The first, quite openly admitted, theme is that that Australia is way behind the world in terms of embracing telework, and needs to move quickly to formally embrace the trend to unlock its latent benefits. The second, less perfectly stated but implied by the pitch and the nature of the event, was that the NBN is the way to close that gap.
These are two very different policy objectives from an event - and the days following it, which the Labor government Christened as National Telework Week (NTW, at www.telework.gov.au) - that played like a Hail-Mary pass for a government grabbing at every opportunity to spruik use-cases that justify its NBN expenditure.
This piece, and two to follow, will explore the arguments being used by the Labor government to encourage and justify greater telework; the body of evidence that suggests we are both following global trends and well behind them; and the actual importance of the NBN in delivering on the government's telework vision (hint: it's not as important as you may be led to think).
First, the benefits, of which it is widely acknowledged that there are many. Long heralded as a quiet revolution in workforce productivity, telework gives employees the flexibility to work from home on a regular or ad hoc basis to accommodate the demands of work/life balance, or simply to avoid the wasted time of a ponderous commute that can be measured in lost hours per day.
Even where it has not been embraced as a regular feature of the workforce, telework is regularly called upon to counter the additional chaos of special events: at the recent London Olympics, for example, it was promoted by the government as a way of reducing city congestion.
This proved easier than many might have thought, since any respectable, governance-compliant organisation has probably already positioned telework as a key part of their disaster-recovery policies.
"As part of their business continuity plans, many companies had already provided for staff to work from home," communications minister Stephen Conroy said. "Workers are now spending an average two weeks a year in their cars getting to work. It's not a big step to let them work from home more often."
Conroy seized on figures from a new Deloitte Access Economics report, launched by Gillard at the NTW event, to suggest that having 10% of workers working from home half the time, would deliver more than $1.4b in economic benefits per year, save 120 million litres of fuel, avoid 320,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions and reduce congestion costs by $470m per year.
Although they feel good, greenhouse-gas reductions are probably the last thing on the mind of workers who gravitate to teleworking because it saves them time, headaches and the challenge of both work/life and interpersonal conflict.
That said, warm-fuzzy feelings don't a business case make; the vague nature of the term makes it hard to quantify the direct financial benefits teleworking can provide. But that didn't stop Conroy from trying: he quoted Stanford University research suggesting workers are 13 per cent more productive working from home compared with working from an office.
Exactly what this implies - that they will generate 13 per cent more revenues, answer 13 per cent more emails, peruse 13 per cent more Facebook posts or productively deal with 13 per cent more outstanding tasks - is not exactly clear. Indeed, with the benefits of telework so broadly varied, assigning a number to in this way seems to both constrain and underestimate the potential of the practice.
The benefit of experience
The true benefits can be significantly higher: for example, US ambassador to Australia Jeffrey Bleich - who followed Gillard and employment and workplace relations minister Bill Shorten with a videoconferencing session in which he shared the US government's telework experience - had nothing but high praise for the benefits of a practice that now has over 3 million regular proponents in the US alone. Indeed, we are told, 16 million Americans telework once a month.
Noting that US public-sector telework take-up has actually outpaced that of the private sector, Bleich said the adoption of telework practices - implemented on an ad hoc basis over the last decade but mandated for government bodies by the Barack Obama-sponsored Telework Enhancement Act 2010 - had substantially improved the resilience of US government agencies that would have been crippled by business interruptions in the past.
During the recent assault on America's eastern coast by Hurricane Sandy, for example, one-third of the more than 300,000 federal workers in Washington, D.C. were able to continue their work from home - reducing gridlock in the city and ensuring they were in a position to support disaster-recovery efforts.
"Telework has made it possible for commuters to continually adapt to emergencies and operate in a crisis," said Bleich, who also credits it with allowing him to manage a previous senior government job in Washington, D.C. from his home in San Francisco, 5000 km away.
"Sometimes it's simply necessary, and other times it's just better to work from your home. Telework allowed me to serve the President without having to neglect my family, and to take on a job that I would have loved to take on but wouldn't have been able to manage otherwise."
Teleworking has proved to be about more than just delivering a shorter commute, however: Bleich also pointed to the experience of the US Patents and Trademarks Office (PTO), which found itself a leading adopter of teleworking because it realised early on that it could not convince enough qualified staff to physically relocate so they could commute to its Washington, D.C. headquarters; furthermore, it didn't have the physical space to accommodate them anyway.
From a standing start in 1997 in which just 18 PTO staff began teleworking, two-thirds of the organisation's 11,000 employees now work offsite via the wonders of teleworking, using thin-client software to access their PTO desktops.
This distributed infrastructure has not only allowed them to retain skilled specialists for evaluating all manner of patents, but has dramatically boosted the organisation's efficiency and availability: even during the 'Snowmageddon' blizzard that shut down Washington, D.C. for four days in February 2010, the PTO's distributed staff base meant the organisation was able to answer 91 per cent of enquiries within 20 seconds.
"This was better than they had done across all of their previous quarter," Bleich said. "Even with all of their offices officially closed, PTO trademark examiners accomplished 85 per cent of the production volumes that they had handled the week before the snow."
Australia follows suit
Gillard's headline commitment to improve teleworking to 12 per cent of the public service by 2020 garnered most of the headlines - and, as we will show tomorrow, is a curiously wan ambition. Percentages aide, however, the NTW launch event saw Labor trotting out a number of highly-supportive experts and convincing success stories showcasing the benefits available to organisations that take teleworking to heart.
IP Australia, our equivalent to the US PTO, was feted as a strong proponent of telework: the 1130-strong organisation has embraced it for many of the same reasons as its US equivalent, bringing the work to its 870 skilled technical experts around Australia rather than forcing them to work in IP Australia offices in Canberra or Melbourne.
Teleworking also became crucial in ensuring staff retention: "IPA's patent examination staff are highly-educated in specialist science, engineering and other technologies," acting director of employee performance Chris Menadue explained.
"Examiners undertake a two-year intensive program to provide them with the legal and technical knowledge they need to example patent applications, and it takes around three years to see a return on investment for this training.
"Some years ago," he continued, "this was being eroded by higher than desired turnover rates, especially at the 3 to 5 year tenure point. One cause was that examiners were often returning to where they had previously lived. It was imperative to find ways of increasing retention, so teleworking was seen as a strategic business decision to help counter this loss.
Health-insurance giant Medibank Private has also been a big proponent of teleworking, with around 1000 of its 4500 employees being teleworking nurses and other health professionals. For several years, these staff work from home and contribute to maintaining 24x7 advice services, delivering two million customer interactions per year across a range of support programs.
"Our people really enjoy working from home," people and culture group executive Ilona Charles told attendees at the NTW event. "They rarely if ever come into the office, and it's one of the reasons we've been able to attract and recruit GPs and nurses to work in telehealth. They've helped us transform into a company that is a 24x7 digital business, and a substantial employer of teleworkers."
"It's unusual for the industry, but it fits in with their work/life balance. We have a lot of GPs were perhaps learning towards retirement, or looking to spend less time I their clinics - but telework offers them the ability to continue working as GPs without going into retirement. They've been able to extend their working life in a way that suits them, so it has been highly effective."
Cisco Systems, the networking and videoconferencing giant for which the NTW event was a massive marketing play, has seen equally strong success with teleworking - both in Australia and abroad.
The company has claimed a major fillip from telework, largely based on reductions in employee attrition and the sparing of hours spent on the congested roads around its San Francisco-area headquarters.
"We've saved 44 hours per employees in commute avoidance, saving US$151 million annually," global employee engagement manager Jennifer Dudeck told the audience. "We've saved US$1 billion in real estate reduction, and employees tell us the ability to telework is a huge factor in their satisfaction and job productivity."
"They are more engaged and tend to report themselves as being more productive," she said. "And, for a 1.1 per cent reduction in attrition because we allow employees to be mobile, we save US$118 million per year in avoiding the costs of hiring those people back. Telework saves us money in terms of people staying with the company."
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Autor(en)/Author(s): David Braue
Quelle/Source: ABC Technology and Games, 26.11.2012
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