http://billbennett.co.nz/2009/06/20/businessweek-columnist-defines-knowledge-worker

“Knowledge workers can be defined as people who know more about what they are doing than their managers do.”

For others who are interested I did a roundup post on remote working a while back:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2009/06/17/a-review-on-teleworking-telecommuting-distributed-work/

We’re supporting the new workplace of the future for business owners, entrepreneurs, freelancers, and other mobile professionals. I’d like to extend the definition of organizations to include groups and communities. Culture is just as important to groups of entrepreneurs or biz owners as it is to the enterprise organization.

Great article and great work by IBM.

On the travel front – the most complex project I was involved with had folks from a major corp based in St Louis, a Canadian Provincial Ag dept and growers and scientists in Ukraine. We would all go to Kiev every 6 weeks for a week. We would put in 12 hours days formally and then spend most of the night with each other – it was intense. We all came from very different cultures and organizations but we came as close a soldiers in combat. It was the best work experience of my life – because of the shared pressure and presence. Very different from going to the office. We knew everything about all of us.

Currently I work for the Public Tv station in St Louis – funny how STL plays a role in my life. I have been working with them for 4 years now. At first I would visit 4 times a year. Again when I was there there was the day at the office but every night I was out with the team for very long periods. The social was key. Now for years later I go down 2 times a year. The key is to lay the foundations – then you can cut back. We talk formally for 2 hours a week and DM and IM each other all the time in the interim. The bond is there.

So that maybe is the main pointy about the travel and the costs – the bond has to be made – so make it in the first year – then you can reduce that. Make sure that when you do meet that there is still plenty of social time.

On the performance question – we can always hide form the boss but not from our peers – that is the point here. We make promises to be there for each other. We push back when others don’t meet their commitments.

Critical is to set the right context – too detailed a plan does not take into account the natural complexity of life. Many of us are working now at the limits of what we know and can understand – so with the right context, like jazz, we can collectively improvise.

For instance at KETC we are co creating a new blended model of TV Broadcast (a 4 part doc om Immigration) and a community engagement online and in person process on the same topic. This has never been done before. It has been a huge struggle but we have spent a lot of time on the WHY and the what is going on – now I am seeing people naturally starting to bring their part to the whole. It has taken months and there has been a lot of pain along the way. But we are starting to see not only our own part but how others have to help us.

I see that I am not answering your question very clearly – but this is naturally messy – there has to be more than a project manager cracking the whip. Real trust has to be created in the team – this means that in the end we have to expose ourselves – this is not normal in the office where we pretend to know it all as a norm.

In closing I always go back to war. In reality on the battlefield small groups of men get to know each other better than they ever know their wives or family – the shared experience – they then can help each other in ways that never happen in the conventional workplace. They have to – they depend utterly on each other. People who canot be trusted get excluded.

Why can’t we create this at work? Why should we not seek to create this bond?

But to do that we need to know each other more completely. We need to also take big risks with each other.

“But to Jay’s point, I actually don’t travel constantly to the US to meet my colleagues; at the moment it’s happening once or twice a year, and usually coinciding with an additional activity / event. So at the beginning of the year we all travelled to Orlando to attend IBM’s Lotusphere event and in a couple of weeks we will all be travelling to Boston to attend (And present!) at the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

So those face to face events serve the purpose for us to meet up and make the most out of the time together while still socialising with other folks. I’d think that if we didn’t get to travel twice a year, like at the moment, I feel that we would be probably meeting once a year and it would be a good start. Mind you, in a previous project I was working with another business unit I spent 2.5 years working on it and I never got meet my immediate colleagues or my boss. Still, with the usage of collaboration, knowledge sharing and social software tools we were capable of communicating and collaborating effectively knowing what was happening all along”.

If you would want further details, get in touch offline, and we will discuss a few other options that you may want to explore further. More than happy to share how some of the virtual teams and communities that I have worked with in the past have managed to improve those virtual relationships. Let me know what you think…

With regards to the second point, I think it is crucial that businesses start to understand that they have got a huge amount of talent that they are not using, just because they haven’t decided to invest enough trust in them. In my opinion, is all about trusting your employees to do the right thing, more than anything else because they were hired to be professionals in the first place. Amazingly enough is all about to treat them like that, and, as such, businesses need to start letting command-and-control go and instead provide a new kind of leadership, one way they facilitate more than mandate.

I mean, don’t you think that those knowledge workers will be the very first ones interested in having that flexibility at work and deliver those results than the businesses themselves? Don’t you think that they would want to keep that situation going for as long as they can, and, as such, they would want to work really hard at it? I would think so! And the funny thing is that if they would want to goof around, they would do it anyway, even while they are at the office: i.e. coffee breaks, water cooler conversations, lunch, private phone calls, emails, longer periods of inactivity, etc. etc. But like I said, if they would want slack off they would eventually do so. I think it is much more important to figure out the reasons why they are not motivated and engaged at work in the first place, but that’s probably the subject for another entire discussion.

Thanks again for the great feedback!

Like I said and stated above, there are multiple jobs and roles at such a large corporation as IBM is, like any other large enterprise, and I can imagine that the context for those roles is different from one business unit to another, as well as from one country to another. Not to mention the different geographies. Not everyone inside IBM works remotely; just the same as not everyone works from a physical office either. In that interview with Rob, which is not IBM propaganda, by the way, at least, it was not mean to be when we got together in the first place (More of a blogger to blogger interview on working remotely / virtually and sharing that experience…), what we brought together was a working style that is becoming more and more prevalent in corporations nowadays, one where people are no longer working on projects co-located, but more and more distributed as organizations become now more global than ever.

Such working methods require the good and extensive use of collaborative, knowledge sharing and social computing tools that we have got available nowadays at our fingertips and the idea was to detail what that experience would be like for an employee like myself, who happens to work on such virtual environment and not in a physical office, just like a good % of other IBM remote workers. Does that represent the entire population? Definitely not! Like I said, there would be projects out there who would require co-location of those knowledge workers. But there would be plenty of others as well that wouldn’t. And it is those latter ones the ones I wanted to share my personal experiences about with that interview that Rob captured so nicely. Because that’s the NEW IBM I have been working at over the last few years. Would be interested to know some more whether you ever had an opportunity to work remotely while inside IBM and whether you could share your experiences on this blog post on the pros and cons to add further up into the conversation. Could you share some additional thoughts whenever you would have a chance? That would be great! Many thanks!

Does this mean that IBM has to regularly fly Luis from the Canary Islands to the U.S.?

I’m very curious because my company tried recently to create cross-national teams, and the human integration was extremely difficult. I’d welcome any advice on how to bridge this gap without incurring large travel expenses.

Secondly, some expansion on the point about “uncoupling physical presence from performance evaluation” would also be appreciated. Sometimes this seems like the Holy Grail of management in my own software development industry where productivity measures can be painfully elusive. How do you prevent a team member from slacking and letting his teammmates carry him? How can you tell if you’re pushing your team hard enough but not too hard? Even decoupling performance from physical presence, it would seem that a Time Billing system that at least counts man-hours is a necessary evil.

I’d welcome your reply.

The reason for this is that there is a calculus applied wherein an assumption is reached regarding how many currently remote employees will not accept the mandate to come into a delivery center, and will effectively be terminated for non-compliance. This goes into the expense take out calculations that senior management engages in, as they will replace these people with fewer head count, at lower salary rates.

Why would this work in IBM’s favor? They are working toward a delivery model that is a majority of lower paid workers (and a much larger percentage of contractors who routinely receive salary cuts – like clockwork each year), who receive direction from a smaller and smaller number of senior technical staff. Many of the senior tech folks have been remote for years. If someone refuses the mandate to relocate to a physical delivery center, they have effectively resigned and do not need to be given a fully-funded severance package (in the US – employment is “at-will”).

Does this work? I can personally attest that it does in fact work. How do I know? I was involved in many planning processes and discussions as a senior staff member and was personally involved in making decisions about who was on the list for relocation. We saw a better than 40% voluntary attrition rate on some teams. Why does it work? The way this always goes down is you are given notice by your manager that you must sign an agreement to join the delivery center, often in another state (for US based employees) and stay a minimum of 1 year. You are given 1 week to decide and usually 30-60 days to relocate at your expense. If you refuse you are considered to have resigned. How many families would jump at that? – to pull up stakes, move your kids to a new school etc, on ridiculously short notice to go work in a co-location facility that resembles a call center (no walls, strict daily meeting schedules like shift workers, etc.). And before someone suggests that this applies to low-level staff, please don’t. This applies to senior technical staff as well, including Bands 9 and 10.

This is NOT some old version of IBM – I left there in late 2009, after over 10 years with the company. I was a Senior IT Architect in good standing with the company and responsible for delivery architecture (along with 2 colleagues on the architecture team) for 25 physical datacenter locations across the globe. I left because I could not stand the business practices of the NEW IBM. That and the fact that the amount of stress was through the roof, as the higher percentage of lower-skilled staff meant more critical accounts, etc.

The propaganda that IBM puts out about new workplace, etc., is just that – propaganda. They are doing nothing short of turning Global Services into a body shop, to be staffed by the lowest bidders. If this model hasn’t hit your particular business unit yet, you can bet your paycheck (quite literally) that it is coming to your unit too – it’s just a matter of time. And on top of everything, quality is suffering – as silently as they can keep it – and those who remain are being worked harder than ever, as they are forced to support a younger and lesser-skilled IBM.

There may well be pockets of teams where, due to their specific working conditions they may need to still rely on the premise of the traditional office environment, but I can assure you it is not as aggressive and restricted as you have shared above and, if that is the case, I would love to know more about it, so it can be addressed accordingly. Would you have a few minutes to comment over here, or contact me offline, to discuss such statements you mentioned above? Like I said, I’m more than happy to find out more. Coincidentally, just this morning, while in Madrid, I had a meeting with an exec running one of those “delivery centers” and the way you describe them is by far the experience I heard from that exec. Would you be willing to share some more details, please? Many thanks for the feedback comments!

Thomas Stewart once shared this quote: “A knowledge worker is someone who gets to decide what he or she does each morning”; and it’s never been so accurate nowadays with the emerging of the Social Web. Many thanks for this fantastic piece of writing! Greatly appreciated!