As we get back into the swing of things after the recent snow, home-working seems to have become the talk of the day. However, despite fully supporting the mobile working principle and agreeing that breaking the confines of the office can help out in emergency situations, I’m not convinced that the recent “snow crisis” was actually a good case study for the need for home working.
The first and, by far, the most important concern is that the mobile working concept is not a crisis resolution model. Don’t get me wrong here, it’s not that people working from home doesn’t work well in a crisis – it does! However, I’ve spoken to countless people who were given permission to work from home during the snow who found the experience tedious, difficult and even said it interfered with the professional vs personal work life balance. One told me: “Working from home is great for a day, but doing it all the time would be difficult, I’d get distracted.”
Excuse me if I take the moral high ground here, but actually, I don’t think they were right, and this is the point I’m getting at. The reason working from home for a day in a crisis doesn’t work isn’t just that systems aren’t in place for checking email and keeping in communication – in many places of work they are. No, the crux is that we don’t have a culture that accepts it. We have nothing in place to train, support or encourage staff to look at home working and how they can manage their time and how work life balance can work. There are models to explore, from working in community hubs to working in local cafes through to having an office space at home. I remember reading an article in the mid 90s about home working ,where an employee always got up in the morning and dressed in a shirt and tie, because that helped them feel at work. When they clocked off, they got changed to civvies again. That model wouldn’t work for those who like to mix work and personal time, but it’s tools like this that can make working from home not only a tolerable but even a pleasurable experience.
The second point I noted in the snow was the other end of the scale of home working – the customer. There are many customer facing jobs that needlessly put people into offices because we have a mistaken belief that customers want to come into a building to see us. Some undoubtedly do, however I’m certainly one customer who much prefers the online, especially in working hours. During the recent snow fall, the country ground to halt not just because people couldn’t get to work, but because people knew if they did struggle out into the white stuff, they’d find businesses closed anyhow. Those organisations that had mobile customer communications in place fared much better, of course, with every statistic imaginable reporting massive spikes in the use of Twitter, Facebook and other web media during the freeze. However, those that tried to set up web media quickly in response, failed. My local bus company cancelled, reinstated and diverted buses throughout the day and realised that this needed to be on their website. The fact that their website wasn’t compatible with my old-school mobile handset and was only updated at apparently random points of the day, made this form of communication next to useless. Luckily, they are part of an urban transport network who DID have Twitter, Web and Email feeds in place, so it was easy to keep up to date.
Obviously all these utopian ideas come with very real considerations – what are the health & safety implications of people working in community cafes and what about customers who are digitally excluded? These are questions we need to work on and there are probably many different approaches to tackling and solving them. However, one thing is clear. While mobile working will undoubtedly aid crisis situations, it isn’t something that can be implemented when, or just before, the crisis occurs. It’s an organic culture that needs to be seeded as early as possible, so that it blossoms not just in a crisis, but all year round.
Guest post by: Kevin Campbell-Wright, West Yorkshire, UK http://kevin.campbellwright.co.uk/
Great post as always Kev.
I particularly like your insights into the cultural issues, as I may have overlooked some of them. I suppose that two years as a freelance, with my office base at home, and no prospect of income if I didn’t work hard, focused my attention on what working from home really means, and also prepared me for work with my current employer who treat people like adults and trust them to get their work done wherever they are.
I think what sometimes passes me by is the issue that not everybody has had that discipline, not everyone enjoys their work, and lots of people see being given leeway as an opportunity to “skive”. What we need is wholescale cultural change on the part of both employers and employees, but, as you suggest, that will probably take a long time.
Interesting points. Whilst some of those who know me think my interest in mobile working is related to my geekiness and love of shiny gadgets, I’m actually [equally] fascinated by the cultural change aspects being discussed here.
Trust and discipline issues have been raised at every mobile & flexible working event I’ve been involved with. I’ve also noticed this repeatedly raised in work I’ve done advising other local authorities and their management teams. My view is that this is just ‘change’. Perspectives are altered and instinctively people who have worked the same way for many years begin to worry.
You can have some fun with this. If managers and leaders are concerned about a proportion of the workforce “skiving” ask them how they know that isn’t currently happening. You’ll be surprised by the response. In nearly all cases we manage performance at work by presenteeism, the fact that the “skivers” (if they do exist in the workforce) can attend a physical workplace and spend all day doing very little seems to be pass many public sector managers by or, in some cases, be seen as an inevitable overhead!
I believe the solution here is to drop the command and control and develop new approaches to performance management. If there is an increase in “skiving” it should be possible to identify that, but this does require a new approach to people management.
Other organisational culture issues have arisen during the big freeze; including envy, jealousy and professional rivalry. There are of course public sector job roles that do not and cannot lend themselves to flexibility. I felt for one of my Pest Control Officers, for example, when reading on Face Book of his exploits digging his van out of the snow to get to work and of the difficulty he had in delivering his services. I’m sure he would have liked to have been able to work from home during the cold snap but you can’t deliver Pest Control Services from home. Period.
We need maturity on all sides here and strong leadership to rebuff challenge. New work styles don’t suit all job roles (or all people) but that’s OK. I guess the new approaches to performance management mentioned earlier need to be in place to defend challenge and a degree of transparency in this would help too. In our ReGS Project at Barnsley we’ve developed an online dashboard to facilitate the recording of new ways of working and all staff can see the working ‘status’ of their colleagues at any time. Simple things like requiring everyone to have an open Outlook calendar and to make a basic note of what they are engaged in can really help too.
Like it or not though, there remains something of a stigma here. Working at home is taken by some as a euphemism for being out of contact. It shouldn’t be. We need to work at the communication message here. Roaming IP telephony and other technologies can help but as a minimum we perhaps need to avoid the, “Oh, s/he’s working at home today” message!
Lastly, for now, what’s to be made of the visible leadership thing?
Were all those managers who worked at home during the snow, whilst their staff struggled into work, abdicating their responsibilities?
I don’t personally think so but some do and there are clearly perception and reputation issues to consider. I think this very much depends on the nature of the work involved. A manager of a team or service area where everyone has to attend work would perhaps be foolish to stay at home during adverse weather. In other cases, where those that are able to work flexibly are encouraged to do so, at all times, then the picture is a little different.
Listening to some people debate this lately reminded me of young Mr Grace in the Are you being Served TV series, “Carry on everyone – keep up the good work!”
We surely don’t expect managers to struggle to work in dangerous conditions just to dish out such cursory platitudes?
Numerous variables and factors to be considered then and as always, no easy one-size-fits all solution.
I do wonder if there’s a skills gap here though – perhaps we need a public sector manager development programme to equip our people with the skills and tools they need to manage successful organisations in the 21st century?
You’ve definitely hit the nail on the head, Ken. CPD is a key part of the solution
You’re both right, of course.
However, as someone who’s been involved from the other end of the stick for the last three years (ie trying to get managers to engage with practice their practitioners want or, in some cases, are already doing), I know that the issue isn’t just one of CPD. Before that can happen you need engagement of the concept by management and an openness to change from practitioners/front line staff. All too often the latter have fallen victim to the latest gimmick around “blue sky thinking” and will therefore resist even change that is blatantly improving their working conditions or purpose. Sadly, the same is conversely true for some managers who may see their staff innovating and feel undermined either in terms of control or simply that their staff are not following their rulebook.
In institutions where innovative staff are encouraged and the innovation concept is embedded at the highest level of SMT, I’ve seen change flourish.
I was at an IDeA conference just over a year ago and Paul Sloane from Destination Innovation gave an excellent talk on what makes an innovative manager. I recommend googling / tweeting him (@paulsloane) for further resources (that’s aimed at general readers, of course, not John or Ken who both have innovative management styles as it is).
So, while CPD is an answer, ensuring management, staff and indeed complete stakeholder engagement needs to be the first step. I believe that senior management teams that are open to innovation, will be the catalyst that drives this.
As someone at the coal face of mobile working the key is getting managers to understand that employees working mobile are not a threat to their right to manage nor a threat to their traditional ways of management.
We have to move away from the mindset that we “go to work”. The truth is unless your based solely in an office then “work” is likely to be everywhere but the office. To alleviate the feeling of isolation working mobile we utilise technology such as MSN instant messenger to keep in contact with other mobile workers in the same way you chat with a colleague sitting at the next desk in a traditional office environment.
The key to successful mobile working is managers giving empowerment and trust to workers and providing support and feedback where needed. Fortunately my employer has empowered us to work in new and innovative ways but the house of cards come tumbling down if one or two people are allowed to undermine the philosophy of mobile working for the others.