Telecommuting: Engaged or Not?

In today's 24/7 global economy, telecommuting makes sense when done well.

Today, executives are schooled and coached in setting up ways to gauge the productivity of people they rarely see.  However, managers are beginning to question this work-from-anywhere by asking: Are the telecommuters working remotely...or...remotely working?  In this world of collaborating across continents and carrying the office around in our palms, companies are grappling with how to best manage telecommuters.  The most important ingredient in making telecommuting work is the combination of "trust but verify."

Most have concluded that all telecommuters need some face time to be actively engaged within the corporate culture.  Researchers at IBM learned that if teams went more than three days without gathering, their happiness and productivity suffered.  Now managers are required to bring teams together at least once every three days--physically or virtually--for reasons that have nothing to do with completing an assignment.

The Gallup Organization estimates "actively disengaged" employees---those fundamentally disconnected from their jobs---cost the U.S. economy between $292 billion and $355 billion a year. 

The estimates are based on a Gallup "Q¹²" employee engagement survey of the U.S. workforce, which found 24.7 million workers, or 19%, are actively disengaged.

Gallup's research for its management consulting clients consistently shows that actively disengaged workers tend to be significantly less productive, report being less loyal to their companies, are less satisfied with their personal lives, and are more stressed and insecure about their work than their colleagues.

The national Q¹² survey found that actively disengaged workers miss an average of 3.5 more days per year than other workers do, or 86.5 million days in all.  And when they show up for work, they may spend most of their energy surfing the Internet rather than working; for example, 15% of Facebook users admit to poking around the site all day while at work.

Gallup developed a proprietary formula for measuring the level of employee engagement from the information in its database, which contains survey results and performance data from its consulting work with clients around the world.  Gallup's employee engagement consulting practice has surveyed more than 1.5 million employees at more than 87,000 divisions or work units.