Teleworking in the office
I have spent a large proportion of my career working in scattered teams, and teleworking made almost no difference.
It's all very well talking about teamwork and the ability to interact in an office, but some teams are necessarily scattered - at one point a team I was a member of had members in all continents except Africa and Antarctica. Organising a team audioconference when people were located on the West coast of the USA, the East coast of the USA, the UK, continental Europe, the Middle East, India, Asia, Australia and Japan was a challenge in itself. I think we did it once. Even when confined to the UK, I worked in a team that had members in 5 offices, so all team meetings were audioconferences (we never got videoconferencing to work seamlessly).
Even if, when teleworking, I went into an office, there was no guarantee that all the people I needed to talk to were in the same office, the same campus, or even the same town. If you need to ring someone up, or send an email to interact with someone, what does it matter it you do it from an office or from home?
On the other hand, if you depend upon work for social interaction, then teleworking can get quite lonely. Also, if you are in a team where all the other members are confined in one office, and you are the teleworker, it can be tough to stay up to speed with things. You also need to work very hard on keeping good relationships going with people you need: it is very, very easy for them to ignore phone calls, instant messages, and emails from you. Despite these challenges, teleworking can be made to work if you (and others) are professional about it.
Some managers are happy with teleworking, and work to mitigate the disadvantages. For others, it is outside their comfort zone, and they don't feel in control unless they can see their team when they wish. Then again, a manager who thinks that a manager's job is team control is not ideal in my book: I've always thought that a manager's job is to remove the hurdles that are preventing a team from doing their jobs - I've probably been lucky enough to work (mostly) with teams of experienced individuals who could be trusted to get on with things.
It's probably another of these swinging pendulum policies: being in favour of teleworking, or not - just like the cyclical swings from centralisation to decentralisation and back again, segmenting an organisation to deal with markets with vertical 'silos' of resource or having horizontal resourcing structures; and other management fads. Unfortunately, such swinging pendulums ruin people's lives.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
