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Flex Your Force: Building the Virtual Office
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Q: How do you define Open Work? A: Open Work is an integrated work environment that brings together the technology, workspace and organizational enablers to support a 21st century workforce. It's about choices for individuals, managers, and workgroups that take advantage of virtual collaboration, distance collaboration, and global reach while opening the doors to intellectual capital that otherwise might not be available given proximity constraints. It's about an expansion of choices for work style. Q: What does an Open Work environment look like? A: There is no standard blueprint. Think of Open Work as an integrated network of people, places, and technologies that are systemically linked to meet the requirements of the task at hand. Physically, it could look like a home-office or drop-in facility on the residential side of a commute, or a main campus that we would call a hub. There can be drop-in centers, team spaces, or Open Work cafes.
The historical office with open cubes or lines of closed desks is becoming occupied less and less. Nowadays, when people come into offices, they do so to be with other people, not to sit in an office by themselves. Q: What benefits does it offer? A: Benefits are varied. Within the enterprise, Open Work affords a significant opportunity to accomplish massive cuts in operating and capital expenses, significant enhancements to the employee value proposition, greater insulation against business disruptions (man-made or natural) and can be a significant component of the triple bottom line — corporate, social, and environmental responsibility. For the manager, it allows broader access to talent and the ability to focus on business results that are not necessarily time-clocked. Employees can improve work/life balance and can finally have an integrated work environment that matches their work requirements as opposed to the way their grandparents used to work. Lastly, for the community and the environment, people are spending dramatically less time commuting which has a significant impact on CO2 emissions, greenhouse gases, traffic congestion, and public infrastructure. Q: What about cost savings? A: They are twofold. First, let's look at the enterprise savings. We've calculated a savings of about $70 million a year, which is the cost containment from the savings in real estate that we would have otherwise built or leased. We are also tracking around $24 million a year in IT savings through our deployment of Sun Ray ultra thin clients.
Second, there is a direct cost savings to employees when it comes to dollars saved. The typical "open worker" saves approximately $2,000 a year in fuel and maintenance and is able to cut their commute time by 160 hours a year. Less time in their cars and less time on the road translates into a reduction in more than two metric tons of CO2 per open worker per year. Q: What are some of the issues created by an Open Work environment and how should they be managed? A: There are side effects to plan for. Most organizations immediately understand the physical and technology components. But the softer side, namely the organizational infrastructure, is where we see most efforts come off the rails — particularly in the area of managing a distributed or remote workforce. Performance management, goal setting, all the things that are directly related to good leadership become more obvious when you don't see people on a daily basis. Once you take out the convenience of seeing people, you shine a light on those management skills typically required in a knowledge-based world — management by objectives and results and not process. Managing by results versus monitoring becomes very important. For those work practices where monitoring is either required for the work or preferred by the manager, this is difficult. For the most part, knowledge work is not well suited for "management by presenteeism" anyway. The world is moving in this direction whether we like it or not. We need to make sure that we give our managers the tools, technologies, and know-how to effectively lead in the 21st century. Q: How do the roles of manager and employee change? A: One of the principal differences is that the focus is on results as opposed to management by line of sight. This operational model requires clear and consistent communications — not only between the manager and his or her employees, but connection between the team members as well. If people become distributed and mobile, they will be required to pay closer attention to the social connectivity and affiliation elements of work-life. We believe that the next generation of employees is going to have expectations around this, because they are growing up with instant messaging (IM), blogging, and wikis as primary communications channels. Q: What technologies are requisite to make this work? A: There is a small core set of technologies that are the simple must-haves for any organization moving into this space. The most important is direct and secure access to critical network-based applications. Online document management synchronization, asynchronous collaboration technology, robust enterprise identity and access management, and telephony are the current handful of must-haves. Leading companies are also taking a hard look at leveraging social networking and community affiliation technologies to bridge the time/space gap, examples being Ning, Facebook, and Twitter. Q: How is this concept spreading? A: There's a perfect storm brewing that is forcing large organizations to consider alternative work environment models. We are seeing four to five macro-level trends that are forcing medium and large organizations from every sector to take a hard look at this. Those trends are escalating real estate costs, recruiting and retaining people, business continuity and pandemic planning, eco-responsibility, and information security. These drivers are causing people to look at alternative work environments.
Q: How do you see this evolving in the next two to five years? A: Looking specifically at the next two to five years, we are projecting massive scale in workforce mobility with a huge upswing in the attention that private and public sector employees pay to this topic. In the U.S. domestic market alone, there are approximately 60 million knowledge workers who would be well suited to operate in an Open Work environment. However, fewer than five million are supported by a formal strategic program. The remaining 55 million are becoming more distributed on a daily basis, but being unsupported, they have unprotected, sensitive information with them. If they are running around with mobile phones that nobody is supporting or managing, how do you protect the enterprise IP? In my opinion, those enterprises that are willing to take a hard look at what technology has enabled in merely the last 10 years will realize that even more will occur over the next five. GenY employees will come into the workforce with better tech savvy than many managers have today — they will be able to communicate and network in virtual ways we haven't begun to address. It is time to choose Open Work as a reality. About Ann Bamesberger | ||||
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Connecting knowledge workers and managers through both technology and social practices is a management imperative of the new millennium. Sun Vice President of Open Work Services Ann Bamesberger shares with Sun Executive Boardroom readers ways in which today's managers can help their teams work effectively across distance and time.