Recruit and Retain Valuable Talent:
Offer Telecommuting - and Make it Work

09/05/08

Many companies overlook—or even resist—a key method of attracting new talent and retaining good employees, according to Nadine Mockler, president of Connecticut based staffing and consulting firm Flexible Resources, Inc. Mockler’s advice: Offer the option of flexible work arrangements like reduced hours, job sharing, and, especially, telecommuting.

“There are a lot of people out there, especially professionals, who are looking to work on their own terms—something different than the traditional nine-to-five.” With the labor market for professionals “incredibly tight,” she adds, “why not give flexibility a try?”

The trend toward flexibility is especially useful in retaining valuable employees. “Say you have somebody’s who been working for you for five years and her mother suddenly needs to go to a clinic three mornings a week. She asks if she can work from home those days. It makes sense to accommodate that schedule and hang on to her instead of incurring the expense of rehiring and retraining.”

Telecommuting Done Better
Here are some of Mockler’s tips for making sure telecommuting arrangements are win-win for all involved:

Equip the home office. Mockler finds that most people who want to work from home take responsibility for getting as close to a real office environment as they can. Most, for example, have a computer.

Yet an employer should be ready to provide a fax machine or Internet connection. “A company,” says Mockler, “should do whatever it takes to help an employee be most productive.”

Make sure it’s a “real” office. Home offices should be real offices, even to the point of having a door to ensure privacy. “You can’t have children running around,” she says. “You need a private place where you can talk.”

And make sure potential at home workers understand that telecommuting isn’t a substitute for having reliable childcare. Mockler says flatly: “If children are home while telecommuters are, they need a nanny.”

Set ground rules. The biggest mistake employers make is in not setting ground rules for the telecommuting arrangement. “If you don’t set ground rules, you will sabotage the arrangement before it starts,” maintains Mockler.

Every arrangement is unique, depending on the nature of the job. In setting up ground rules, therefore, “concentrate on the flow of communication when the employee will be at his desk, whether he’ll carry a beeper or cell phone when he’s not, how often he’ll check his e-mail or voice mail, how often and when he’ll check in with others.”

You can anticipate some of the issues you need to address by simulating the experience. That’s just what Merrill Lynch does, according to Mockler. “It has a home-office simulator in one of its New Jersey work sites. People considering telecommuting spend two weeks there working out the kinks.”Both sides need to be flexible in crafting the ground rules. But once an agreement is set, both sides need to abide by it. That’s why it’s important to put it in writing. “An employee may have a new boss in a year or two,” says Mockler. “That person needs to know exactly what arrangements have been made.”

Telecommuting Productivity
Unlike other fans of telecommuting, Mockler doesn’t make extravagant claims for improvements in productivity. “It’s hard to put a number on productivity for telecommuters. People aren’t manufacturing widgets at home. The work is more intangible.”

But Flexible Resources surveyed fifty of its client companies not long ago, finding that every respondent agreed that employees working a flexible schedule “are as productive or more productive” than those working traditional schedules.