Handling employees who want to work from home.
Q: One of our senior designers wants to work at home but we're worried that would hurt staff morale. How should we handle it?
ACE advises: Work at home, often called work in place, is an increasing trend. It can result in happier and more productive staff as well as better management and better employee retention.
Start by creating a “work in place agreement” that spells out communication and work arrangements. It should cover hours and when the employee can be reached. It should specify a dedicated workplace and may require a weekly “significant events” report to keep other employees aware of what this employee is doing.
Actually, requiring such a report from all staff can be helpful. Significant events are not just accomplishments, but may include warning of problems that have not been addressed, observations of some national or cultural trends, and anything else that could become significant.
The biggest culture change involves the habit of management by proximity. Just because I see Jane and Harry in their cubicles doesn't mean they are productively addressing business problems. They could be caught up in all manner of concerns important from home and elsewhere.
Instead, managers need to contract with staff to produce certain results, create awareness of the status of customer relationships, or work in other ways towards very specific goals. I may see my “remote” employees, but I could certainly tell when they had addressed the goals.
The contract needs to be amended when the understanding of goals changes.
With such measures in place, staff should recognize the work done by remote employees, just as they value work of colleagues they see regularly.
Arthur Fink, principal at Arthur Fink Consulting, can be reached at arthur@arthurfink.com
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