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September 22, 2011 By Hilton Collins
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Count former Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy among the industry heavyweights who support telework in government workplaces.
McNealy, the company’s founder, voiced his support for mobile employment programs and said that Sun was an early adopter of the strategy. McNealy’s comments came Thursday, Sept. 22, at a teleworking conference attended by local, state and federal government workers.
Sun’s telework activities have reaped benefits, he said. Employees spend less time commuting, saving an average of 2.5 weeks of work time annually. McNealy shared that an internal company survey in June 2008 found that 82 percent of the company’s employees said they’d recommend Sun to others because of its flexible and innovative work environment.
McNealy said employees shouldn’t be densely packed in walled environments all the time. When McNealy led Sun, he said he’d walk building halls on weekdays, and sometimes there’d only be 15 percent occupancy because people were elsewhere doing their jobs.
“Telework is what the world is about,” he said.
According to McNealy, employees are more comfortable when they work away from managers’ watchful gazes. But they still want goals and direction in their duties. “People do not like to be managed. They love to be led,” he said.
McNealy did recognize one of the main barriers to telework, a concern that’s no stranger to government offices: It’s difficult for managers to monitor employee work performance if they can’t see them in the desk two feet away.
This lack of trust was also mentioned by California Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren of Silicon Valley, another speaker at the Work Anywhere Symposium 2011. Employers worry about the productivity of teleworking employees, she said, but a Booz Allen Hamilton study has dispelled that notion. “They found the productivity of teleworkers increased by an hour a day,” Lofgren said, without naming the specific study.
Lofgren echoed McNealy’s laundry list of benefits realized from telework, including less traffic congestion and a better work-life balance. She added one more potential benefit: The public sector can’t compete with the private sector when it comes to the salaries it can offer to job applicants, so teleworking may lure people to government work with the promise of more flexibility and freedom.
“Telework has started to gain traction in the public sector,” she said. Technological advances, like wireless capability and the mobile tech explosion, make it easy to deploy now, Lofgren asserted.
In December, the federal government enacted the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010, which makes executive-level employees eligible for telework opportunities — one indicator that telework may be catching on in government.
But there also have been setbacks, Lofgren said. The General Services Administration has partnered with other organizations, including universities, to offer telework centers in Washington, D.C., but they didn’t work out and have been shut down. The telework centers were designed to be hubs for remote workers to come in to complete remote work instead of at home.
And security of remote data and connections is a concern. “One of the challenges we have is maintaining data security in the telework system,” Lofgren said.
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I'd love to see more telework at the state level. The amount of money that goes to pay for huge office buildings, parking, etc. is amazing. While having an office is important for sharing in the work environment, more flexibility WILL be required for state's to attract good employees. No one likes to have uncle sam watching over you!
I believe it is time to get with this trend. With the rising gas prices and traffic jams, working off site can really help save time and money on the employee and the state. I agree that our big office buildings cost the state much to operate. We can certainly cut down on energy bills if telework happens on a broader basis.
As our economy continues on it's present downward course, cost savings for businesses, employees, and consumers will become a higher priority for all. As with most things, this need will dictate our acceptance of things that at one time were deemed unacceptable. Teleworkers will become more prevalent. It is our individual and collective circumstances that will determine when this will happen.
The time for embracing the benefits of Telework has arrived long ago. The savings are real for organizations, the environment and individuals. As McNealy stated,"it is a matter of leadership".
I find that I am actually more productive when teleworking than when I'm in the office. My telework location - my home office - does not experience any of the work place interruptions as my "official" office. With the technology available today, being confined to one location is no longer a necessity. I actually give the job more focused hours from home than from the office. If I were a weaver I could understand having to be confined to the loom, but with today’s fast paced work environment – I function much better in my telework environment.
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As a manager of state employees, I can't trust them to do their work while in the work place.....how in the world can I trust them at home??
Your statement begs the question "Why do you have people working for you that you can't trust to do their job?"
Maybe it's your leadership!
I believe there are three big hurdles that needs to be overcome for this concept to work in the public sector 1. Accountability - The subordinates have to demonstrate it and the supervisors need to enforce it. 2. Trust - Only when the first is achieved can this be accomplished. 3. Union Environment - this is probably one of the biggest challenge in accomplishing items one and two. Unlike the majority of the private organization that are not unionized, most public sectors are. With the history of the union and organization relationship, items one and two will be extremely hard, if not impossible to achieve.
As presented at the Sacramento conference, the entire city of Calgary has adopted telework as an economic growth incentive, called Workshift. Imagine, an entire city focused on teleworking for job growth. Hint to California leaders??
Gotta laugh at this one. If you can't manage the work they do at home, how do you manage at the office? Do you sit and watch them type? Planning and managing work (not people) is why you get the "manager" title. You can never actually manage people - but you can manage to objectives. I've managed global home based teams, and it boils down ensuring you have self-motivated staff, assigned work, and guidelines that set expectations for working as a remote team. Sometimes, just as you do in the office, you'll get non-performers, and you'll have to boot them off the team. The reward of teleworking is a great motivator for many, however, it's just not for everyone, so make sure you have the option to go either way.
I agree with the replies. As Scott McNealy said, “People do not like to be managed. They love to be led”. Maybe the problem is in your mirror JM.
I think that if you have employees that you can't trust to get work done then you have a problem with either who works for you or with your own leadership. I have one employee who is very valuable to our group who I let work from home several days each week. Her work from home is just as good as her work in the office. I never concern myself with whether or not she is being productive. The way to deal with trust issues is to have measuables, then you know whether or not they are productive.
All I can say, JM, is that I'm glad you're not my supervisor.
JM, you really need to find a new job if you can't lead your staff to productive results. I suspect though, that you aren't a government manager and just needed to express your dislike for public servants, for some reason. In my own 24 years on the job I have never met a manager in state government who would talk like that about his or her employees, even anonymously.
I know another managers like you. She is the worst procrastinator I've ever seen. She is slow getting her own work done because she is too busy micromanaging everyone else. It is a good thing for the world at large that she never married or had children.
I love the notion of "if the government workers aren't working, then just fire them." Shedding deadwood government workers is about as easy as lifting a moutain with your bare hands.
That sounds like apathy at the Manager level, not the worker level. You CAN get rid of poor performing government employees, but it takes diligence and commitment to show they lack the skills to do their job. My people work at home one day a week - they get more work done there than they do at the office - walking around, chit-chatting with coworkers, and surfing the net. Without all those distractions, there's nothing to do at home BUT work.
In JM's defense, I am going to guess that his line staff are all union (i.e. untouchable). You cannot lead a horse that doesn't want to / have to drink. I was very successful providing leadership in the private sector, but TOTALY handcuffed by labor unions in the public sector. Example: Why would a DBA require "wash-up time" at the end of his/her shift? It's not a coal mine, but an IT shop!
In JM's defense: As a State employee who actually does work, many of my co-workers, including management, spend hours discussing the latest game, be it football, basketball, toilet training, etc. They are not working; they are socializing. I am not certain that this would translate to an improvement in production "at home." Additionally, I do have a micro-manager and, I know that I would be more productive away from those interruptions.