Tele-working: a mixed bag?

Some ten years ago, research indicates that every fifth employee in the world was using the option of working from home in some capacity. Now the pandemic has hastened the trend towards tele-working or remote working, and the number is expected to have increased significantly. Faced with mobility restrictions due to pandemic, leading employers suddenly found tele-working as the only viable option left to ensure business continuity. The perception that employees are more satisfied working from home and hence more productive also aided and abetted the move towards tele-working.

Be that as it may, tele-working remains an under-researched topic in the domains of management and organizational development. The urgency to perform a rigorous empirical analysis of pros and cons is missing. After all, those fortunate enough to keep their jobs in the pandemic and are allowed to work from home are enjoying the fruits of remote working. They don’t have to suffer long drives or commutes to work; they now have more time with families; they can spend less on personal grooming, professional attire and other costs associated with showing up at work; they can enjoy home-cooked meals at lunch; and much more. The employers, meanwhile, can save on some real estate and administrative overheads.

But tele-working is a more complex phenomenon than the initial favorable experience of employees or employers may suggest. There are several issues concerning work-life balance, teamwork and communication, workforce performance and employer obligations that require in-depth, longitudinal research in the context of “future of work”. One hopes that academia and corporate sector in Pakistan will take the lead in addressing some of the questions that have arisen.

For instance, what can be those fair and transparent metrics to assess the productivity of remote employees, given that not everyone is a self-starter or follows self-discipline to manage working from where they live? How can remote employees be trained to better manage “distractions” at home and follow a regimen to assign time for work and chore? Technology has enabled remote collaboration, but what are the hiccups in dissemination of adequate information so that employees can perform their work well when they are not at office?

Cut off from colleagues, how can organizations ensure effective employee communication and fulfill the need for some productive form of informal interaction among employees? What are the SOPs to make virtual meetings effective and keep them from becoming a bane of one’s existence? What can be the new codes for “professionalism” or work-etiquette in a home-based work setting? What are the tools to ensure that deadlines are followed and feedback addressed on time? Plucked away from the head office or regional offices, how will remote employees rely on their supervisor’s support and executive guidance?

How will tele-working affect training & development needs of remote employees and how will they access such programs? Come appraisal time, how will remote employees be evaluated compared to on-site employees? In the long run, does tele-working diminish career progression given the distance from workplace and professional networks? Perhaps most important of all, as workers are detached from workplace and if on top of it they also feel isolated at home, what happens to their mental health and who is responsible for it?

The need to answer such research questions is also important because tele-working may be affecting different demographics in unique ways, so there may not be one definitive, universal answer as to whether tele-working is good or bad. For instance, male employees may have a different experience of tele-working than female employees, a manifestation of blurred lines between roles at work and home. Similarly, the tech-savvy younger age cohorts may have a different way to cope with the demands of tele-working than the older generations. Besides, the benefits and challenges of tele-working may be felt differently by people working in services sectors than, say, employees in the industrial sectors.

Given there is no known, prominent backlash against tele-working at the moment, it would appear that tele-working is working, both for employees and employers. But a time will come when unforeseen stresses may build up in the system and affect employee morale and business outcomes. There is a global need to study this phenomenon, its good and not so good aspects, in a holistic manner, to suggest what intensity and frequency of tele-working may work for key demographics across different sectors.