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Telecommuting to Career Oblivion?
Jan 22
Telecommuters are at least as productive as their office-bound colleagues, but they also can face career oblivion according to new research conducted by Korn/Ferry International. Molly Slevin at the Los Angeles Times reports:
Maybe Woody Allen was right, that 80 percent of life is really just about showing up.
At least that’s what most executives seem to think about people who work from home.
Telecommuters are less likely to be promoted than peers who head into the office every day, according to a survey of 1,300 global executives released Tuesday by Los Angeles-based executive search firm Korn/Ferry International.
Yikes! A month ago I wrote about Best Buy’s Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), which reports that productivity is up 35% over the traditional “face time” approach to business. BusinessWeek says ROWE focuses on getting things done, not where they are done: “The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours.”
Company mantras are often about getting results, and that’s how ROWE works. But in some places, managers still value face time over results. What does that say about the state of performance reviews and their credibility?
Technorati Tags: telecommuting, ROWE, Korn/Ferry, career advancement, Best Buy
About the Author
Frank Roche
Frank started IFRACTAL over 7 years ago with Sarah Chambers. Together, they've created HR communications and HR software for some of the world's leading companies. Frank is also studying Flamenco guitar and origami.
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Companies lie to employees. Against their own long-term interests.
Hopefully the managers at Best Buy will put their promotions where there mouth (and productivity) is. The best cure for discriminating against the telecommuter is good metrics.
But also – management of employees is about knowing them, not just their recent performance metrics. How can one properly know people who you don’t get to work alongside?
ROWE has an interesting conundrum…getting to know someone is part of being in a company. I suppose that could be done by telephone, in our business we certainly work enough by phone. In fact, I once worked with a client in Germany for a year, talking to him every day, and I felt like I knew him when I finally met him in person. It can work, but it will be an interesting challenge to balance the results-only versus promotability. One final thought: perhaps people who choose to work off the ranch all the time are exchanging that benefit for career advancement. After all, why do we work in the first place?
“To gain something you have to lose something” is a well known fact, which applies well for telecommuters too..yes, their promotions may not be as lucrative or fast as it may be for their peers at office.
Steve