An Australian newspaper, The Age, offers Home alone by Adam Turner (Sept. 30, 2003) offers a brief history of telework, a summary of it's adoption in Australia, and then provides some interesting insights into why telework has stalled.

Dr. George Lafferty, in a three-year research project commencing in 1999 on the adoption of telework in Australian organisations, defined "regular teleworkers" as "employees who consistently spent more than 40 per cent of their working hours away from the office, using telecommunications technology to access it." This definition embraces mobile workers and those who work at remote sites or on-site with clients in addition to basic home-based workers.

Dr. Lafferty's research found that "Managers comprised the largest single group of teleworkers identified by the study, followed by IT professionals and administrative and clerical workers." (my emphasis added) They typically work harder but don't climb the corporate ladder as quickly. ' "If you're not visible, in many organisations you tend to be overlooked," Lafferty says. ' Which leads to an interesting observation:

"Considering managers were the primary category of teleworkers in Lafferty's research, it is ironic he found the greatest resistance to teleworking came from managers who were not prepared to trust employees to work at home and whose own positions may become threatened if there is no apparent need for direct supervision."

The remainder of the article is a case study of Hewlett-Packard consultant manager Roger Lawrence:

"Lawrence manages 20 consultants who are based at client sites across the eastern seaboard, while his manager and peers are based in Melbourne. Using a secure Virtual Private Network, he can access his desktop environment from any location. A combination of mobile phone, SMS, email and instant messaging usage keeps him in constant contact with the outside world. "

... 

"Armed with an array of electronic gadgets, Lawrence says the barriers to teleworking are human, rather than technological.

"We have the technology - it's secure and it's relatively intuitive to use, compared to the tools we use in the office - but there are social, legal and HR aspects that we need to properly manage for teleworking to be successful," he says."

Lawrence says "we have the technology" to successfully telework. I disagree.

All signs point to the need for the richness of face-to-face communications. We may have the technology to enable basic telecommuting, like VPNs, email, cell phones, and IM used by Roger Lawrence, but the Telework Consortium takes a different perspective: we aren't yet using technology to enable virtual presence, a key enabler for successful telework.

Real-time, high-quality video applications such as those being researched by the Telework Consortium can overcome the barriers faced by managers, including the need for visibility to help them climb the corporate ladder, the need to establish and maintain trust with teleworking employees, and the need to deal with other social aspects of telework.

8:38:22 AM    
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