Several weeks ago I posted some thoughts on what Charlie Grantham and I call the “ReFormation of Work” (Parts One, Two, and Three are available here, here, and here). I was pleased to see the reactions and comments that our admittedly “far out” thoughts stimulated. Not everyone agreed with us but we clearly touched some raw nerves.

In fact, we really do believe that nothing short of a reformation in management practice is required to cope with the changes that face virtually every organization and the entire economy these days.

Specifically, our experience suggests that your future business success depends directly on your ability to understand the shifts that are occurring and to redefine your workforce, workplace, technology, and business strategies accordingly.

We like to recall the simple statement by one of our clients not too long ago that, when faced with all the changes impinging on the world of work,

“Management must come to the serious realization that doing nothing, or not taking action to change, will result in a significant threat to the health of the organization.”

The undeniable reality (at least to us) is that computing and communications technologies are transforming traditional workplaces into virtual “workspaces.” The once-fanciful notion of working “any time, any place” has indeed become a reality. In our view, a fundamental transformation in the way work gets done – and managed – is one of the most distinctive aspects of the so-called “new” economy.

As we all know, knowledge work can now be conducted effectively from a corporate office, on an airplane, in a car, at the local coffee shop, or from just about any other place you can imagine. And with the growth of wireless access to real-time data, our assumptions of what we can know at any point in time – and therefore, have to know – are also being challenged.

New forms of outsourcing have also become common, driven by new technology capabilities. Many core business processes now cross multiple organizational boundaries and require collaboration among individuals and groups who work not only in different places but for different companies, or for themselves as independent contractors, consultants, temps, or part-timers.

Yet this is hardly the first time in history that work has been conducted in a distributed way. For hundreds of years larger organizations have had facilities in multiple locations in order to be close to their suppliers or customers, to take advantage of real estate savings, to have access to local talent, or to benefit from varying tax laws.

Operating multiple facilities and managing people in different locations has been common for a long, long time. Physical separation made managing difficult, but with the telephone and telegraph, in combination with trains, planes and automobiles, managing distributed work was certainly feasible if sometimes awkward and time-consuming.

For our purposes, we consider work to be distributed if any of the following conditions are met:

• Individual workers are located in different physical locations;
• Most normal communications and interactions, even with colleagues in the next office, are asynchronous; that is, they do not occur simultaneously; or
• The individual workers are not all working for the same organization, or are working within distinctively different parts of the same parent organization. They may have widely different terms of employment.

Each of these three dimensions impacts workforce management, and the interactions among them create new skill requirements, demand new management practices, and raise stress levels for everyone.

But today a richly interconnected and inexpensive communications and computing infrastructure allows those facilities, workers, and separate organizations to access, process, and transmit an incredible variety of information from almost any location on the planet. In many respects their physical separation has become virtually invisible and almost irrelevant.

However, it is important to remember that the idea of computer-supported distributed work is not really all that new. Many companies began experimenting with “telecommuting” programs twenty or thirty years ago. “Road warriors” have carted laptops and portable printers into airplanes, hotel rooms, and customers' offices for many years.

The concept of office “hoteling” was introduced more than a decade ago (that’s the situation where individuals forgo private office space and must reserve office space for their temporary use when they visit the facility). Now we call it “free address” offices, or “touchdown space” but the core concept has been around for quite a while.

Yet the success stories are still few and far between. It turns out to be far more difficult to manage work and workers in a truly distributed – but interconnected – world than almost anyone realizes.

The principal challenge remains how to manage the many changes in organizational culture and behavior that distributed work requires. Every company needs a vision, a strategy, and the wisdom to implement new technology and transform working arrangements. This challenge is unquestionably magnified when the workforce becomes more distributed physically, organizationally, and even culturally.

Despite the hype and the growing belief that the Internet and information technology (IT) generally have meant the “death of distance,” (see Frances Cairncross, The Death of Distance, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997) managing distributed work and a distributed workforce remains incredibly difficult.

For some extended thoughts on what distributed work means and the challenges it creates, please see my 2002 white paper, "Understanding Distributed Work" (originally prepared for the sponsors of our first Future of Work program)

In future posts I’ll comment in more detail on the specific challenges to managers and workers, and offer some suggestions for easing the pain (see also Dave Desforge’s earlier description of some of things that Sun Microsystems has done to make its iWork program successful.

It’s sad but true that the iWork program at Sun and the OnDemand Workplace program at IBM remain among the few genuine success stories we know about.

If you’ve got a good distributed work story, please contact me at jim@thefutureofwork.net. We’re hungry for compelling success stories.

Tag: distributedwork