April, 2007

You know that a problem has reached the extreme when Consumer Reports takes up the mantle. So important is this topic that I thought I would pass it along.

Fire Safety – http://blogs.consumerreports.org/safety/2007/03/this_is_not_a_d.html . Good advice, please read it all. For more information on Fire and Disaster Safety, there is also tons of good advice and recommendations on the Red Cross National site, available to all. As more and more people work outside the safety of the office, employers and their EH&S departments need to expand their workforce’s awareness and education of potential and new hazards that exist beyond the company office. A basic ounce of prevention – be aware of your surroundings. To repeat the phrase from the old TV show Hills Street Blues”, and as I often end my Red Cross Disaster Preparedness Presentations:
“Be Safe Out There”.

April, 2007

This is a “rant”. I borrow the term from my good friends Charlie and Jim. My rant is based on a frustration. I think most rants are. My particular frustration is my inability to access my blog control panel, leaving me unable to post new blogs. My level of frustration has increased as I experience the game of Customer Service Dodge Ball between my web site host and my blog host. Each is working very hard to evade the ball of responsibility thrown at them to fix my access problem. First prize is a “It’s not my problem/job, we don’t support it” medal. So far the web host is winning with their strategy of flat out “We don’t support it”.

There are two things at issue causing. First, there is they have broken the implied, no, expressed covenant that makes business work. If I pay you for something, what you provide me should work. In the above case, this covenant has not only been broken, but is costing me exponentially more than what I paid for it.

How can this cost me more? The answer leads to the second issue – personal productivity. If I pay, let’s say $60.00 dollars for a product and it doesn’t work and it takes me 28 hours of wrestling with Customer Service to get that product to work, or as in all of the cases above and below, never works, I am really out of pocket much more than that initial cash investment. If after 28 hours, at just the minimum wage of $6.20, (which btw, is substantially less than my time is worth, but I will use for the sake of argument) the product in reality costs me $173.60 or over 2 1/2 times the initial price. Add the blog issue time to the – time spent with the first, then the second, scanner that didn’t work; and my cell phone issue time; and my current tally of lost hours over the past year is around 60 hours, and still counting. I am now into the thousands of dollars worth of lost productivity for a couple of hundred dollars of expenditure.

Admittedly, 60 hours spread over a year is only 5 hours a month. Even this is way too much.  If you extrapolate this number – 5 hours X roughly 200,000,000 adults between the ages of 15- and 64 in American it comes to one billion hours of lost productivity, or over 6 billion dollars in lost productivity or purchasing power per month. That is $74 billion per year. Dollars that could be spent on the purchase of more products, thereby increasing the GNP. Time that could and should be better spent – on family, friends, job, career, building new businesses or just that old American pastime of the pursuit of happiness.

If you are an executive in a corporation out there, you need to start to understand and realize the extent of this issue. This is why the time regained by telecommuting or applied to work/life balance is so important and such a precious commodity to your employees. Are you contributing to the solution or this problem? Take a closer.

•  Look internally – to what extent do your own systems contribute to the company’s loss in employee productivity – both personal and company? They are really one in the same.
  
• Are you still operating under the misguided assumption that 100% of an employee’s time spent sitting at their desk equals 100% productivity?
  
• Have you really built an organizational support infrastructure (OSI) that supports employee productivity or does it get in the way more than it paves the way?
  
• If your employees are starting to work remotely, are you augmenting your current OSI to support work out of the office?
  
• Look externally – are the production and delivery of your products or services adding to the problem? If they rob people of personal time, it will come back to bite you on the behind. How much of people’s personal time you steal will directly effect their individual performance at work.  

What could you do with 60 lost hours of time? A lot I am sure.

March, 2007
I have always found those dire predictions of how people who work at home are less likely to be promoted extremely mystifying. The current rash of doom and gloom articles has again circulated on the topic. Here is what I don’t get. I mean – if you are a global, or even just a national or regional company or just have another building across town, how do you expect to retain your distributed workforce if you only reward those employees who work with or report to co-workers who sit next to each other?
Work from home, work in another part of the world or work in a building next door – what’s the diff?! It’s all about working remotely via technology. Seems to me companies are shooting themselves in the foot if they only reward are those who are sitting within line of sight. The employees out there on the front lines are often the ones making it happen and are the future of the company.
Maybe it is the old military model. Those out in front are the expendable foot soldiers. While the important generals and lieutenants stay behind directing the show. If the supposition is true, that if you work remotely you won’t be promoted, then it would appear that those employees out on the front lines aren’t being shot by the competition but by friendly fire, in the back by those safe in the corporate office
The big mistake these companies are making is that in this business battle for good employees, when their managers take pot shots at them, they don’t crawl back wounded or die. If they are worth their salt, they will just jump sides. It’s a different world out there folks. Yes – loyalty is dead, especially if it only rewarded for those sitting in the company desk. What you see as expendable collateral, others see as assets.
What are the assets of an accomplished remote worker?
• The ability to work independently.
• A self-starter
• Highly self-motivate
• Good distance communication skills
• Able to collaborate with across multiple platforms
• Technologically savvy
The skill requirements requested on most job postings. Yet the culture that fosters this behavior is not one of out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Just as a child tied to proverbial apron streams does not grow up to be a strong, self-reliant adult, neither does an employee. A boss watching all the time to see if employees are doing their jobs does not foster strong, independent work habits and processes.
Additionally, if you reward those who stay in the office and then, by default, you punish those who are brave enough to leave the nest to explore and work in new places, and you are setting up a culture that is risk adverse. Risk adversity does not foster creativity and innovation. The very things companies are complaining they don’t have anymore. Just like those baby birds and children who, once taught survival techniques, are then gently pushed out of the nest to live, survive on their own and to achieve their own accomplishments, so should companies do with their employees.
Instead of rewarding those safely staying behind company walls, management should be teaching their employees the skills of independence and self-reliance. Encouraging and supporting them to work in any location and rewarding them for their success so that their valuable brand of productivity stays with the company.