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RSS feedsRemote working is a growing phenomenon. According to the Office of National Statistics, about 7.5 per cent of the UK labour force, or just over two million people, were classified as teleworkers in 2003, an increase of 12 per cent on the previous year.
And the trend doesn't look ready to stop in the near future.
The most rapid uptake has been among large companies with in-house resources to introduce the relevant technology.
Sales, services, marketing and engineering staff, whose jobs already have a large mobile component, are the most likely groups to sign up.
As a result, remote working is proving popular in financial services, telecoms and high-tech firms, although less so in manufacturing and government sectors.
"One key driver is the work-life balance, where employers want to give staff the choice of where they work and, often, when," says John Eary, head of the NCC Group's staff consultancy.
"The aim is to recruit and retain staff more easily, especially people with key skills."
Another big motivation is the speed at which property rental prices are rising, particularly in large urban centres such as London. "Any way people can find to reduce these costs is a benefit," says Eary.
The flip side of this, of course, is the lack of available skills in certain areas of the country, although this is mitigated if the location is no longer an issue.
But there is still quite a lot of cultural resistance to the concept.
"It doesn't work if the right culture isn't in place and the right culture equals management behaviour," says Peter Knowles, workstyle consultant at BT's Workstyle Group.
"If senior management doesn't think it's a good thing, it's not going to happen."
Trust is the key issue, and new methods of performance management have to be worked out, based on hitting reasonable targets and objectives rather than the time spent on a task.
"Some managers can be reluctant to trust staff when they can't see them working and there can be peer envy too from people who feel that if they can't see their colleagues, they must be taking time off and not doing the job," says Eary.
Another inhibitor is the up-front costs of changing business and management processes, and providing staff with equipment. But remote working can generate often hidden savings over the longer term, according to Knowles.
BT, for example, says it spends an average of £16,000 each year to support an office-based employee, compared with £2,500 for a remote worker.
The savings come from a mixture of lower property-related costs, reduced staff turnover, and higher productivity rates resulting from increased motivation and less commuting.
But, warns Knowles, three key elements of the organisation must be involved in the implementation of change.
The first is human resources, whose responsibility it is to put in place policies, procedures and even training to ensure that management processes and communication mechanisms work effectively, and that people have help to cope with changing working practices.
Health and safety guidance also needs to be set up, as do practices to ensure that staff don't feel isolated, or cut off.
The second area that needs to be involved is facilities management. Staff need to provide everything, from appropriately sized desks for home working or hotdesking facilities if remote workers come into the office, to ensuring that postage surpluses are paid.
The third crucial element is IT. "The IT function has to make sure the technology works as well as people expect it to," states Dave Cottam, director of client services and human resources at Partners for Change.
"Many remote workers experience frustration because they can't get things to work properly. This just increases their stress when the whole idea is that it makes it easier to do their jobs."
Robust, reliable systems and fast and secure networks are crucial to keeping end users happy. But equally important is having IT support in place when needed.
"Remote working puts more pressure on IT staff because they may find they have to provide a round-the-clock service," explains Eary.
"If end users can't get through to them, they really don't have many other options. In the office they can just use someone else's computer, but they can't rely on that if they're in the field or calling at an anti-social time."
This in itself is an argument for IT departments to work remotely and more flexibly, in larger organisations at least.
"While providing support at 3am still isn't very common, until 10pm is increasingly so, so staff could work remotely to provide an on-call service which might suit them better anyway," he adds.
CASE STUDY: CAMBBA Construction
"In the construction industry as a whole, many people work remotely, so good communication is a major issue for us," says Martin Warburton, IT manager at CAMBBA Construction.
But the sector is conservative in its approach to IT. "You have to ensure everyone is coming along with you and you don't go off at an IT tangent. If you do, you'll leave people behind, and at some point you'll find you've lost them," he warns.
CAMBBA Construction, a joint venture between Carillion, Alfred McAlpine, Balfour Beatty and AMEC, was awarded a £500m contract by Midland Expressway (MEL) just over three years ago, to design and build the 27-mile M6 toll road north of Birmingham.
As part of the deal, MEL required CAMBBA to use a web-based collaboration tool to make it quicker and easier for interested parties to share design documents.
Aside from MEL and the contractors, interested parties ranged from local authorities affected by the project, such as South Staffordshire Council, to the designers at AAJV, some of whom were based in Australia. AAJV is a joint venture between Arup and WS Atkins.
CAMBBA opted for Causeway Collaboration, an application service provider-based offering built by Arup and further developed by Causeway Technologies, because it was easy to use.
"Some of the other packages had more complexity, but the contract was only for 40 months, so the timescale to get it up and running and get people using the tool was very short," says Warburton.
"It was about trade-offs between complexity and what could be achieved realistically."
The tool acted as a repository for design documents, which included word processing files, computer-aided design drawings and specifications that could be submitted, reviewed, amended and approved online.
"This speeded up the design process because people didn't have to wait for paper documents to arrive in the post and the same information was available to everybody at the same time.
"As soon as a document was posted, everyone was notified, so various tasks were able to go on in parallel," says Warburton.
A high-bandwidth internet connection was key to the success of the project.
"High bandwidth is quite expensive, but it makes such a difference to people's acceptance of technology," he adds.
"If they have to wait forever to open a file, it puts them off, so it's worth paying for."
CASE STUDY: Grant Thornton
"Five years ago, it was very painful to cater to mobile staff because the technology didn't support what we were trying to do," recalls Greg Swift, national director of IT projects at Grant Thornton.
"Now it's much more dependable and our users are happier because they can get on with the job. In reality, it's all about improving service to clients."
Grant Thornton provides accounting, tax and business advisory services to middle market companies. Out of its UK staff of 3,000, it has about 2,400 remote workers who deal directly with customers in their own offices.
The number is now stable and equates to an increase of about 20 per cent over the past three years.
The company has recently upgraded its laptops to 512MB Toshiba Tecra M1s. The improvements in reliability have helped notebook-related calls to the helpdesk plummet by 20 per cent.
Staff use the notebooks to complete audits electronically. They work between meetings and access email over a virtual private network.
But to boost productivity, Grant Thornton is trialling wireless access with a pilot group of 30, courtesy of the Intel Centrino chip on which the notebooks are based.
"Supporting remote workers is vastly more complicated than on-site workers because if everyone is on a Lan or Wan, problems with a spreadsheet, for example, can be sorted out remotely," explains Swift.
"You can ask electronically for access to their machine and take over the spreadsheet, but that's not an option for remote users."
Swift advises that all laptops are configured in a standard way, so that "if IT staff are trying to resolve problems over the phone, you at least know what the build is, which all helps with fault resolution".
He also recommends that businesses put in place a mechanism to allow remote users to obtain the latest updates to software, emails and data.
Grant Thornton uses IBM's Lotus Domino messaging software, which is scheduled to replicate information to staff machines when they are offline so they can pick it up when they dial in.
Another key issue is training staff to be aware of the problems faced by remote users, so that they are aware of the challenges and can handle them efficiently and sympathetically.
Grant Thornton backs up the approach with a knowledge base of common faults that runs off the electronic helpdesk, allowing calls to be dealt with swiftly, especially to new staff.
See also:
Mobile working has become a fact of life. In this Computing Special Report we look at the relevant technology, and the effects it will have on your business. 19 Mar 2004
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