Everyone knows what telecommuting is these days, but still, businesses are nervous about using remote workers.  In this post I want to talk a little about some of the benefits of using remote workers, as well as some of the obstacles.  Note that I’m going to use the term “remote worker” to indicate someone who may be a telecommuter, but may also just indicate someone working at a remote office.

Advantages of Remote Work

Remote Workers Can Mean Less Physical Infrastructure

Telecommuters frequently do not require businesses to supply office furniture, computers or telephones.  A company who’s workforce was sufficiently composed of remote workers would have less need for physical infrastructure, such as a big office.

Remote Work is a Perk for Employees

To work remotely means the comfort of working at home, or perhaps a conveniently located local office, and often in a more casual and comfortable environment.  Additionally, it can mean that many of the “costs of working” for the employee can be reduced or eliminated: primarily the cost of commuting.  Especially in the current climate of high fuel costs, the benefit of not having to commute can be a significant financial gain for the employee.

Remote Work Means Not Having to Be Local

When it no longer matters if an employee happens to live near the office, the labor market opens up significantly.  Suddenly it’s not so important whether there are jobs for someone in the town in which they live – they can get work from an employer in another city somewhere.  From the employer’s perspective, if it becomes impossible to hire local talent in a particular area, perhaps they can find someone elsewhere.  Freeing the labor market from geography also makes it more efficient – salaries are less likely to be either artificially inflated or depressed based on what’s happening in the local area.

So there are some clear benefits to using remote workers, or to being a remote worker.  So why don’t companies do it all the time?

Problems with Remote Work

Best Practices Are Not Well Known

We don’t know how to manage people that aren’t in the office.  It’s really that simple – many managers have never been trained in how to manage virtual teams, and are uncertain how to proceed.  Old habits like “managing by walking around” is going to be more difficult when the staff isn’t in the office.  Not knowing how to manage virtual teams can lead to fear, of course, and result in the manager rejecting the entire idea.

Furthermore, many of the standard mechanisms of management become harder without physical presence.  Having a meeting where people call in remotely is often just not as good as one where all the people are in the same room.  Getting a virtual team together can require more reliance on new technology, with makes some people uncomfortable.  There’s nothing like wasting time trying to get some piece of collaboration technology to work to make you pine for a meeting where everyone is in the same room.

Lack of Trust

A common fear of managers is that remote workers won’t actually, you know, work.  This fear generally has its roots in a low level of trust between management and workers, and additionally in the lack of a usable metric to accurately gauge worker productivity.  If “productive” is merely defined as not being caught surfing the web by the boss then, yes, there is in fact no way to ensure that the worker is being productive.

Being Cut Off

One of the lesser known, but very real, problems with remote work is that the remote employee becomes separated from the hub office.  This can mean important news doesn’t reach them, they feel like they don’t have input in decisions, and over time this can result in them being passed over for opportunities.  The danger here is essentially that at a subconscious level, the people in the office don’t really consider the remote worker to be part of the team.  This is the product of the cumulative difficulty in communicating with the remote worker.

In conclusion, there are some tremendous benefits for both employer and employee in virtual teams, but there are also some major challenges to overcome.  In following posts on this subject I’ll talk a bit about methods and techniques that people use in working with virtual teams.

Worked in a virtual team?  Have an experience to share?  Send me an email at loren.davie <at> gmail.com, and let me know what you learned from it.

Specialization happens as fields mature.  As disciplines grow into their own they spin off even more specialized sub-disciplines.  It’s a natural process of the development of human civilization.

However, it used to take a long time for this to happen.  Hundreds, even thousands of years would pass allowing fields like mathematics to slowly extract themselves from philosophy.  Careers lasted longer than lifespans: it was common for a single profession to descend from father to son, over the centuries.

Well, that’s over.

The “web business” is what, ten years old at best?  It’s changing under our feet.  Every year is different.  Sometimes it changes from month to month.  And it shouldn’t be any wonder to us that specialization is starting to work its way into the web business.  The idea of a generalized “web agency” that just does everything internally is starting to be replaced by a more flexible and sophisticated structure.

Here are some activities that used to fall entirely under the domain of “building and maintaining a website”.  Look how deep the rabbit hole goes on each one of these:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): While a cursory knowledge of SEO can be easily gained by any web dev shop, the full blown thing is a black art which requires constantly staying current on the latest trends and practices by major search engines.
• Mobile: iPhone, Android, WAP…this specialization is deep, and it keeps getting deeper.  Just recently a mobile version of the website was a nice-to-have: now its mandatory.  And how about a native iPhone app that ties back to the main website while you’re at it?  You’ll need to know Objective-C, of course. Your Rails and PHP people won’t be able to do it.
• E-Commerce: Know how to integrate your site into comparison shopping sites?  Paypal?  Google checkout? Amazon Fulfillment Services?  Are you familiar with shopping cart best practices?  E-commerce is a world all of its own, with its own domain knowledge.

Is all of this stuff really the same business any more?  It seems to me that these specializations are getting complicated enough that they need actual specialists in order to do them.  The concept of a vanilla “web developer” is starting to become impossibly broad; sort of like calling yourself a “philosopher” on your resume.

Of course, the client still doesn’t want to deal with this.  They want to continue selling shoes or whatever and outsource all of this interactive marketing crap to someone else.  A single “someone else” is preferable: no one wants to try and co-ordinate 5 vendors who may step on each others toes.

That’s why I’m proposing a delegation tree.  The client outsources their interactive marketing business to a single “agency of record” who acts as custodian and project manager for the client’s online brand.  However that agency don’t try to do all of the work themselves.  Instead they selectively choose and outsource work to various specialist vendors, while ensuring that the overall integrity of the brand and customer experience is maintained.

There’s an obvious staffing advantage here.  The mothership agency doesn’t need to maintain deep expertise in the various rabbit-holes of the web anymore, and instead relies on the best-of-breed specialist agencies to focus on their respective areas.

Instead, the mothership agency is the custodian of the online presence of the client, in an exact analogy to the traditional ad agencies of the past.  They need to really understand (or even create) the interactive brand strategy of the client, and they must select the specialist vendors that can best implement that vision.  Additionally, they need to have great distributed project management chops in order to make sure that the vendors are delivering what they’ve promised, and that it is all centrally coordinated.