Telework and telecommuting: definitions and workplace practices

Telework / Telecommuting

Business

At Waggoner Edstrom we have discovered that time is one of our most precious assets. We continue to win new accounts over some of the best advertising agencies in the world by allowing our teams to develop their own way of being aggressive and challenging deadlines while still being able to participate in their family life. This competitive advantage that we have discovered will be hard for our competitors to copy as their cultures are more centered on traditional in office functions. By providing our creative and account teams with the independence to systematize their workloads as they choose, and giving them control over their project direction we have created weapon that will allow us to be very successful in the future.

Defining the Concepts and the Current Environment

Proficient partaking in today's economy demands high reliance on effective leadership of technical and support teams whose members are spread across a lot of geographic locations. There are exclusive and distinctive requirements for leadership attention in the virtual project team or remote management situation. This is because people who divide responsibilities for universal objectives reside in geographically dispersed locations. Key findings from best practices across a lot of industries reveal that successful remote leadership includes the characteristic fundamentals for leading people and running resources in a conventional office environment (Thompson, 2000).

Nevertheless, difficulties in the conventional environment can be appreciably magnified in the virtual situation. Difficulty with communicating; working together; and producing high-quality, on-time results is characteristically heightened by distance. Effective leaders need to rapidly, self-assuredly and capably diagnose such issues. They have to be able to take purposeful actions in order to keep project team associations, productivity and outcomes on track. There is even more importance on the use of suitable communications skills to fit the needs of the people and the situation. There are five main categories of effective leadership skills in virtual project team or distance-management situations: communicating successfully and utilizing technology that fits the circumstances; constructing community, based on shared trust, respect, fairness and association, among project team members; establishing clear and rousing shared goals, expectations, principle and vision; leading by example with a focal point able to be seen and quantifying results by coordinating and collaborating across organizational limitations (Thompson, 2000).

Communicating successfully is the key to successful virtual project teams. In distance situations, successful communications necessitate careful attention to listening. People must also be able to present their own thoughts and ideas as obviously as possible, centering on conveying affirmative and positive intent. They have to choose the correct technology to rapidly and sympathetically express an apparent message, and take extra care to respectfully make sure that everyone understands the expectations for action. This includes significant feedback loops and networking and frequently necessitates daily contact throughout particularly fast-changing times. Successfully communicating in a virtual project team also requires careful diagnosis of any given circumstance to distinguish not only the task or work purpose in question but also the emotional content within the situation. It necessitates purposeful concentration to the needs of the project team members and their longing for action or a remedy in a suitable and responsive manner. A particularly effectual technique is establishing ground rules that meet the requirements of the project team and its leader (Thompson, 2000).

Is Telework/Telecommuting Responsible for a Corporation?

Telework takes place when information and communications technologies (ICT's) are functional to facilitate work to be done at a distance from the place where the work results are needed or where the work would traditionally have been done (What is Teleworking? . . . Telecommuting, n.d.). This idea is an innovative business solution that allows employees to do prolific work away from the traditional office. Contemporary technological advances have made it easier to work anytime, anywhere, and any place (Telework Overview, 2011).

There are advantages of telecommuting for both employees and employers. Advantages for teleworkers include: better administration of time and augmented flexibility of working schedule, productivity development due to the fact that they are not bothered by colleagues or by superiors, better focus on tasks to be done, reduction or even elimination of transportation costs, reduction of time required for going to the office and reduction of stress (Hortensia, n.d.).

Advantages for organizations include:

decrease of operating costs involved by the necessity of utilizing working spaces like rent, maintenance and insurance decrease of utilities expenses like gas, electricity and water decrease of the expenditure of consumable materials decrease of salary operating costs, as the teleworkers are paid for their task and not for their time spent at work possibility to have experts located in any part of the world and possibility to hire low cost but capable labor force, for example recruiting the personnel can be done in geographic areas where the labor force is low cost well trained increase of productivity and performances due to the fact that teleworkers can better focus on the results to be achieved reduction of the number of absentees, because the teleworkers work at home creation of jobs and employment chances in rural or disadvantaged areas (Hortensia, n.d.).

Virtual teams permit for companies to take advantage of on a lot of different things. One of the most significant benefits of a virtual team is diversity of knowledge. People with a lot of dissimilar kinds of knowledge now can be spread out all over the globe. Online meetings, remote computer access, wireless technology, and conferencing systems present a way for participants to connect to a complex discussion from anywhere. With no travel and lodging costs, and no in-between chunks of empty time, people who would be reluctant to be inconvenienced now can provide their informational part of a process, and then go on with other business. Since they're concerned only for the particular knowledge event, they can charge only for that time, not the supplementary travel times that used to be involved (Landers, 2008).