The typical teleworker in the US is a 49 years old, university educated, salaried individual in a management or professional role, says the Telework Research Network. Some of these just love the opportunity to indulge themselves through the satisfaction of doing knowledge or creative work that both engages them and challenges them.
But many of them also want career advancement. They want to get ahead. This is where an interesting article from Talent Management Magazine enters the picture. It reports on a Stanford University study of a massive Chinese travel agency where call center employees who volunteered to work from home:
- experienced a 13% increase in productivity
- were 50% less likely to be promoted than were their colleagues operating from the central call center
This suggests that if you have staff who work predominantly from home, or in remote geographical locations, for that matter, you need to make sure that their presence, their work and their potential remain on your radar screen, especially when you are looking at succession pipelines and assessment of promotability among your team members.
Now, if they telework but come into your location most days of the week, this is much less of a problem. If they don’t, however, start finding ways to get face-to-face with them more frequently, in the same space. Skype and fancy, high tech, web-based conference meetings help but they are not enough. You simply will get a better read on employees who work in your location and that’s not fair to the remote folks. It’s also not fair to the organization which might lose the benefit of the best people being advanced to greater responsibility and greater impact on results.
