Telecommuting: Relevance to anywhere

Following is a response to the ‘My View – Humane Results’ column by Dr. Ajantha Dharmasiri published in the Daily FT on Monday, 7 March, titled ‘Technicalities of telecommuting: Relevance to Sri Lanka’:

By Amal R. Dias

In his second edition Dr. Ajantha Dharmasiri brings into light one of the most significant aspects: how to determine who in an organisation or what functions should fit in a telecommuting environment, to which I wish to add on the same lines with this edition and further elaborate on my previous edition on the enablers that would make telecommuting a success, this time from a functional perspective.

So, why would one want to telecommute, work from home or any other place than office? Certainly not only because it is fancy to have an open laptop in front of you with a Bluetooth plugged to your ear and sipping a latte in a noticeable place. There is an actual job function that has to happen.

For the ‘appropriate’ telecommuter it is a matter of achieving results and not a case of putting in eight hours of work, nor is it the above.

‘Appropriate’ is the key word here as Dr. Dharmasiri explains the importance of identifying who should be telecommuting. There are certain obvious functions such as a bank teller should be seated in front of a counter, but for the others how do we determine who should?

Finer points

Let me in short share with you an experience I once had just to give you an idea how finer points may be missed out. I had to travel to the UK where my job function was to validate numbers that was sent to me from different locations in the UK, authenticate, consolidate and upload to a system. I would have occasionally had to call a few people if the information sent was inaccurate.

My boss sat out of the US and I had to get on a weekly call for a status update. I had no interaction (face-to-face) with anyone who reported to me, my peers or my boss. I would meet my boss only once in three months or randomly if otherwise. People I sat with in office had hardly anything to do with what I was doing except for a boss who I had a dotted line to only for administrative sake.

It did not take me too long obviously to realise this was something I could do from home (In the UK now, working from home is a common practice and not merely a fashion); for that matter I could have done it from anywhere in the world.

The point I am trying to make here is the importance of appropriately identifying the fits and the misfits for telecommuting. Besides yardsticks and guidelines, it also requires a little common sense too I guess. Of course in my case I did not have a choice as the client wanted a person on-site.

Enablers

Getting back to our discussion, once it is identified what the right job is and when telecommuting is an accepted method of work it will soon become a habit and one would opt to work from home more often than not.

Then how would companies ensure that these functions would achieve the desired results? Now I wish to elaborate on the point I made last week; the enablers. Enablers in layman terms are nothing but information ‘smartly’ collated and made available to effectively carry out certain functions. Smartly means making information available in a meaningful way with relevance to the user.

Let’s take an example. Of course there would be many functions that would fit in well, but let’s look at a commonly known job function which is sales. Yes it is anyway an outdoor function, but how productive can this function be made?

Information required by a sales person would be on prospects, customers, status, appointments, products, services, pricing, suppliers, delivery, etc. and he or she would also require updating status at the end of the day.

Now if this information and functionality are being person specific (individualised) and made available to a sales person, imagine the level of productivity an organisation can achieve. Here I wish to touch upon allowing further personalisation as well which would give the individual the extra bit of feel good factor that would only help to improve and achieve better results.

Add to the above mobile enablement, which would be a significant addition to further enhance the desired results, at least the simpler functions of synchronised contacts, calendaring and scheduling.

Last week I touched upon areas beyond the city-driven commercial organisations extending to fields such as agriculture. Purchases and suppliers can very easily come to common grounds if the people concerned are equipped with the right information on the field, thus expediting the transaction process.

I don’t intend to elaborate too much on this as I’m not a subject matter expert on this particular line of business. But I’m sure Government officials who are engaged in such numerous areas could contribute much more to carrying out their services should they be properly equipped to be on the field.

Similarly this can be adapted to any function in an organisation really be it working from out or within an office but more importantly for the outdoor worker.

Enabling the enablers

We spoke about what the enablers are and now let’s look at how the enablers can be enabled. To make it sound extremely simple, this is nothing but integrated backend applications, capturing relevant data and making it available in the required form.

Today highly priced enterprise wide applications along with technologies and concepts such as data mining, business intelligence, cloud computing, virtualisation, the list goes on, are very much within reach. Should these not be helping organisations to achieve similar objectives?

Of course some may argue that this is easier said than done, but the question is, does this not add true value to the users and will organisations not pay for solutions of this nature? In this context, with the right facilities made available, everyone who would fall within the desired category would opt for an ultimate experience in telecommuting.

(The writer is a technology enthusiast and can be reached on [email protected])