The remote working revolution is being hampered because many mangers are unable to break free of the mindset that they can only manage a team that is physically there in front of them.
The vast majority of managers say they trust employees to work from home and recognise they will not spend the whole time watching daytime TV or bunking off to the shops, a study by the UK’s City & Guilds and Institute of Leadership & Management has concluded.
The research has found that, while nine out of 10 managers said they trusted remote workers and three quarters recognised they were more productive, a significant minority admitted they were still unable to break their old-fashioned “presenteeism” management style.
Unsurprisingly, it’s a similar story in the U.S, where a survey this week by recruiter Robert Half Technology has found telecommuting among IT professionals growing apace.
Nearly half of the 1,400 chief information officers polled said their IT workforce was telecommuting at a rate that was either the same or higher than five years ago.
But the City & Guilds research found, while more employees were working remotely, the management skills and training to deal with this evolution in working style had yet to catch up.
Nearly half of the managers polled said they were unprepared for the supervision of remote teams, and only a quarter had received any training on how to manage such a team.
While nearly three quarters believed remote workers were more productive, and nine out of 10 said they trusted their remote employees, a third also confessed to wanting to monitor their employees closely, just to make sure.
Photo by MSDesigns.
James Wilcox on August 9th, 2007 at 9:47 pm
This is an interesting study because I work for one of the largest banks in the world and as a general policy we are allowed to work remotely provided we have a business case to do so.
Our company is beginning to adopt the Results Oriented Work solution which basically means they don’t care where you work from as long as you are productive and do what you say you are going to do. As long as you get your work done and deliver it on time and preferably under budget, it really doesn’t matter if you are physically in the office.
For me, this means removing a 5 hour commute from my day and allows me to be much more productive and put in hours when I need to. I think more businesses should adopt telecommuting as a practice but it takes good self control not to vege out in front of the TV when you should be working. :)