Virtual Offices - the Future of Work
If globalization shrunk the world to the size of one big village, the IT revolution has shrunk it further to the size of a palm! The new world order consists of virtual offices, paperless decisions and 24/7 knowledge factories. By now, it‘s old news: time and distance are no hindrances to a company wanting to recruit a new candidate. Advanced technologies make it possible to distribute work to a team on any side of the globe. But strangely, it‘s not the global distribution of work that is thrilling managers these days. It‘s the potential held forth by retaining talent within the country by allowing employees to work virtually With telecommuting being touted as the next big thing in the future of work, it does look as though the 9 to 5 culture is pass. HR managers feel that by allowing employees to shift their offices to their homes, they can reduce attrition.
A New Avatar?
If you look beyond the hype, a virtual office is not such a new trend. Many companies have allowed their employees to work virtually when they are traveling abroad on work, or for short periods when they had to remain home for good reasons.And remember all those post-it ads you saw asking stay-at-home moms to plug in and earn some money? Then, offshoring happened and people realized that face-to-face interaction had little to do with getting a job done well.
First, it was just data entry jobs that were being sent out. But with more sophisticated technology, the projects being bagged could be in the tune of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars!
What‘s more, with the scramble for talent retention, the future of virtual work looks promising. The great thing about virtual offices is that it reduces the importance of face-to-face interaction, by substituting it with technology.
With instant messages and video conferencing, it really is possible to take real-time decisions with just the click of a mouse. It‘s a win-win situation for clients and employees.
Really, the issue is not about finding talent within or outside the country. Rather, it‘s about subjecting time and distance to find the best solution for your company through global talent sourcing.
Some Reasons for the Success of Virtual Offices
- Falling cost of communication: You don‘t need to spend thousands of dollars getting data transferred from one point to another. Just a broadband internet connection will do.
- Greater focus on core activities: Companies are realizing that they can save time and money by staying focused on their main activity and allowing outsourcing vendors (experts in a different field than theirs) to handle non-core activities.
- Decentralized operations: Thomas W. Malone, Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Founder-Director of the MIT Center for Coordination Science, in his book 'The Future of Work' compares the current trend to a shift from monarchy to democracies. Centralized operations are becoming more decentralized, giving way to 'looser hierarchies.'
- More Importance to Personal Goals: The baby boomers were more focused on economic goals. Gen X redefined that prerogative. Today, more and more people are looking at work-life balance and non-economic goals like freedom, personal satisfaction and fulfillment.
What can a Virtual Office with Virtual Employees do for Your Company?
Virtual Offices can address major issues both at the national and company level. Let‘s look at how flexible work strategies can be an advantage for your business:- Retaining talent: Virtual offices make it possible for you and your employees to work from any part of the world. This can reduce attrition and boost retention, especially in the case of working parents with childcare responsibilities.
- Cut Costs for Your Company: Reduced infrastructure and overhead costs and big savings on real estate can translate into dollars worth saving.
- Global Talent Sourcing: In the next couple of years, a lot of baby boomers are going to retire in America causing acute talent shortage. The succeeding generation in America is far too less in terms of numbers to make up for this talent shortage, and economists fear that this could undermine the American economy. But with a virtual office you can source the best talent from anywhere in the world and make up for the shortage at home.
- Other Benefits
- Reduced stress and sickness levels
- Time spent beating the traffic can be profitably spent on work
- Reducing the business risk of disruption from terrorism or a natural disaster
Benefits for the Nation
- Traffic Congestion and its Consequences: Traffic congestion continues to be a huge problem in almost every American city. According to recent estimates, every year the U.S. economy suffers a $78 billion drain in the form of 4.2 billion lost hours and 2.9 billion gallons of wasted fuel.
Virtual offices can work wonders in reducing traffic congestion and global warming, help Americans move towards energy independence and enable parents to spend more time with their families rather than in their cars!
Savings on Infrastructure for the Whole Nation: Instead of spending more money on building bigger bridges and wider roads and accommodating an ever increasing spurt of cars, why not give people a great reason to stay off the road in the first place?
So if Virtual Offices are so Great, How Come it doesn‘t have More Takers?
Now that it has been widely accepted that telecommuting has all the potential of making the U.S. economy more stable, why does it still have such few takers?- Lack of a Standard Metric to Measure Progress: One major reason is that managers are still struggling with the ‘preseentism‘ mindset. Distributed work, remote offices and virtual employees fly in the face of traditional wisdom, which believes that if you're visible, you're accountable. Managers will have to come up with other quantifiable metrics to measure progress.
- Demands Higher Levels of Initiative: A lot depends on self-reliance and self-motivation of employees. Not every employee‘s personality is suited to work without the work-culture messages that are sent out by most organizations. Others cannot thrive without social interaction and loneliness and a sense of isolation and alienation can negatively impact productivity.
- Communication Gaps: Virtual workers rely on communication, without which they can easily feel left behind. Managers confess that relationships with staff members can be demanding and one third of them said that communication with the team had to improve.
- Technology Gaps: Technology has fueled the growth of virtual offices. But any problem with technology can turn the situation on its head. Six out of 10 managers said their IT systems supported remote working, but 5 of them felt they weren‘t fully exploiting the networking technology. Fewer than a fifth used audio conferencing and instant messaging, and only 10 per cent use video conferencing.
- Security Concerns: Network security is a serious issue. With at least one news story every other week of a remote worker who has had a laptop full of data stolen from a car, an airline club, or a hotel room, managers have every reason to worry.
- No Strong Telecommuting Policies: Yoh, a provider of talent and outsourcing services across the U.S. points out the dearth of telecommuting policies. A well-articulated telecommuting policy, he says, can make the difference between winning and losing a bid for a high-impact professional, especially when more than 27 million people in the United States work from home.
Will a Virtual Office be Right for You?
Virtual Offices could offer a solution to some of America‘s pressing problems. However, mindsets and perceptions are much harder to change than policies and procedures.Also, while it may be possible to work part time from a virtual office, human interaction is still a powerful force in getting the balls rolling.Here are a few steps from Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham, founders of the Future of Work Organization that could make virtual offices work for you:
- Use highly participative approaches to establishing distributed work environments This would be essential to fostering the sense of community that is so integral for the success of an organization. For instance, you could invest in an online resource where members can find essential information about each other and can participate in discussions about common issues. You could establish an online community. Go the extra mile to ensure that virtual relationships are strong, even if they are continents apart.
- Define and publish formal policies and procedures for distributed work This would help clarify goals and serve as a yardstick to employees wanting to gauge themselves and their work in the overall scheme of things.
- Establish explicit, tangible performance measures You can‘t measure performance based on time spent at the job. Get over that mindset and move instead into measuring progress in terms of results.
- Develop formal agreements about regular interaction Set aside a time when all members can meet as a team. Develop policies about frequency of communication and interaction.