Remote Control
pharmafile | July 9, 2007 | Feature | Business Services |Â Â home working, recruitment, remote workingÂ
Vorsprung durch technik? Technological advances have allowed employees to spend increasing amounts of time working remotely away from the office. This change has been critical for advancement in the healthcare sector, which now demands a truly global workforce with employees spending an increasingly shorter time in one single office.
Research and experience from occupational psychologists Pearn Kandola warn that technological advances alone do not spell progress. As the tale of the sorcerer's apprentice suggests, new technology needs to be fully understood, if it is to provide benefit.
Many of the challenges faced by employees working remotely are more to do with the human condition than with technological constraints. The absence of employees from the office, facilitated by blackberries and wi-fi, can impact on communication, group cohesion and, ultimately, on the productivity of a team.
Furthermore, mobile working can lead to feelings of isolation, and disconnection from colleagues and, ultimately, the company as a whole. Therefore, it is important that mobile working is carefully managed and not thought of solely as a challenge for the IT department.
Communication breakdown
Periods away from the office, without face-to-face contact with colleagues, can lead to feelings of frustration and mistrust. Impersonal forms of communication, such as email and voicemail, cannot be relied on to bridge the gap between the office and the plane. Trust is more difficult to develop from a distance, when opportunities for social interaction in the lift or over a coffee in the kitchen are reduced.
There is also the risk that not all team members are kept up-to-date on news and progress when they are working remotely. Contrary to the popular saying, absence can, in fact, make the heart grow fungus and people can be forgotten if they are constantly away from the office; and experience shows misunderstandings occur more often in teams when some members are only infrequently in the office because there is little opportunity for face-to-face meetings.
A number of issues need to be addressed in managing mobile working effectively. Paradoxically, some of these issues in addition to the challenges mentioned above arise from the very technology which enables mobile working in the first place.
Let me tell you a story to illustrate a worst-case situation arising from mobile working, which taps into many of the themes and challenges raised so far. In a major organisation, a decision was taken at senior level to shut down one particular advisory unit, the members of which worked remotely, travelling the country and internationally.
It was decided that email was the quickest way to pass on the bad news, although suitable information was provided to allow people to contact their remote manager to discuss the options. Unfortunately, one member of the team was on holiday, and he was back at work for three weeks before he (or anyone else) realised that his job no longer existed. The organisation was too embarrassed to admit its mistake and so he stayed in his post for several more months before he was moved sideways; evidence, if any were needed, that remote working can mean out of site, out of mind.
Pearn Kandola's own research points to the fact that a failure to establish protocols and ground rules for remote communication can create major headaches, particularly in terms of employee engagement, perceptions of trust and efficiency of communication. In the jargon of the times, CMC (computer mediated communication) allows for a mobile workforce, but provides significant challenges when compared to F2F (face-to-face) working.
Emails don't emote
So, what are the signs that all is not well in your technologically enabled remote teams? One of the most important is minimal conversation syndrome – i.e. less is not always more.
Thousands of years of evolution have honed our capacity to judge and evaluate each other based on subtle, non-verbal cues, as well as the raw data content of what we say. In addition, a whole range of social context cues are missing from CMC making it much harder to assess the worth and importance of a given communication. The risk is that CMC with remote teams becomes one-dimensional and task-orientated rather than rich and meaningful.
Think about the challenges of motivating, enthusing and engaging others when information about tone, context, personal commitment and enthusiasm are largely removed from the communication mix: a bit like talking to Mr Spock when you want to be talking to Dr McCoy. Emails tend not to emote.
Research suggests that anything up to 60% of face-to-face communication is non-verbal; this implies that you would need to add an awful lot of smileys to your texts or emails in order to create the richness of a F2F encounter.
The research also suggests that communicating with mobile workers via CMC can take up to four times as long to exchange the same number of messages as in face-to-face conversation. This is in conflict to the conventional perception that email is faster and timelier. It can feel faster to send an email, rather than pick up the phone or organise a meeting, but in reality, the quality and quantity of information exchanged is likely to suffer.
Co-operation and conflict
Research shows that co-operative activity is highly dependent on trust and the visibility of each team members contribution. There is a risk this can be compromised in mobile workforces where the opportunities to naturally monitor each other's contribution are limited.
A danger is that any lack of trust can lead to an unwieldy reliance on formal monitoring and compliance processes, sometimes to the point of work duplication and proliferating bureaucracy. This, in turn, can lead to defensive behaviours designed to manage the system rather than to achieve commercial objectives. The good news is that even though it takes longer, trust does develop among members of remote teams.
As co-operation is harder to achieve in mobile and remote teams, perhaps it is not surprising that these types of workers experience more conflict than do their F2F colleagues. For reasons already described relating to context and the lack of non-verbal cues, misunderstandings arise more easily and take longer to resolve.
Weaker interpersonal bonds and the lack of a shared history and track record mean that remote team members are more prone to misjudging the reasons for others' behaviour and leaping to conclusions about their intentions. I know of one whole team who resigned and defected to a rival because of one too many red, underlined emails. Confusion and misunderstanding that could be relatively easy to resolve through a face-to-face meeting can fester and turn into conflict in the empathy-light world of the remote worker and their fact-rich, but engagement-poor, emails.
Minimise the negative, accentuate the positive
Do you recognise any of the above as symptomatic of any of your teams? Many of these issues arise because we are programmed to relate face-to-face and to draw rich meaning from verbal, but not textual, information. For example, no one had to teach you to speak or understand your native language; you picked it up naturally because your brain is wired to do so. On the other hand, you probably had to work quite hard to learn to read and write because this brain hardware did not come bundled in the package you were born with. Solutions come from recognising this distinction and working to manage it.
While there is no universal panacea to the challenge of communication and mobile working, our research shows that there are steps we can take to minimise the potential negative impact of remote working and, indeed, turn it to our advantage.
Remote teams and dispersed workforces are a fact of life in the pharmaceutical world. Globalisation and mergers add the challenges of trying to align different national and corporate cultures to the challenges we have already described – all the more reason then, to ensure that we manage communication with remote teams thoughtfully.
We might work in a strange land, but we can't afford to be strangers.
Ceri Roderick is Partner and Head of Assessment at Pearn Kandola -occupational psychologists.
For more information, visit the website: www.pearnkandola.com
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