Work Naked
leveraging the value of the distributed workplace

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Chapter 1:  Why Work Naked?
 
Should your employees have the freedom to work naked? Yes, now is the time to free employees to work where and when they are most effective. Let’s face facts.  Corporate America has been downsized, rightsized, flattened, outsourced, reengineered, empowered, delayered, divested, tri-vested, co-located, decentralized, merged, and purged. Still, companies continue to search for ways to sustain their competitive advantage. It’s time to reinvent your company by shedding the layers of outdated rules and trappings of the old economy that keep workers tethered to their desks. If you want your customers to embrace new ways of doing business (e-commerce), you’ve got to encourage your employees to experience new ways of working (remote and mobile work strategies). When people have the mobility and connectivity to work from remote locations (whether that is a client site, hotel, or home), individual and organizational performance improves.
 
Who are these remote and mobile workers? How do companies benefit from letting people work this way? The following four stories describe how people are working differently, why they have chosen a nontraditional workstyle, and the advantages for the worker and the company.
 
Marshall Simmonds had no interest in relocating from the resort town of Bend, Oregon when New York City-based About.com recruited him to be their search engine specialist.Simmonds, a twenty-eight-year-old fan of running, hiking, and snowshoeing, spends about a third of his time in About.com’s offices in New York City or at conferences and the remaining two-thirds working from his home. He’s responsible for helping more than eight hundred globally-dispersed About.com subject guides optimize their Web pages to appear well on search engines and he does much of that work by e-mail. When he is in Oregon, his workday often starts early in the morning and extends until late at night, but in between he takes breaks for recreational activities with friends. What are the advantages? Simmonds gets to do exciting work and lead a healthy lifestyle; About.com gets access to his talent without relocating him to New York City.
 
Cynthia Doyle, vice president of human resources at Chase Manhattan Bank, works five days a week from her home on the coast of Massachusetts between Boston and Cape Cod. Once a month she travels to New York City to meet with colleagues she used to work with every day.In 1995, when Doyle’s husband was transferred to Boston, she and her manager agreed that she would work in New York two days and from home for three days a week until she finished her project.  At the end of that assignment, Chase didn’t want to lose a valuable employee who had been with the company for ten years, so Doyle became one of their first full-time telecommuters.Cynthia enjoys this workstyle because she avoids wasting time commuting and gets to take her twin sons to preschool in the morning and be around the house when her thirteen-year-old daughter comes home from school in the afternoon. 
 
Donald Richards, area vice president for e-commerce sales at NCR, oversees the work of eighteen employees, but only goes to his Atlanta office a hundred hours a year. He is part of NCR’s Virtual Workplace Program which equipped the sales force to work from anywhere and saved the company millions of dollars in real estate costs. Richards coordinates with his team members by phone each Monday from his home office and then travels to customer meetings for most of the week.  He loves having the flexibility to structure his schedule to work when he is most productive, stay out of traffic jams, and clear time to spend with his children when they are home from college.
 
Jane Brody, personal health columnist for The New York Times, commuted to the office five days a week for the first twenty years of her tenure with the paper. When she started writing books on health and nutrition in addition to her weekly column, Jane and her editor agreed that it was a better use of her time to do some of her work from home. She avoided an hour-long subway commute each way and could work at her “peak times” rather than during the traditional office hours.  Working at home in sweatpants and a T-shirt was, as Jane says, “much more conducive to deep creative thinking than dressing up and going to the office where there were constant interruptions.” Her twin sons were in college by then so she had no problem getting the privacy she needed in her home office. Eventually, she developed a routine of working from home four days a week and commuting to the office one day a week to attend a staff meeting, pick up mail, and interact with colleagues. She has maintained that same schedule even though she took early retirement in 1998 and now works as a contract writer for The Times.Because both Brody and her management were comfortable with this remote work arrangement, the employment transition has been a smooth one.
 
In each case, there were different reasons for adopting remote or mobile workstyles. In all four cases, rethinking where and when work is performed has enabled individuals to integrate their work and their personal life.This level of autonomy has benefits for a single, twenty-something dot-commer, an early-retiree with grown children, and all workers in between. Today’s remote and mobile workers do not fit into a clearly defined mold. The Telework America Survey 2000 (conducted by the International Telework Association and Council) gives us a sense of the characteristics of teleworkers.Defined as full-time workers who perform some work from home or a telework center during normal business hours, the representative sample of teleworkers was 65 percent male, 35 percent female with an average age of 40. Two-thirds lived with a spouse or significant other; one-third lived with children under 6 years of age. A full 82 percent reported that they had some college education and the median annual income was roughly $50,000.The average one-way commute to work for the teleworkers was 19.7 miles and they primarily lived in urban areas as opposed to small towns or rural areas. The majority of the teleworkers (54 percent) were full-time employees, 13 percent were contract workers, 24 percent were self-employed, and 9 percent operated home businesses.In total, half the teleworkers worked for companies employing more than 1,500 people.1  Remote and mobile work strategies are being used by a wide range of workers in both small and large companies.

What Is at Stake for Business Leaders?


Companies today face many challenges to their profitability and competitive advantage. Most business leaders agree that employees are the most valuable corporate asset and many are finding that it is getting more and more difficult to recruit these valuable assets. In McKinsey’s study, “The War for Talent,” 75 percent of corporate officers surveyed said they could not attract and retain the high-quality talent they needed to pursue all growth opportunities.2  When Hewitt Associates asked a hundred leaders of traditional companies about obstacles to evolving into e-businesses and competing against dot-coms and start-ups, 41 percent cited difficulty hiring talented employees.3 According to a June 2000 survey of the Society of Human Resource Managers (SHRM), the average voluntary turnover rate for all member companies was 17 percent and for companies with more than 5,000 employees it was 25 percent.4  That means that along with trying to hire additional employees to handle growth, large companies need to hire replacements for one out of every four employees annually. The struggle to fill job openings and the high cost of replacing employees will continue to have a significant effect on the performance of traditional and nontraditional businesses. Staffing issues will dominate the corporate agenda in the knowledge economy.
 
At the same time that the demand for talented employees has been outstripping the supply, workers have been asking for more freedom and autonomy to adapt their work schedules to accommodate nonwork concerns. In a 1999 Work Trends survey, researchers found that 95 percent of working adults were concerned about spending more time with their immediate family and 87 percent were concerned about getting enough sleep.Furthermore, 88 percent complained about feeling stress from work demands and 92 percent said they were concerned about having flexibility in their schedules to take care of family needs. Almost half of all workers (46 percent), would like to have the opportunity to work from home some of the time.5
 
How many employees are given the freedom to work outside the corporate office during normal business hours? Nilles reports in the Telework America Survey 2000 that there were 16.5 million full-time workers in the United States who performed work from home or a telework center during normal business hours on a regular basis. While the number of teleworkers increased steadily throughout the 1990’s, this study found that another 19.4 million U.S. workers would like to perform some of their work from home and had jobs that would permit this kind of arrangement. Only one-third of the non-teleworkers felt their employers would be supportive of remote or mobile work strategies.6 These findings suggest that organizations still have a lot to gain by encouraging new ways of working.
 
The profiles of Marshall Simmonds, Cynthia Doyle, Don Richards, and Jane Brody illustrated how remote and mobile workstyles can solve a company’s need for access to high-quality talent and support an employee’s need for better work-life integration. Research supports this conclusion -- both sides win if these new ways of working are implemented effectively. In Pratt’s 1999 study of teleworkers, she found that most were more satisfied with their jobs and more productive as a result of being able to do some work from home; they also took fewer sick days and were more likely to stay with their current employers.7 The other surveys and case studies described throughout this book demonstrate that workers who have more autonomy over their place and time of work report the following types of benefits:

  • More strategic use of work time. (For some this means more time with clients.)
  • Less time spent commuting or fewer hours driving during high traffic times.
  • Fewer disruptions and enhanced ability to concentrate.
  • Flexibility to work at peak performance times.
  • Improved self-management skills.
  • Enhanced creativity from fewer constraints and more variety in activities.
  • Lower stress levels and higher morale.
  • Decreased absenteeism. (There’s no work time lost when a child is sick.)
  • Improved collaboration skills. (This means better use of colleagues’ time.)
  • Focus on results rather than office politics.


The impact of improved individual performance on overall corporate performance can be significant.These effects include improved customer service, increased sales and revenue, reduced turnover and its associated costs, access to a larger talent pool, and in some cases, reduced overhead and real estate costs.These new work strategies can also help a company achieve its goal of being a good neighbor by reducing traffic, energy usage, and pollution.
 
What’s Standing in the Way of Remote and Mobile Work Strategies?


It sounds like a simple proposition: free your employees to work where and when they are most effective.Some people think that technological, legal, security, and tax concerns are the biggest hurdles to overcome when implementing new work strategies; I think they are wrong.It is important to have the right policies, procedures, and equipment in place, but corporate norms and unwritten rules thwart many change efforts even when the infrastructure for remote and mobile work has been established.For instance, when workers are given the freedom to decide where to work, some employees choose to spend a great deal or all of their work hours at the traditional workplace.That should be totally acceptable when that work routine is genuinely well-suited for them.Problems arise, though, if workers continue to go “to the office” just because they believe raises and promotions will be affected by how much time the boss sees them spending there or other reasons that do not relate to performance. 
 
Each company has its own definition of an "effective worker."Some cultures reward the early riser who gets in before the boss while others look favorably on workers who stay late and go to the office on weekends.Unfortunately, these beliefs are based on appearances rather than measurable results and are just a few of the outdated mind-sets that hinder the acceptance of new workstyles.

Review the Work Naked Checklist: Obstacles to Peak Performance in the Virtual Workplace to explore which stated and unstated norms in your company may be constraining performance.

 


Work Naked Checklist:  Obstacles to Peak Performance in the Virtual Workplace
 
 
True or False:  Which statements reflect the beliefs or norms (both stated and unstated) of your company?  (Check all that are true.)

 
01 If work isn’t your top priority, you will not be a top performer.
02 The more time you spend at the office, the better your chances for promotion.
03 If you look busy, even frantic, you must be very productive.
04 Wearing a beeper and carrying a cell phone are sure signs that you have a REALLY important job and you are a REALLY important person.
05 Face-to-face interaction is the only real way to build and maintain relationships.
06 The quality of communication is directly proportional to the amount of time a team spends together
07 Frenetic travel schedules, lack of sleep, ulcers, and constant complaints about workload are traits of dedicated, valuable workers.
08 Dressing in business attire gives you a serious attitude about work and shows your sense of discipline.
09 Calling the office on your cell phone from the beach when you are on vacation means you are a devoted, indispensable worker
10 Calling the office on your cell phone from your backyard garden when you are working from home for the day means you must be goofing off
11 Getting to work early in the morning shows you are a very hard worker.
12 If you are having fun, are well-rested, and physically fit, you must not have enough work to do.
13 If workers were not surrounded by colleagues and management, they’d goof off.
14 Most employees are trying to do the least amount of work for the highest pay.
15 Most people do their best work between the hours of 8 am and 6 pm.
16 Napping is a sign of laziness
17 Spending Saturday on the golf course with clients shows real dedication to your work.
18 Relocating for a new job shows how committed you are to your career and new employer.
19 Giving larger and larger offices to people with bigger and bigger titles motivates employees to work harder.
20 Dragging yourself to the office when you are clearly sick shows dedication and commitment.
21 Requesting to work from home one or two days a week is proof that you are not serious about your job.
22 All successful workers want to climb the corporate ladder.
23 Having lots of employees reporting to you means you produce better results.
24 People give you the respect you deserve when you have a reserved parking space, corner office, and private bathroom.
25 Management is always trying to get more work out of employees for less money and fewer benefits.

      

After completing the checklist, total the number of “True” responses you checked on the twenty-five-item list and compare that total to this key:


True = 0, False= 25.  If none of these statements seems remotely familiar, your organization already provides an excellent context for remote and mobile work.  Congratulations!
True = less than 5.  If you found less than five of the statements to be true, there are relatively few obstacles to virtual work in your organization . In fact, your company probably already has a number of people working in nontraditional ways and has made a sincere effort to be an “employer of choice.”
True = 5 to 15.  For those who checked between five and fifteen items, there is some work to be done. Your company has probably taken some steps to move away from a traditional, formal corporate culture.  Perhaps you’ve already made the transition to casual business attire, started flattening the hierarchy, and implemented a results-based performance measurement system. Still, your company is probably not yet willing to give employees the freedom to make decisions about where and when to work and these attitudes will need to change.
True = More than 15  If more than 15 of these statements describe the values and norms (whether stated or unstated) in your organization, there are fairly substantial obstacles to successfully freeing employees to work where and when they are most effective. 


The good news if you’re in the over-fifteen group is that your company has the most to gain from overcoming these challenges. Yours is probably a traditional, hierarchical organization where image is emphasized. The overriding philosophy is that the best way to run a profitable business is to have all employees report to a corporate workplace for a prescribed number of hours a day and that longer work hours lead to higher productivity. It is most likely that your industry or geographic region has not yet been affected by talent shortages, changing customer relationships, and other trends that have provoked great upheaval in other organizations. You have a chance to stay ahead of these changes by implementing these new work strategies before your business is affected by the trends that make them imperative.
 


 
 
© C. Froggatt, 2001  Excerpted from Work Naked:  Eight Essential Principles for Peak Performance in the Virtual Workplace (Wiley, 2001)