent examples of retraction, the choice is not in the hands of the workers. Executives decide. Unless they can be convinced through a patience long enough to see any results, and a vision bold enough to change the rules a little about the view of work, the critical mass of getting this idea of working without visual feedback will not become the norm.

Management in general is weened on bodies and clocks. Management control is: "If I see you, and if you where here for 8 hours (or more), you must be working and productive." They are not thinking about the effects beyond the short term, many won't be around long enough to see. And there is a "if you are here and not productive and efficient it is your fault, if you are not here then it is my fault" view on responsibility. The trust is not there,  Douglas McGregor's Theory X management is in the political foundation and the company Kool-aid, no change is happening until executive management accepts that maybe Theory Y will prevail if it is allowed to. If consultants and human resource professionals really think there is merit to this telecommuting, they need to spend time converting the deciding executives, not expecting a grass roots revolution by telling individuals that they would love it. Most of them know it already, they just don't have the power or the option to do so.

Now there are contrasts to this. I recognize a significant benefit of spontaneous collaboration which is difficult (but not impossible) in a remote configuration, so I think we want to encourage people to come to the office, but lets give them compelling reasons, not generic edicts. And there will always be those that abuse freedom and circumvent the work when telecommuting, but I have news, people even do this when they are "at work". There needs to be a feedback loop that effectively measures productive contribution (easier said than done with growing knowledge work and skill) and to regularly (and intelligently) wean out the ones avoiding work.

Telecommuting will happen in a broad way eventually. But news and examples like Yahoo and Best Buy - two companies in need of a wild idea or innovation, not a retraction to ancient models of management oversight and illusional productivity - sets back the adoption of telecommuting at least 5 years from any path or trend line it may have been on. Unless a significant number of executives who believe in it go all-in to the idea, we will have to await an outside of work factor like forced carbon footprint reduction or other political, environmental or economic event of significance to push telecommuting over the acceptance and adoption hump.