Virtual Management and the New Normal: New Perspectives on HRM and Leadership since the COVID-19 Pandemic

451 Pages·2023·9.224 MB·English

by  Svein Bergum, Pascale Peters, Tone Vold

Edited by
Svein Bergum · Pascale Peters · Tone Vold
Virtual Management
and the New Normal
New Perspectives on
HRM and Leadership
since the COVID-19
Pandemic
Virtual Management and the New Normal
“This is a timely and important book since responses to Covid-19 marked a
juncture in how human resources are managed, particularly where work is done.
It brings together an impressive set of contributions offering insights from
research conducted in public and private sector organisations across a number of
European countries. Its focus on what can be learned from experiences of remote
working during this time and resulting implications for future ways of working
in a post-lockdown world, means that it represents an invaluable resource for
researchers, policy makers and managers as organisations adjust to a new
normal.”
—Clare Kelliher, Professor of Work and Organisation, Cranfield School
of Management, Cranfield University, UK
“When the idea of ‘telecommuting’ was introduced 50 years ago, the notion that
people should be allowed and enabled to work remotely instead of travelling to
a traditional office seemed both obvious and far-fetched, as veteran telework
guru Jack Nilles outlines in his foreword to this excellent edited volume. Despite
tremendous advances in technology and work organisation, the fundamental
challenges surrounding remote working have hardly changed. What has changed,
however, is the wealth of knowledge that is now available to deal with these to
make virtual management both effective and beneficial for all, which is sum-
marized in this outstanding book.”
—Karsten Gareis, Senior Project Manager and Researcher,
empirica GmbH, Bonn, Germany
Svein Bergum • Pascale Peters
Tone Vold
Editors
Virtual Management
and the New Normal
New Perspectives on HRM and
Leadership since the COVID-19
Pandemic
Editors
Svein Bergum Pascale Peters
Inland Norway University of Applied Inland Norway University of
Sciences Applied Sciences
Lillehammer, Norway Breukelen, Norway
Tone Vold
Inland Norway University of Applied
Sciences
Rena, Norway
ISBN 978-3-031-06812-6 ISBN 978-3-031-06813-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06813-3
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Foreword
Jack M. Nilles, “the Father of Telecommuting”
Evolving Telework
The Beginning
In the 1960s and early 1970s—those were my rocket scientist days—I
often wondered how the technology we used for space could be applied
to real-world situations. As part of my search in 1971 I came across a
regional planner who said to me, “If you people can put a man on the
moon, then why can’t you do something about traffic? Why can’t you just
keep people off the freeways?” It was a revelation to me. Why not indeed?
I started to examine the problem from the first principles. Why do we
have traffic, particularly rush-hour traffic? It turned out that a large pro-
portion of rush-hour traffic comprises people driving to or from their
homes and their workplaces. What do they do when they get to their
workplaces? A little research showed that almost half of them were work-
ing in offices. What do they do when they get to their offices? A substan-
tial amount of their time, at least in 1971, was spent on the phone talking
to someone somewhere else.
v
vi Foreword
If that is the case, I thought, then why can they not just phone from
home and save the trips, not to mention gas costs, energy waste, air pol-
lution, and depreciation to their cars?
I happened to be the secretary of my aerospace engineering company’s
research committee at that time. I asked the committee members to
spend some effort and funds on the idea of substituting telecommunica-
tions (the telephone) for transportation (the freeways). They asked me
what I would need to do to conduct the research. I said that we would
probably need to hire a psychologist or two and maybe an economist—
we already had many engineers—to examine the implications of this
rearrangement of work. Their response was disappointing. “We are an
engineering company. We don’t want to deal with this touchy-feely stuff.”
I could not convince them otherwise.
I was complaining about this reaction to a friend of mine who taught
in the School of Engineering at the University of Southern California
(USC). I told him that USC had the right kind of people to do this
research, whereas my engineering company did not. Shortly thereafter, I
repeated my assessment to the Executive Vice President of the university.
He asked, “Why don’t you do it here?” So, I left the engineering company
and went to USC to become its first director of Interdisciplinary Program
Development. My job was to develop and manage research programmes
that involved multiple schools of the university.
As part of that job, I applied to the National Science Foundation for a
grant entitled, Development of Policy on the Telecommunications-
Transportation Tradeoff. I got the grant and my chance to test my ideas in
the real world. My team, comprising university faculty from the Schools
of Engineering, Communication, and Business, enlisted the support of a
major national insurance company. The insurance company’s motivation
had nothing to do with our attempt to test our theory. Their objective
was simply to reduce the rate at which employees left the company. They
were willing to try distributing their workers into satellite offices near
where they lived, instead of requiring them to come into the company’s
downtown offices every day.
In the test project, the output of the employees’ work in the satellite
offices was transmitted to in-office minicomputer concentrators. The
minicomputers uploaded each day’s work to the company’s mainframes
Foreword vii
every night. The project ran from 1973 through 1974, and was a resound-
ing success. Worker productivity and job satisfaction increased, along
with other positive indicators, and none of the employees involved in the
project left. We estimated that the company could save several million
(1973) dollars annually by broadly adopting our design.
Early in the project, I decided to call the process telecommuting or tele-
working, depending on the audience, to make it more understandable to
people than the telecommunications-transportation tradeoff. A book based
on the project was published in 1976 in the US and 1977 in Japan.
To my dismay, the project did not continue. The company manage-
ment was concerned that, if their workforce continued to be scattered
around the region, it would be too easy for them to be unionized. A few
months later, I spoke with a planner for the AFL/CIO about our research.
He also said that telecommuting was a terrible idea. Why? Because, if the
workers were scattered all over the region, how could they be organized
by the union? Both rejected telecommuting, though for completely
opposite reasons. I was getting the idea that telecommuting might be a
bit too radical for both groups, as fear of change seemed to be an issue.
The Middle
Then there began a series of requests for research funding, trials, and
demonstrations of telecommuting in the real world. In the 1980s, we
enlisted the support of a number of Fortune 100 companies, many of
which adopted telecommuting for their own employees. While giving us
data on how well telecommuting was working in large US corporations,
those projects produced another problem. Like the initial project with
the insurance company, we were not allowed to divulge the names of our
participants. Therefore, when executives of prospective telecommuting-
adoptive companies asked who else was doing this, all we could say was
“Fortune 100 companies.”
In the meantime, the technology of the telecommunications infra-
structure was rapidly improving. In 1973, the option for telecommuting
from home was out of the question since the telephone system could not
provide the necessary transmission bandwidths at a reasonable price.
viii Foreword
With the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981, the technology landscape
suddenly grew brighter for home-based telecommuting. The PC pro-
vided the office at home, thereby reducing the need for always-on con-
nectivity, while faster modems allowed ever easier communications to the
traditional office.
Yet, we still had the same fundamental problem in expanding the use of
telecommuting. We quickly learned that enlisting potential telecommuters
was no problem. However, attracting their management, particularly mid-
dle managers, was another issue altogether since we could not point to
specific companies to say, “The Xers have adopted telecommuting and are
enthusiastic about it.” We would point out telecommuting’s improvements
in productivity reduced the use of sick leave, reduced turnover, and dimin-
ished facilities costs for very little in up-front investment. The response was
often, “It may work for X, but it won’t work for us.” The idea that managers
might not be able to check on their employees’ progress was a clear issue.
“How do I know they’re working if I can’t see them?” [Yet, once that reluc-
tance was overcome, and the managers were trained to think about perfor-
mance differently, telecommuting generally became a great success.]
Frustrated by all this reluctance, we tried another tack by going to
government agencies. With governments involved in telecommuting, we
could run the demonstration projects and release the data publicly. In the
late 1980s and early 1990s, we and others had successful projects with
state and municipal governments. After these projects, several people
have learned to design and run successful telework projects, both in
industry and in government. We knew how to manage them successfully
and developed the tools. I even wrote some books on the details; fore-
most among them is Managing Telework: Strategies for Managing the
Virtual Workforce. My wife Laila and I spent a considerable amount of
time in Europe, under the auspices of the European Commission, and in
Asia in the 1990s giving presentations about telework.
Yet, as the saying goes, the other shoe did not drop. Many managers
were still reluctant to take a chance on telecommuting for the reason
already stated. After all, what you knew now may be troublesome, but
something new might be worse. Risk aversion was endemic, except in
many small- to medium-sized start-ups that got the message beginning in
the 1980s. Even IBM and Yahoo gave up telework in the twentieth
Foreword ix
century, largely because of management errors for which telecommuting
was blamed (in my opinion).
So, what could be the secret sauce that would grab the attention of
CEOs everywhere? What is the sauce that would break their reluctance
to change?
The Dawn, Among Other Things, Breaks
The secret sauce is a microscopic virus called COVID-19. Essentially
overnight, the world learned how important it is to keep people isolated
from each other in order to avoid becoming infected with a severe, often
fatal, disease. For roughly half the workforce in developed countries, tele-
work, alias remote work, became the key to survival.
Even so, my first thought in March 2020 focused on all those millions
of people, managers and teleworkers alike, who were thrust into tele-
working without a clue as to how to do it. For many, it was a formidable
struggle, though for long-time teleworkers it was business as usual. Those
who adapted quickly learned to manage by results, not by visual observa-
tion. Now that effective vaccines have arrived, the panic has abated. So,
are we about to go back to business as it was before 2020?
I think not. Evidence is growing daily that a substantial number of
these newly bred teleworkers like it just fine, and do not want to go back
to that pre-2020 office environment—at least not full time. The new
“normal” is becoming a hybrid; a mixture of home-based and office-based
work, with the average about half time in each location. The office work-
space of the future also is a different concept than yesterday’s cacopho-
nous, dysfunctional rows of cubicles. It is morphing into a centre for
comfortable face-to-face communication, both formal and informal.
Much of the sensitive interpersonal communication is performed in the
office; the detailed, focused work is done at, or near, home.
The successful management of the future is not necessarily what you
are used to. But you may enjoy it more.
Los Angeles, CA, USA Jack M. Nilles
June 2021
Preface
Since the 1970s, when the American engineer Jack Nilles coined the term
telecommuting, scholars like us have been interested in innovative ways
of working in which people can work away from their employer or prin-
ciple, enabled by information and communication technologies (ICT),
meanwhile reducing commuting time, and, hence, contributing to “a
good cause.” Since that time, expectations about the possibilities for
remote working, for example working from home, have been high. In
contrast to the dystopian views on alienation due to the lack of physical
human contact being replaced by machine-mediated connectivity, as pic-
tured in the short story “The Machine Stops” by E. M. Forster (1909),
futurologists, such as the American Alvin Toffler, known for his book
“The Third Wave” (1980), predicted that technology and new social
structures would drastically change our everyday lives. According to
Toffler, in the short-term, administrative staff would only travel to work
in Japan because the collectivist culture would not fit with working from
home. In the rest of the world, the work was expected “to come” to the
administrative staff, living in their home-centred societies, providing
opportunities for new forms of entrepreneurship. Due to the rise of work-
ing from home in “electronic cottages,” central offices would no longer
be needed.
During the 1980s and 1990s, there was a huge interest for telecom-
muting and telework, as an innovative means to decentralize work, and
xi