Friday, June 11, 2004

Alliance Launches Telecommute Effort (Newport News Times, June 9, 2004) reports on a county in Oregon that plans to actively recruit teleworkers in their area.

"The Economic Development Alliance of Lincoln County is forming a Telecommute Committee aimed at positioning Lincoln County as a place for telecommuters to live and work.

"The group will assess and inventory telecommunications infrastructure throughout Lincoln County including cellular service coverage, municipal regulations governing home-based businesses throughout the county, and pursue strategies aimed at making the central coast as telecommute-friendly as possible. Interested volunteers are invited to participate."

...

"Active support of telecommuting, and telecommunications infrastructure are goals listed in Lincoln County's long-range plan for economic development, because such activity brings dollars and generally well-paying jobs into the local economy from outside of Lincoln County, has minimal impact on transportation infrastructure, and is environmentally sound."



2:14:40 PM    

 The Office of Personel Management (OPM) plans to host a web seminar on June 24 to teach agency managers how to become effective teleworkers. The seminar is part of an effort to boost the poor adoption rate (14%) for telework in federal agencies, blogged earlier here, and here and here.

According to the article OPM going online to promote telework by Jason Miller (Government Computer News, June 10, 2004), "federal managers will view a series of information slides and then discuss them during a conference call during the online tutorial." OPM has also specifically targeted agencies in which less than 2 percent of eligible employees who were teleworking, helping them to develop policies and programs and holding a special workshop for them featuring success stories.

Management's biggest concern is that if they can't see their workers, how do they know that they're working? What OPM is NOT doing yet is considering the use of advanced communications technologies like personal video conferencing. Tools like this would go a long way to allaying management's underlying fears that a worker who is out of sight isn't being productive. Couple this with good training in performance management, and you've got a winning strategy for increased commuting AND increased performance.


1:37:04 PM    

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