HR Monthly August 2012
Australian Human Resources Institute
Doing the Telecommute
It’s cheaper, greener and people are happier and more productive if they work from home. So what’s the
problem for companies?
By Brad Howarth
In March 2011 the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen
Conroy, outlined plans to double the rates of teleworking participation in Australia from 6 per cent today to
12 per cent by 2020.
It’s an ambitious plan, given that teleworking — ie, working from home — uptake in Australia lags behind
other developed economies. The arguments in favour of teleworking are many. There are environmental
benefits from reducing daily commuter numbers, and reduced real estate costs for employers.
The most often-cited benefits, however, relate to employee engagement, satisfaction and productivity.
Teleworking enables more flexible working that may better suit workers’ lifestyles, particularly in relation to
mobility or child-minding responsibilities. It also gives them more options for where they can live.
But many teleworking proposals still encounter strong resistance from management cultures that consider
teleworking as opening a can of worms in terms of worker safety and productivity. After all, how can you
effectively manage a worker whom you can’t see?
According to Macquarie University researcher Dr Yvette Blount, the failure of many organisations to
embrace teleworking stems from not viewing it from a strategic perspective. Where it is implemented, it is
often in response to sporadic requests from staff in relation to child-minding duties. “For telework to be
successful, senior management has to think about telework in a strategic way,” Blount says. “And if they
don’t, it is only going to be piecemeal and will not be sustainable.”
That means retraining managers to manage a workforce that is often outside their direct line of sight. This
also means ensuring that the job is actually suitable for being performed remotely.
While the concept of telework has existed for decades, it is only now achieving a degree of maturity in
Australia, as measured by the few organisations that have run programs for an extended period and at
significant scale. What they have learnt is proving crucial for those who intend to follow in their footsteps.
Chris Luxford has very clearly set out a strategic plan for teleworking. As the president of business
outsourcing service provider Aegis Services Australia, Luxford is aiming to see teleworker numbers within
his 2600 staff grow from 4 per cent today to as much as 15 per cent. His motivation is in part based on
findings that employee engagement among his telework workforce is twice that of other workers. “The
average tenure is significantly higher and the attrition is almost zero,” Luxford says. “When you get
someone working from home really, really well, the productivity levels are actually higher than people in the
office, and the quality of output, the accuracy of output, is much, much better. And many of our clients rave
about the work ethic and the quality that is produced by those people who work from home.”
Luxford says teleworking is also a strong incentive when recruiting, and he even has two workers in the US
and UK. “In the war for talent you have to continuously look at how you offer more flexible working
conditions that align with the needs of people today,” Luxford says. “And the feedback that we get from
employees is phenomenal.”
When the marketing services company Salmat launched a new call centre in 2006, it made an important
strategic decision. Rather than take office space and fill it with row upon row of call centre operators, it
created a virtual call centre called Salmat@Home.
Today Hugh Bryant manages a team of 350 contact centre contractors from North Queensland to
Tasmania, connected via telephone and broadband. He has never met many of them.
Bryant says the model enables him to hire workers with skills that would otherwise be unavailable due to
where they live, with 45 per cent residing in regional Australia. And should a contractor choose to relocate,
they are not lost to him.
Crucial to making the model work is selecting people with the right mindset and temperament to work at
home. Bryant believes it’s a cultural or behavioural trait that one inherently has or needs to be taught.
“Where we have seen teleworking fail at other organisations is where they get 10 of their best and longest
HR Monthly August 2012
Australian Human Resources Institute
serving employees and send them home for a month and see what happens. And what often
happens is they hate it, because they liked being in that office culture and liked getting out of home.”
Indeed, personality traits are emerging as one of the clearest determinants of the success of teleworking
initiatives. The managing director of HR consulting firm Corporate Canary, Anne-Marie Orrock, agrees that
certain individuals just don’t have the right psychological make-up, with those who perform best tending to
be people with high levels of drive and independence, as opposed to those who are more compliant and
need more instruction.
“But you can also have a self-starter who is a real social animal, and they find it difficult,” Orrock says. She
cautions that a poorly communicated telework strategy can also lead to jealousies emerging among those
employees who are not allowed to telework.
Even where workers are happy to work autonomously, Bryant says it is vital that managers ensure there is
constant communication to ensure all workers feel that they are part of the team. Salmat@Home operates
a web chat room where workers can share their knowledge and experience.
“It can be quite lively and colourful at times, and you need to have appropriate administration techniques,”
Bryant says. “But trying to overtly manage or control that can backfire quickly on you, because people stop
being interested in it.”
One of the other significant considerations for teleworking is the workplace itself. Some organisations have
shunned telework due to occupational health and safety requirements, and a fear that home-based injuries
will lead to lawsuits.
Bryant says Salmat invested significant time in developing its OH&S policy, devising an in-depth checklist
for working conditions including the layout of the room, height of the desk and monitor, and even the make
of chair. Because of the impracticality of physically visiting each worker’s home office, workers submit
digital photographs.
“There is some to-ing and fro-ing, but the intent is to ensure that someone has a quiet workspace and an
appropriate workspace, and that it is set up as you would anticipate in any other office environment
according to rules and regulations,” Bryant says.
A web of difference
Technology is spurring the spread of teleworking
By Brad Howarth
The concept of teleworking existed long before use of the internet was widespread. But it is broadband
connectivity that is making teleworking a viable proposition for many Australians.
The ability to use online tools to simultaneously work on whiteboards or documents, engage in multi-party
audio and video conferences and watch live presentations is helping tear down the geographic barriers
between teleworkers and their colleagues.
The tools for teleworking are numerous, and their cost and utility is appropriately diverse. They range from
free tools such as Google Docs and Microsoft’s Skype through to more sophisticated tools such as Citrix’s
GoToMeeting and Cisco’s WebEx.
Inevitably, however, the march of technology is pushing their price downwards. And as Australian workers
continue their migration to higher broadband speeds at home, the opportunity for them to become digital
teleworkers is growing.
According to Vaughan Klein, the regional manager for unified communications and collaboration with
networking technology maker Cisco, the current interest from the business community in teleworking is
fuelled in part by workers having technology at home that is equal, or superior to what they are given at
work. Furthermore, many of the robust and secure technology environments that employers’ IT
departments have developed have been superseded by publicly available tools that workers prefer using.
HR Monthly August 2012
Australian Human Resources Institute
“And what people have at home for free, in terms of videoconferencing, social sites, wikis and blogs, are
more capable than what is being offered in a work environment,” Klein says.
Cisco has invested heavily in developing online collaboration tools that mirror the ease-of-use of consumer
tools, and recently released Jabber, which enables workers to collaborate from any location they can get an
internet connection, using text messaging, sharing documents, or through voice and videoconferencing, on
a wide range of devices.
Cisco’s Webex online conferencing service allows users to conduct multipoint videoconferencing in high
definition while also sharing and annotating documents in real time. Cisco also offers a dedicated point-topoint high-definition videoconferencing service for clients.
Klein himself lives on an 800-hectare cattle property near Dubbo, and teleworks from there two to three
days a week. “I participate in the management of a business that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars
from that teleworking environment,” he says.
Klein’s telework set-up means that when his phone rings at his desk in Cisco’s Sydney headquarters it
simultaneously rings at his home office at the Dubbo farm. Klein also has a dedicated high-definition, pointto-point video conference system installed in his farm office, which is connected via a 3G mobile data
service. In any given week he spends about five to seven hours in video conferences, which consumes
approximately 15 gigabytes per month.
“My staff are nationally distributed, so it wouldn’t matter if I was sitting in the Sydney office or my Dubbo
office, the interface needs to be the best that I can get, and video is the best for that,” Klein says. “Video is
the new voice.”
Not all set-ups are as advanced as Klein’s, but the tools available share many of the same capabilities. One
of the most common tools of the teleworker is the online communications service Skype. While it is
commonly used to make free audio calls across the internet, Skype also has a range of collaboration tools,
including the ability to conduct multi-party video conferences.
In May last year Skype was acquired by Microsoft, which is now integrating its communications functionality
into its range of web-based services. According to Oscar Trimboli, the director of Microsoft Australia’s
information worker group, the wide range of devices that workers use today means it is important that the
experience of using different tools is harmonised. This also reduces the training required to make people
proficient with collaboration tools. “So making sure that video, voice and desktop sharing aren’t three
different experiences — they are just one,” Trimboli says.
This will please those industry segments that have been faster to adopt the technology than others, such as
the engineering sector. “Those guys typically are moving around globally, and want to be connected not
only to their own organisation but the customer they look after as well,” Trimboli says. “They really push
those collaboration scenarios where they have engineers in Chile, in Russia, in Africa, and are all working
seamlessly. They want systems that work together.”
Trimboli says one of the drivers for the use of these tools is that interactions can be recorded and played
back. “I can hit a record button in a meeting and just give that to my team,” Trimboli says. “In two or three
years’ time we’ll be doing that over video, and the systems will be search-aware, so that you will be able to
catalogue the things you’ve spoken about in a meeting. And you’ll see more and more video integrated in
terms of mobile worker scenarios as well.”
Indeed, two-way online video is the new ‘killer app’ of collaboration. The country director for Citrix in
Australia, Seamus King, says he has witnessed a significant increase in the number of enquiries from
clients wanting to conduct face-to-face engagements, often for training purposes, without staff needing to
physically come together.
King adds that Citrix is also being driven to create technology that enables workers to be productive
regardless of the type of device they are using, be it a PC, smart phone or tablet. The company is soon to
HR Monthly August 2012
Australian Human Resources Institute
launch its Workspaces tools, which will provide a single environment for everything a remote worker might
use.
“You can have a go-to meeting ‘environment’ with all of your files, documents and everything that you
would be sharing,” King says. “As you can appreciate, we are making these leaps and bounds to more
accurately reflect the way people work. That’s where collaboration is going.
“I can have a full high-definition video conference on my iPad while walking along George Street [Sydney].
These devices are in everybody’s portfolio and we’re making sure that our applications are sitting on any
device. We don’t care what you buy.”
Source: HR Monthly, August 2012, pp. 32-37