Banning remote work won't make employees more productive - here's why

Allowing employees to work from home is an increasingly popular - and beneficial - option for a growing number of companies and their employees.

According to Global Workplace Analytics' 2017 State of Telecommuting in the US report, 40% more US employers offered flexible workplace options compared to five years ago. And the number of daily telecommuters grew 115% in the past decade, nearly 10 times faster than the rest of the workforce. According to the report, companies reap the benefits of employee telecommuting: higher productivity, better continuity of operations, reduced or eliminated parking and transit subsidies - not to mention the ability to attract and retain top talent.

Yet, some companies - notably IBM and Yahoo - have cracked down on work-from-home arrangements and mandated that those employees return to their main offices.

Yahoo circulated an internal memo after notifying remote employees that they were required to relocate to company facilities. The memo read in part: "Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together."

While such moves can address various concerns that arise from not having daily, face-to-face interactions, requiring everyone to work from the same location isn't the productivity golden ticket. Instead, companies should look to address the real underlying problem of a remote workforce: a lack of visibility into the majority of work being executed across the business.

"One of the biggest challenges organizations face is having the right information at the right time to make informed decisions," says Alan Lepofsky, vice president, Constellation Research. "That makes it critical to coordinate work, keeping everyone on the same page. This holds true regardless of if the workforce is spread out across the globe or if everyone works at corporate headquarters."

The problem with unstructured work

For recurring projects and tasks such as responding to customer requests, the processes for organizing and managing them can be clearly defined and become routine.

But many workers, both in-office and remote, are spending a large portion of their work day on "unstructured work," which refers to non-routine activities or "one-offs," such as soliciting or giving feedback on projects, getting approval requests, or updating teams on recent developments. According to Gartner, these unstructured tasks account for more than 60% of today's work.

Without a method in place for managing and tracking unstructured work, the information about how projects or deliverables are progressing is spread out (and often lost) across email, conference calls, messaging apps, or other cloud productivity apps.

Companies often try to offset the lack of structure with messaging apps (e.g., Slack, HipChat, Google Chat, or Skype) or cloud-based sync and share platforms (e.g., Office 365 and Google for Work). And while these two categories tackle two specific areas of the work spectrum - communication and document collaboration - they don't provide adequate structure or visibility for teams to operate out of the same playbook.

The solution

Without the right tools in place, communication and productivity problems around unstructured work are pretty much inevitable: Important updates shared through a messaging app don't get relayed to the entire project team, an excess amount of time is spent tracking down approvals, or decisions are delayed while key information about a project gets centralized.

"Best practices can make processes more efficient, but to truly be effective there needs to be complete transparency into work," says Gene Farrell, senior vice president of product at Smartsheet. "This becomes even more important with a geo-distributed workforce. When you can see the who, when, and how behind every step of a project in one central hub, your team will demonstrate better ownership and accountability with everyone knowing what's expected of them."

For remote or otherwise isolated workers, a work-execution tool like Smartsheet removes many of the barriers they often face, including lack of visibility into where projects stand, decisions that are made on the fly based on old information, and ad hoc discussions.

For managers, this provides a centralized, queryable at-a-glance view of who is doing what, what's on track and what's at risk, how their teams are tracking to goals, and more.

And for the company and its employees, promoting use of a new work management tool is much simpler, quicker, less expensive, and more effective than forcing employees to relocate.

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This post is sponsored by Smartsheet.

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