Virtual reality

11 Jun 12
Armed with a laptop or smart phone, today’s public sector workers do not have to be tied to the physical office. This throws up some challenges for managers

By John Thornton | 1 June 2012

Armed with a laptop or smart phone, today’s public sector workers do not have to be tied to the physical office. This throws up some challenges for managers

Smart_Thinking, Illustration: Angus Greig

More than 3.8 million people in the UK work from their home or use it as a base. This represents 13% of the country’s total workforce and is a 24% increase over the past decade. Today’s technology means that anyone with a laptop or smart phone can move easily between home, office and remote sites, keeping up to date and getting down to serious work in between meetings, wherever they happen to be. 

There are, of course, issues about security and confidentiality, particularly when coffee shops and hotel lobbies provide your sources of free or cheap access to Wi-Fi networks. But these are not insurmountable. The biggest barriers to expansion of this type of working are usually cultural.

Many of us still have deep in our minds models of management that are based on a set place of work and the classic command-and-control approach. Many managers still try to judge performance by hours spent in the office rather than by outputs achieved. Similarly, employees often struggle to adjust to an environment where they don’t have their own designated desk and have more flexible working hours and environments.

The advantages of remote and flexible working for organisations can be huge. They include dramatic reductions in the costs of office space, heating, power and light, plus reductions in ‘lost’ time spent travelling and returning to the office to write up notes and collect files. 

For the employee, it can mean greater domestic flexibility, reduced commuting and more control over their work/life balance. However, it can also mean that they are never out of contact and feel under constant pressure to take calls and answer e-mails.  

Twenty-first century managers need different skill sets. Increasingly, they are required to manage virtual or semi-virtual teams, with team members often working in different locations. They might also be managing staff for whom they do not hold direct line responsibility and who might not even work for the same organisation. 

One of the challenges in this environment is keeping staff informed, engaged and productive. They need to know what has to be done and how much freedom they have to decide how to do it. They need to feel that they are supported and that they have influence and impact. Equally, you cannot have people who are just coasting. You need to be able to deal with poor performance as well as encouraging outstanding performance. 

These are basic components of managing any team or business unit, but they are even more important in a virtual environment where axiomatically they are more difficult to achieve. Managers need to take full advantage of collaboration tools such as web conferencing and mechanisms for virtual networking. They also need to recognise that human interaction is still important, as face-to-face contact with your colleagues on a regular basis makes a huge difference to how you feel about your job and team responsibilities.

Over the next few years we can expect the public services to become more fragmented and fluid. As we move further into the realms of partnership working, collaboration and shared services, we will need to develop more flexible management models and new conceptual models. 

We will need to shift our thinking away from ‘command and control’ to ‘co-ordinate and cultivate’. While there are still basic control functions to be performed, finance is increasingly more about ‘facilitating’ than ‘controlling’. Co-ordinating and cultivating are not the opposites of commanding and controlling; they are complementary approaches that often need to operate side-by-side, even if at first they appear to form uneasy bedfellows.

So have you got what it takes to be an effective twenty-first century manager?

John Thornton is a director of e-ssential Resources, and an independent adviser and writer on business transformation, financial management and innovation

This article first appeared in the June edition of Public Finance

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