Telecommuting is becoming increasingly common as more companies start to get comfortable with it. Unfortunately, problems such as difficulty maintaining work-life balance, feeling of isolation, and a lack of face-to-face contact with fellow workers begin to affect telecommuters' performance over time. The spread of new technology such as videoconferencing helps companies to partially solve these types of problems.
Jul 25th 2008
From Economist.com
Telecommuters need more than e-mail and a broadband connection
THE best thing about being a foreign correspondent is not having to commute to the office every day, attend dreary meetings, dress soberly, and generally get distracted from the nitty-gritty of doing the job. The worst thing is being out of touch with colleagues at head office, with little say over how your stories are treated. But if you can handle the patchy feedback and total lack of control, the freedom pays dividends in productivity and sheer job satisfaction.
Being one of the most portable jobs on the planet, journalism provides a daily reminder that work is something you do, not some place you go to. For the past quarter of a century, your correspondent has smirked about the time and energy he’s saved through not having to travel to work.
When he commuted back in the 1970s, he spent 80 minutes a day strap-hanging on trains and buses, and hoofing it in between. On the odd times he drove, it took an hour and at least a gallon of petrol a day. By telecommuting, he reckons he’s saved the planet some 2.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide for each of the past 25 years.
He’s not alone. Gartner Dataquest, a market-research company, reckons one in four employees in America worked from home for at least one day a week last year. Over half of all businesses in the United States now allow some form of telecommuting. European employers are further ahead still.
However, it’s what’s not being done that’s even more interesting. One study published earlier this year reckoned 33m Americans have jobs that could be done from home. If all of them started to telecommute instead of drive to work, oil imports would drop by over a quarter, and carbon emissions would fall by 67m metric tonnes a year. In terms of hours saved, each telecommuter would get the equivalent of an extra 25 working days of holiday per year.
The telecommuting boom has been driven in part by the rapid penetration of broadband in the home, easier and cheaper forms of IP telephony, more robust VPN (virtual private network) software, plus a new generation of powerful laptops that are true desktop replacements. Actually, that “technological pull” has existed for quite a while. What’s different today is that, complementing it, there’s now an “economic push” for telecommuting from business itself.
To gain an edge over the competition, firms have begun belatedly to realise how much more agile they must quickly become. Success, it’s now understood, goes to those that can genuinely reduce costs, recruit and retain the best employees, and ensure business continuity when disaster strikes.
A sure-fire way of saving money is to reduce the amount of office space and services—generally reckoned to be around $10,000 per employee annually. Telecommuting doesn’t remove all those overheads at a stroke, but it can easily halve them.
Surprisingly, firms also find that telecommuting can reduce their communications costs. That’s because a broadband connection to the home—and telecommuting is impossible without one—can always be configured as a second (essentially free) voice line as well as a high-speed data connection. That saves firms from having to reimburse employees for making business calls at high residential rates.
The other big saving comes from reducing labour costs. Employers find they can often recruit cheaper and better employees as telecommuters by going outside their normal catchment areas. An added bonus is that teleworkers don’t incur relocation expenses.
There are productivity benefits, too. Telecommuters at American Express, for instance, are reckoned to generate over 40% more business than their office-bound colleagues. British Telecom’s 9,000 teleworkers are apparently 30% more productive than their office counterparts.
That may be just the extra hours they put in. Telecommuters are famous for clocking on much earlier and clocking off far later than their office counterparts.
But as experience with telecommuting has accumulated, doubts about some of its reputed benefits have begun to surface. For instance, Korn/Ferry, a recruiting firm based in Los Angeles, finds the careers of telecommuters are believed to stagnate—as out-of-sight translates into out-of-mind.
The unhappiness is mutual. Half the bosses in the Korn/Ferry study felt the work done by remote employees suffered over time through lack of face-to-face contact with fellow workers. With 40% of its employees working away from the office every day, IBM has been alarmed enough to do some soul-searching.
Research it commissioned recently from Jay Mulki, a marketing expert at Northeastern University’s business school, points to two particular challenges that need addressing—the feeling of isolation and the difficulty of achieving a healthy work/life balance when employees operate from home. “When face-to-face communication isn’t possible,” says Mr Mulki, “teleworkers need a substitute—and voice-mail isn’t it.”
Technology, it seems, is both the problem and the solution. What most telecommuters rely on—e-mail, voice-mail, conference calls and instant messaging, plus a broadband-connected computer—will do the job, but only just. Without some form of “telepresence”, remote workers tapping away at their keyboards in their pyjamas will always be struggling in the dark.
The good news is that the cost of providing telepresence—visual and aural feedback that makes remote users feel they are all in the same room together, having personal conversations—has started to come down quite steeply.
Depending on the number of screens used, these high-definition video teleconferencing systems that deliver life-size images of the participants used to cost $500,000 or more per room. Cisco Systems, a network equipment maker based in San Jose, California, is now selling a personal telepresence system for $33,900.
That’s still big money by any measure. But with petrol at $5 a gallon today (and probably double that in a decade’s time), think of the savings to be made. Cisco reckons to have saved $70m in travel expenses in 2007 alone from the 200 telepresence systems it’s installed in its remote offices over the past few years.
And now a small start-up called LifeSize Communications in Austin, Texas, has introduced a personal teleconferencing system for $6,000. It lacks some of the bells and whistles that more professional systems offer. But it’s more than enough for a foreign correspondent filing stories from his bedroom.
To view this article at the source, please go to
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11819706
Monday, September 28, 2009
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Teleworking - Business Continuity Opportunities and Threats
By David Honour
IDC issued a report recently in which it predicted that the worldwide mobile worker population will increase from more than 650 million worldwide in 2004, to more than 850 million in 2009, representing more than one-quarter of the global workforce. Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) currently has the largest total number of mobile workers, followed by the United States and Western Europe. However, in percentage terms, the United States has the most mobile workers in its workforce. By 2009, 70 percent of the US workforce are expected to be mobile.
Teleworking presents advantages to business continuity managers, in that the distributed nature of the workforce provides inherent resiliency. Teleworking can enable continuity of business during mundane business interruption incidents, such as snowstorms or traffic problems preventing staff being able to travel into a central office; and teleworking can protect against more unusual and esoteric threats. For example, it reduces the risk of losing a cohort of critical members of staff due to a single geographical incident or disaster; and offers a business continuity solution to wide area incidents such as pandemic influenza; or a CBRN-based terrorist attack.
In the US, TelCoa has been very active recently in promoting teleworking as a business continuity strategy. TelCoa suggests that companies should follow certain guidelines to facilitate the implementation of telework programs. These are:
• Determine who in your organisation is in a position to perform their duties from home. This would include workers who spend the majority of their time on the computer and/or phone. Further, modify work activities so they can be carried out from home; for instance, this may mean digitising many more of your records and information.
• Coordinate with your IT departments to verify that these workers have a secure means to remotely access the corporate network(s).
• Develop and coordinate with managers an immediate plan to train workers on the basics of working from home and how a telework strategy promotes your organisation’s objectives and business continuity.
• As soon as a plan is in place, test your plan, evaluate it, adjust and refine it as necessary and test it again and again until telework becomes a part of your working culture.
• Develop a two way notification system to let your staff know when your emergency telework program is in effect and so they can report their whereabouts and receive instructions and support.
As well as advantages, teleworking also offers significant information security challenges. This issue has been highlighted by Internet security company SonicWALL, which has expressed fears that the move towards teleworking could result in a dramatic increase in corporate security breaches. To stay safe, SonicWALL recommends that businesses install a VPN and take the following actions:
• Isolate the telecommuter connection - where the teleworker unit is on a shared network at home it should not be possible for the VPN tunnel to be accessible to anyone else on the home network.
• Enforce network protection at the telecommuter site - companies should consider giving teleworkers security levels at home that comply with the basic minimum corporate standards thereby enforcing a multi-layered defence mechanism that incorporates firewall, anti-virus, content filtering and authentication.
• Scale the telecommuting network infrastructure - the majority of enterprises will require VPN connections with many different users so it is important that the solution should be scalable to allow security measures to be deployed rapidly via a web browser.
• Manage telecommuting security policies - any solution must be capable of being managed remotely by the company's service professionals so that the VPN links remain in full control of the organisation at all times.
• Perform stateful inspection - where malicious attacks are detected at the application layer rather than at operating system level.
• Comply with international and local information security standards.
British Telecommunications (BT) reiterates the need to look carefully at security issues when establishing a teleworking policy. BT recently highlighted the security issues raised in a Computer Weekly survey, which found that more than half of the UK SMEs surveyed use at least three examples of wireless technology for mobile and teleworking. While welcoming the trend, BT warns companies to make sure that they have the appropriate training, security, business continuity and flexible working policies in place, rather than allowing the ad-hoc and uncontrolled development of teleworking. However, the survey results show that the latter is the norm in many businesses, with less than 50 percent of small businesses giving staff training on how to use mobile technologies securely. Additionally, more than 60 per cent of SMEs do not have a formal policy on flexible working and teleworking.
Bill Murphy, managing director of BT Business, says: “It is essential for any organisation introducing wireless technology to take steps to safeguard fundamental systems such as phone and data networks. The threat posed by viruses, hackers and fraudsters affects every organisation – both large and small. For an organisation to fully realise the benefits of any investment in wireless technology, it is absolutely crucial to assess and address all security issues as part of comprehensive business continuity plans.”
As well as increasing the information security threats to organisations, mobile working makes communications continuity an ever more important issue. The communications network becomes the lifeline, not just between the company and its customers and suppliers, but also now sits at the very heart of day-to-day business processes. If communications network fails, employees can not work for long. Vital data becomes unavailable and team working becomes impossible. Whereas ten years ago many businesses could operate for many hours, or even days, without access to telecommunications services, today’s business grinds to a halt much more quickly. And the greater the investment in teleworking, the greater the impact communications outages have. The need for true communications high availability solutions is now a genuine one.
To view this article at its source, please visit http://www.continuitycentral.com/feature0275.htm
IDC issued a report recently in which it predicted that the worldwide mobile worker population will increase from more than 650 million worldwide in 2004, to more than 850 million in 2009, representing more than one-quarter of the global workforce. Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) currently has the largest total number of mobile workers, followed by the United States and Western Europe. However, in percentage terms, the United States has the most mobile workers in its workforce. By 2009, 70 percent of the US workforce are expected to be mobile.
Teleworking presents advantages to business continuity managers, in that the distributed nature of the workforce provides inherent resiliency. Teleworking can enable continuity of business during mundane business interruption incidents, such as snowstorms or traffic problems preventing staff being able to travel into a central office; and teleworking can protect against more unusual and esoteric threats. For example, it reduces the risk of losing a cohort of critical members of staff due to a single geographical incident or disaster; and offers a business continuity solution to wide area incidents such as pandemic influenza; or a CBRN-based terrorist attack.
In the US, TelCoa has been very active recently in promoting teleworking as a business continuity strategy. TelCoa suggests that companies should follow certain guidelines to facilitate the implementation of telework programs. These are:
• Determine who in your organisation is in a position to perform their duties from home. This would include workers who spend the majority of their time on the computer and/or phone. Further, modify work activities so they can be carried out from home; for instance, this may mean digitising many more of your records and information.
• Coordinate with your IT departments to verify that these workers have a secure means to remotely access the corporate network(s).
• Develop and coordinate with managers an immediate plan to train workers on the basics of working from home and how a telework strategy promotes your organisation’s objectives and business continuity.
• As soon as a plan is in place, test your plan, evaluate it, adjust and refine it as necessary and test it again and again until telework becomes a part of your working culture.
• Develop a two way notification system to let your staff know when your emergency telework program is in effect and so they can report their whereabouts and receive instructions and support.
As well as advantages, teleworking also offers significant information security challenges. This issue has been highlighted by Internet security company SonicWALL, which has expressed fears that the move towards teleworking could result in a dramatic increase in corporate security breaches. To stay safe, SonicWALL recommends that businesses install a VPN and take the following actions:
• Isolate the telecommuter connection - where the teleworker unit is on a shared network at home it should not be possible for the VPN tunnel to be accessible to anyone else on the home network.
• Enforce network protection at the telecommuter site - companies should consider giving teleworkers security levels at home that comply with the basic minimum corporate standards thereby enforcing a multi-layered defence mechanism that incorporates firewall, anti-virus, content filtering and authentication.
• Scale the telecommuting network infrastructure - the majority of enterprises will require VPN connections with many different users so it is important that the solution should be scalable to allow security measures to be deployed rapidly via a web browser.
• Manage telecommuting security policies - any solution must be capable of being managed remotely by the company's service professionals so that the VPN links remain in full control of the organisation at all times.
• Perform stateful inspection - where malicious attacks are detected at the application layer rather than at operating system level.
• Comply with international and local information security standards.
British Telecommunications (BT) reiterates the need to look carefully at security issues when establishing a teleworking policy. BT recently highlighted the security issues raised in a Computer Weekly survey, which found that more than half of the UK SMEs surveyed use at least three examples of wireless technology for mobile and teleworking. While welcoming the trend, BT warns companies to make sure that they have the appropriate training, security, business continuity and flexible working policies in place, rather than allowing the ad-hoc and uncontrolled development of teleworking. However, the survey results show that the latter is the norm in many businesses, with less than 50 percent of small businesses giving staff training on how to use mobile technologies securely. Additionally, more than 60 per cent of SMEs do not have a formal policy on flexible working and teleworking.
Bill Murphy, managing director of BT Business, says: “It is essential for any organisation introducing wireless technology to take steps to safeguard fundamental systems such as phone and data networks. The threat posed by viruses, hackers and fraudsters affects every organisation – both large and small. For an organisation to fully realise the benefits of any investment in wireless technology, it is absolutely crucial to assess and address all security issues as part of comprehensive business continuity plans.”
As well as increasing the information security threats to organisations, mobile working makes communications continuity an ever more important issue. The communications network becomes the lifeline, not just between the company and its customers and suppliers, but also now sits at the very heart of day-to-day business processes. If communications network fails, employees can not work for long. Vital data becomes unavailable and team working becomes impossible. Whereas ten years ago many businesses could operate for many hours, or even days, without access to telecommunications services, today’s business grinds to a halt much more quickly. And the greater the investment in teleworking, the greater the impact communications outages have. The need for true communications high availability solutions is now a genuine one.
To view this article at its source, please visit http://www.continuitycentral.com/feature0275.htm
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