Company draws workers back to office, citing collaboration, ideation
As remote work continues to increase in popularity among office workers, technology giant IBM recently announced a move that appears to go against the grain.
Calling it an effort to boost collaboration and ideation results, IBM is drawing portions of its staff back into the office. In February, more than 2,600 employees were informed they would need to return to state-of-the-art office space in one of six U.S. cities, according to Quartz, a global news website.
Once a remote-work pioneer, 40 per cent of IBM’s 386,000 global staffers worked from home as recently as 2009, according to Quartz.
IBM employees will continue to work in a variety of workspaces going forward, said Carrie Bendzsa, the company’s Canadian brand manager in Ottawa, adding Canadian workers are not affected by the change.
“Because of the nature of their work, in certain cases, it makes sense to have teams together in order to collaborate more effectively and accelerate the iteration of products or services,” she said, pointing to sectors such as digital marketing and software development.
“In these fields, professionals with different skill sets can come together and develop and iterate new services much more rapidly than via traditional assembly-line work processes where work is handed from one team member to another. We also see that employees in these fields who work in agile, co-located environments have much higher job satisfaction.”
Focus on collaboration
The drawing in of workers is a hot topic in the tech industry, according to Leslie Sarauer, senior vice-president of human resources at software company OpenText in Waterloo, Ont.
For companies growing globally through acquisition, telecommuting can prove to be more difficult. And when it comes to tech developers and engineering teams, it’s helpful to have those teams working together as opposed to remotely, she said.
“It becomes more challenging to coalesce people under a common culture and common way of doing work, and collaboration is much more challenging,” said Sarauer. “Our collaboration is more effective if people are co-located in the same office in working teams.”
“It’s not to say we don’t have to have collaboration and innovation amongst other teams, but it is pretty critical amongst the engineering team.”
IBM’s decision comes at a time when remote work is at an all-time high, said Wayne Berger, executive vice-president of Regus Canada, a flexible workplace provider based in Toronto — 47 per cent of Canadians work from outside the office for half the week or more, according to a September Regus survey of 1,600 office workers.
Fifty-four per cent of those working remotely do so to remain productive while travelling to and from meetings within the same city. And 16 per cent of remote employees prefer working in business centres, while 11 per cent work exclusively out of the home.
Remote work is said to boost productivity through improved work-life balance and the ability to skip long commutes, but it also holds financial benefits for employers, said Berger.
“One of the reasons why IBM pursued this remote workforce strategy was to help alleviate capital expense,” he said. “They realized US$100 million in savings just on the real estate portfolio alone.”
And IBM isn’t pulling its workers back to a traditional office setting lined with cubicles, but rather a work environment attempting to inspire collaboration, teamwork, innovation and new ideas, said Berger.
It’s a sign that the greater trend to flexible working environments is the way of the future, he said.
“We’re in a renaissance period,” said Berger. “We’re more driven towards a results-based society and technology has become such a key enabler.”
Advice for HR
Despite IBM’s decision, all signs point to more remote workers in the future, with 60 per cent of Fortune 500 companies implementing a flexwork strategy of some type, said Berger.
“No doubt, the trend is to more of an open, collaborative workspace or ecosystems with multiple types of space,” he said. “You have to make sure you provide a multitude of solutions, technology and workplace types in order for people to get their job done.”
A rise in contingent work is increasing the need for shared office spaces with open, private and meeting areas, accessible based on need, said Berger.
Sixty-five per cent of workers in Canada place an emphasis on flexwork when job searching, said Berger.
“If a company is looking to attract and retain their top talent, having a strong, flexible workforce management strategy is paramount.”
Remote work will continue to evolve over the next few years thanks to increased pressure from millennial workers seeking flex options, said Sarauer.
“It is putting a lot of pressure on organizations to review how they’re asking people to work.”
And while collaboration and ideation are the current focus of many companies, so is the recruitment and retention of key employee talent.
“It’s a constant balancing act because as much as we want to have the talent working together in teams, that might preclude us in being able to attract certain individuals into the organization,” said Sarauer. “I know a lot of people like to work remotely because they can avoid commuting and everything else.”
For HR professionals required to restrict remote work arrangements, leadership support is paramount, she said.
“This can’t be HR-driven,” said Sarauer. “HR helps with the change and the implementation, but it needs to be driven from the business.”
Additionally, remote work may not be as widespread as people believe, she said. Remote work is irrelevant in the manufacturing and retail sectors, for instance.
“It’s mainly a North American issue,” said Sarauer. “People in other parts of the world like Europe and Asia are a lot more comfortable with the concept of office-based work.”
SIDEBAR
Pros and cons of remote work
While remote work can improve work-life balance, reduce commuting time and boost productivity, it can also result in longer working hours, higher work intensity and work-home interference, according to Working Anytime, Anywhere: The Effects on the World of Work, a joint report released in February by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions in Dublin and the International Labour Office (ILO) in Geneva, based on the findings of data and research literature in 10 European countries.
The findings are, therefore, “highly ambiguous,” said the report, and are related to the interaction between the use of telework, the place of work in specific work environments, the blurring of work-life boundaries, and the characteristics of different occupations. Moreover, whether telework substitutes for work in the office or supplements it appears to be an important factor.
“Partial and occasional forms of telework appear to result in a more positive balance between its benefits and drawbacks,” said Jon Messenger, team leader of the ILO’s working conditions group and co-author of the report. “It seems unlikely that telework will, or should, completely replace work in the office in most organizations, but instead its use on a part-time basis will continue to expand over time.”
Technological advances and workers’ increased desire for control continue to be the driving factors supporting remote work, said the report, while organizational cultures and managerial attitudes continue to slow the adoption of such arrangements.
