From: www.itworld.com

Learning to supervise remote workers

by Tracy Mayor

April 3, 2001 —

As the IS director at a small, fast-moving consultancy, Matt Pardo executes the usual daily tasks required to manage technology workers in the 21st century. But looking over the tops of cubicles isn't one of them. Seventy-five percent of Pardo's direct reports work somewhere other than he does, and even he isn't in what he calls his "office office" every day.

His scattered workforce doesn't faze Pardo -- as long as the work is completed, he doesn't particularly care where it's being done. But he acknowledges that's a mind-set that might take traditional managers a while to embrace. "It boils down to a control issue. There are a lot of managers who only feel comfortable being able to talk to [their employees] and see their work every day," he says. "You have to manage by objective instead. That old management style will have to go away."

In evolving his management style, Pardo says he was careful to increase phone and e-mail communication with his direct reports to make up for their infrequent visits in person. And when his team does get together, Pardo says that as a remote worker himself (he's in North Carolina; company headquarters is in Austin, Texas), he tends to be more sympathetic with people's travel woes.

It's no surprise that Pardo's company, TManage, is willing and able to embrace a scattered workforce: The company specializes in managing remote-work programs for corporations. But it's clear that at more and more companies, offsite work is becoming ubiquitous, thanks to a number of converging trends, including cheaper portable equipment and a tighter labor market. And an ongoing organizational focus on customer retention and globalization is forcing businesses to rethink the concepts of 9-to-5 workdays and office-bound employees.

The idea of letting your star programmer do her magic from home one day a week may not strike you as particularly radical. But it's a step that is leading to a corporatewide shift in thinking about and managing workers. In fact, remote-work proponents like the International Telework Association and Council (ITAC) prefer the use of the term telework to the older telecommute because the former emphasizes the strategic nature of offsite work arrangements.

"Telecommuting was an accommodation, a convenient alternative to commuting," explains ITAC President John Edwards, also CEO and executive director of TeleworkNetwork, an Arlington, Va., consultancy. "Telework is a business strategy, and that's easier to sell to executives." Indeed, business leaders are becoming more enamored of remote working's bottom-line benefits -- reduction of real estate expenses, increases in employee productivity and retention, and adoption of a dispersed, results-oriented corporate culture that fits with today's global business goals.