Family friendly? September 26, 2012
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
Telling piece in the Sunday Business Post a few weeks back which looked at new statistics about working outside the office. According to the SBP:
…new research from Regus, which provides workspace and has business centres in Dublin and Cork, found that 35 per cent of Irish workers were allowed by employers to work from locations other than the company’s main offices for at least half the week.
And apparently this figure lags behind international experience, for example in the US it is close enough to 50 per cent. Nor is it a case of home-working. The piece notes that libraries, business centres and other locations are more often where individuals work from. Hard to know if this is overstated, even 35 per cent seems a bit high.
But halfway through the piece there’s this.
According to the Regus research, Irish workers look set to benefit as firms in Britain become more open to new ways of working with staff based overseas.
However, the report found that more than two in five Irish firms will only grant flexible working to staff when they reach “a certain level of seniority”, despite the fact that half of employers recognise the productivity benefits and 86 per cent view it as more family-friendly.
I like the ‘despite the fact’. The assumption clearly is that the employers would regard ‘more family-friendly’ as a positive. But having worked in the private sector – and with the public sector – for a long while now and taking note of legislation on such matters in this state, I wonder on what evidence that assumption is based?
This is a subject close to my heart. I have been a tele-worker for 11 years now. During that time I have had the privilege of being present in the home while my children have grown up. My kids are now 16, 14 and 10. For me, for my family, on balance, it has been a very positive experience.
However. There is always a however. And the however in the general case is that really tele-working is all about power relations in the workplace. There are situations where the balance of power rests more with the specific employee, the senior manager, the techie with the hard to recruit skills, for example the senior staff mention in the piece above, where really the employer is faced with a like it or lump it ultimatum that it’s tele-work or no-work. The employer knows that the employee in question is part of “the team”, is going to put in the hours regardless of where they are located, so grudgingly but with a liberal face the company permits tele-working in that specific case. There is always the corporate fear of the flood gates being opened, and that “less reliable” staff will ask for and expect tele-working provileges as an entitlement, and where would that end up, because those staff haven’t necessarily proven their trustworthiness, aren’t part of the core team, aren’t the type of staff who are guaranteed to put in the hours. Which then leads to questions about how to control the work output of remote workers, and of course technology facilitates that, VPNs, clouds, skype, internet meetings, really there is not much difference in terms of command and control of employee productivity whether the employee is sitting in an open plan office in CityWest or in a cottage on the coast of Clare.
Which leads neatly to one of the major downsides of tele-working, which is the intensification of work. The very technology which facilitates remote working also facilitates the measurement of output and the constant squeezing of more and more productivity. This enables remote working for the less reliables, it allows employers to reap the benefits of reduced overheads, smaller offices, whether that’s less desks, less electricity and heating, less down time, and externalising those costs onto the employee. Again the power relation. The employer can do it, can enforce tele-working inorder to reduce costs. Depending on the skills required for the remote work it can ultimately become a casualised relationship, piece work performed remotely, cottage industry in the 21st century. (Very interesting recent article here on that phenomonen carried to extremes: http://www.alternet.org/labor/dystopian-digital-sweatshop-makes-internet-run).
My wife was briefly involved in a tele-working group 12 years ago when we first moved out of Dublin with our (then) two small kids. At that time we were both continued to commute the 50 miles from our country idyll up to our jobs in Dublin. (This was before she went over to the dark side and became a teacher). The double commute didn’t last long needless to say. So she started looking into tele-working as an option. (This was in the days of 56k modems, we had to wait about 3 years before we got an upgrade to ISDN (64kbps), and another 5 years before broadband arrived.) Anyway, though that tele-working group we both ended up being interviewed for a European study on tele-working, the results of the which were then published in a book “Work and Family in the eWork Era” (http://books.google.com/books/about/Work_and_Family_in_the_eWork_Era.html?id=QIQXbqdKUtkC). At the time we were both very enthusiastic about tele-working, it solved our immediate commute issues, it suited our family situation, we were amongst the hard-to-recruit techie cohort at the tail and of the dotcom bubble, so our contributions to the study were all rosy about the possibilities of remote working. When the results were published the researcher who had interviewed us forwarded us a copy of the book and we were genuinely surprised to read that other people’s experiences of tele-work weren’t all as positive as ours. Such was our naivety at the time. The book was an eye opener, but we duly closed our eyes to again as the daily slog licked back in of raising a young family and keeping two careers going. The usual.
Now, 12 years later, I have quite strong views about tele-working. At a personal level I deeply miss the social interaction of the office environment. I’m fucked if I’m going to spend 2.5hrs per day commuting the 100 mile round trip to my workplace to have the bant with my work colleagues, I don’t miss it that much, but after 12 years in darkest rural Meath, working in isolation, I do sometimes feel like this period of my life is my Siberian exile and that someday I will return to the mainstream of society. The other negative is that no matter how the power relations start off, ultimately the corporate workplace thrives on the sort of male team spirit that requires a dose of daily back-slapping and shite-talk over the coffee machine, the off-line bitching and in-jokes that fill the first couple of minutes of every meeting before everyone has arrived at the table and the remotes are dialled-in to the conference call. Gradually but quickly enough the reliable team play who is working elsewhere becomes less connected, less indispensible, less reliable. Out of sight and out of mind. So the other downside of tele-work is that there are compromises to me made with career ambition. And let’s face it, in retrospect that’s not really a downside at all, but in the process of arriving at that conclusion one doesn’t have the benefit of 20:20 hindsight, so it does feel like a negative. On balance, to adapt the Chinese CP’s assessment of Mao, tele-working in my case is 70% good, 30% bad. I don’t have regrets.
But I wouldn’t recommend it either. Because when I hear business interests talking abou the “knowledge economy” and the importance of 21st century broadband infrastructure for job creation all I can envisage is the same old same old labour stratification and exploitation of the majority, now enabled by technology. Shite work being farmed out over the global internet in a race to the bottom where casualised labour churns the e-working production lines at globally deflated prices to generate ever increasing profits for the monopolies. Some of my generation might reap the transitional benefits of e-working as we collaborate in building the infrastructure to roll it out globally, the senior managers and specialised techies of the IT industry, but we’re building that dystopian future where our kids will be competing for piecework with other members of the global reserve army of labour on a 24/7 conveyor belt. It is industrialised atomisation of the labour force. It destroys the protections which spatial inertia affords employees. The future is not bright.
Work from home the odd time myself and have had periods (like when I did my ankle a few years back) when I worked for a month at home rather than try and hobble in and out of the office.
Like LATC I find I miss the social interaction of a workplace when working at home.
Its a wonderful facility to have, especially with children or indeed elderly parents. For instance recently I worked from my mothers house as she recuperated from an operation and its very handy too when you have to meet teachers etc.
One aspect I’ve talked about with a few people is that it must impact the number of sick days. Where previously people would have said “fuck it I’ll ring in sick”, they now ring in or mail “working from home today”.
The other aspect is that the working day sometimes doesn’t end, for instance you may be ‘expected’ to check your mail when you go home. Or rung to see if you can have a look at an urgent issue. So there is a blur between workplace and home.
It’s a subject close to my heart as well, but as an employer rather than an employee.
If ‘flexibility’ becomes a perk to be offered to senior or proven employees, you’ve already lost. That’s not flexibility.
Flexibility needs to a universal ethos and principle. I would see it as a natural and inevitable result of a work environment built on mutual respect and trust.
We try – and I emphasise try, we’re by no means perfect at it – to be as flexible and family-friendly as possible. Aside from being humane, it’s a simple equation – work is only a part of people’s increasingly pressured and complex lives. Flexibility helps them manage that complexity better, which means that they’re happier, which means they’re both more productive and more creative. Wins all round.
There’s actually quite a lot of really interesting stuff being written in this area at the minute – about the importance of autonomy and happiness in productivity and performance. Daniel Pink has written quite a bit about it (http://www.danpink.com/) as has Teresa Amabile (http://www.progressprinciple.com/books/single/the_progress_principle). Perhaps the most interesting work is the notion of the Results Only Work Environment, (http://www.gorowe.com/about/about-cali-jody/) which trashes the notion of time-based work entirely.
But all of this is a massive challenge to employers and managers, because it forces a degree of rigour and planning in their approach that isn’t always there. If you are going to implement a Results Only Work Environment, you have to be very clear what results are expected of everyone, and in my experience, that’s not always the case in business. Too easy to just expect workers to turn up, clock on and clock off.
My attitude is I don’t really care where you are or when you work, once you get the work done. It seems like common sense to me.
“the importance of autonomy and happiness in productivity and performance”
No, no, no. There’s a simple disconnect going on here. Work is not about happiness, it’s not about “flourishing”.
“My attitude is I don’t really care where you are or when you work, once you get the work done. It seems like common sense to me.”
That’s actually the essense of the problem here. And it touches on what IELB says above also. For teleworkers there is an intensification of work, it’s not all about having the flexibility to drop the kids to school, to throw a load in the washing machine, to post on CLR etc. It’s about getting the work done, as you pointed out, that’s the bottomline. And there’s no escape. As IELB says, there are no duvet days for teleworkers, there’s no such thing as “too sick to work” unless it’s really really bad, there’s no clocking out time, it’s all about the “commitments to the team” and professional pride in getting the work done. But for every half hour of flexibility in the employees favour there’s the pressure to work late on getting that report in on time or whatever. That pressure isn’t any different when it’s located at home than if it is in the office, working late is working late, regardless of location. The reality is that without the separation of work space/time from home space/time, and without the normalising effect of social interaction with work colleagues, it is actually more stressful to be under pressure to deliver as a remote worker.
I appreciate that this perspective is not one you may have considered as an employer, other than to believe in the “common sense” of win-win for teleworking employer-employee relations.
This fluffy rosy view of teleworking as guaranteed win-win doesn’t stand up I’m afraid.
If you’re genuinely interested in a balanced assessment of tele-working and it’s impact on family, and how as a good employer you might best implement teleworking, then have a read of that book I referenced above. It’s on Google.
I think we may be a bit at cross purposes here.
I’m not referring to tele-working. I’m talking about flexible working. There’s a difference. I can assure you I don’t have any romantic notions of tele-working or remote working as a labouring paradise. And there are very real problems of isolation and lack of collegiality.
There’s a fundamental question about the nature of the labour contract underneath this. Is it a rigid exchange of money for time? Or is it an agreement about specific outcomes in return for money?
I appreciate that there is the *potential* for increased pressure, stress and indeed exploitation if you take the latter approach. But that is also the case in a money for time exchange. A lot depends on the parties involved and the power relations involved – we’re into the democratization of the workplace here, which is another discussion altogether.
Done properly, I think a results approach can have benefits for all concerned.
Going back to your points about the intensification of the work and the pressure to work late – that’s a potential issue in any workplace and under any arrangement. It’s not exclusive to tele-working.
A question for you though. If work is not about ‘happiness’ what is it about?
As I said above – flexibility as a perk, or as a lever to force people to be constantly ‘on’ isn’t flexibility.
And thanks for the book recommendation, I’ll check it out.
Easy to descend into cross purposes, especially on a subject as huge as the nature of work.
A results oriented relationship is extremely open to abuse due to the unequal power relations. Just to twist it here back in the direction of my own particular hobbyhorse if you’ll forgive me, i.e. teleworking, that power relationship in the general sense (not the highly skilled specialist but the routine data processing teleworker) becomes even more skewed by the social isolation and casualised nature of the contract. There is no opportunity whatsoever for collective action by workers in such a situation, there is no collective workforce, no common cause, its the 21st century lump with keyboards and broadband instead of shovels. Again, I’m not suggesting that this necessarily applies to your situation, nor does it to my own particular situation. I’d make the point again though that our current generation of remote or flexible workers are enjoying a premium that derives from the transition into these work practices, a premium that will not be passed on to the next generation when institutionalied work flexibility becomes another tool for reducing labour costs and increasing profit. Or if not increasing profit then simple survival in a generally globalised on-line economy which is without national borders and national labour market differentiation in terms of pay and conditions of employment. It facilitates the race to the bottom. I do think it’s slightly naive to believe that capital will not use the unequal power relations to its benefit. Not saying that specific employers will consciously use flexible work arrangements to drive up their bottom line, but in a globally more competitive labour market the motiviation to lower labour costs becomes an accepted “common sense” that is simply unquestioned, with workers carrying the can as a result.
Democratisation of the workplace is another big discussion.
“If work is not about ‘happiness’ what is it about?”
Well now, where to start? I don’t have a stock answer for that. For the overwhelming proportion of workers it is about economic necessity, that’s the bottom line. Clearly it’s better to spend the hours doing something that doesn’t leave one physically or emotionally broken at the end of the day, so I’m not going to shoot you down in flames for suggesting that “happiness” is part of the mix in that sense, where “happiness” as a catch-all equates to the basket of attributes involved in the exchange of labour apart from just money. But I think one has to acknowledge that the situation of the privileged brain-workers in the developed western economies is far from being representative of the situation of most workers on the planet. In the pyramid of needs there’s a bit of angels on a pinhead sort of meaninglessness about whether some fluffy notion of good employer practices are really the important issue of the 21st century global proletariat. It simply misses the point that work in a capitalist economy is about exploitation, maybe with ribbons on in some cases, but exploitation none the less. I mean, you don’t need to be a Marxist these days to see that the future work prospects are pretty grim in simple terms of quantity of work let alone quality of work. In that sense I think the prioritisation of work quality for the upper echelons of the labour masses is simply fiddling while Rome burns. It’s not that the qualitative aspects of work are not important per se, they’re just not as urgent as addressing the structural economic issues that underlie unemployment and under-employment in capitalist economies. I appreciate that as an individual employer you can’t solve the problems of the global capilatist economy, whereas you can make improvements within your own sphere of influence in your own business enterprise, and every little helps of course. But it’s still a bit of a cop out. I don’t mean that personally or nastily.
I’d pretty much agree with everything you say about teleworking there.
The challenge for labour (in the worker/trade union sense, not the party) is to find ways of organising and mobilising within these new realities. Regardless of the pros or cons, the changes in how work is structured. located and organised is a juggernaut. We’re not going to be able to stand there shouting stop. We need to find a way of making new forms and ways of working work for the workers (if you’ll excuse my clumsy sentence construction there).
On to happiness.
Yep, I’m looking at this from a privileged position and a narrow position. We’re brain-workers in a small enterprise and that’s clearly not representative of labour globally and my early comments obviously relate to our specific corner of the world labour market.
Empowerment, autonomy and happiness all mean diddley-squat if you can’t afford to buy bread or pay rent. So yes, exploitation, underpayment, unsafe practices – all these things need to be sorted first. And I’m not suggesting some fluffy notion of happiness or autonomy can be any sort of a substitute for that. In fact you can’t have any of those things if you’re working in exploitative conditions.
However, once a fair salary is paid, and conditions are reasonable, these things become important – both for improving quality of life for employees and also – from an employers perspective – in achieving the best possible productivity.
Wow, some great contributions to this and for what – in truth – was something I thought might be more of a throw away post.
One small thought. A lot, an awful lot, depends on the nature of the area/sector of work in relation to autonomy (something that’s close to my heart as an area of research too). Obviously in some contexts results oriented work practices can be good, in others it can be deeply and profoundly negative.
I also wonder about work and happiness. I don’t know what the experience of most people is, but I wonder how broad the sense of loving their work is. A lot of work is mundane, repetitive, predictable, boring really. And of course there are lots of jobs which are actually grim. I wonder about how new work practices impinge on them.
That said there are workplaces where they work well and people can easily integrate them.
One other thing there of course is about the democratisation of the workplace as mentioned above. That’s definitely a related area.