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Training helps firms adapt to
virtual work world

By Maggie Jackson, Globe Correspondent, 3/16/03

Globe Staff Photo/Nancy Palmieri Maureen O'Malley, a teleworker for Cigna HealthCare in Worcester, checks in with her boss, Joseph Banish, from her home office, about a half hour from downtown Worcester. She works out of her home four days a week.

As the world grows more virtual and more employees work from home and the road, progressive companies are realizing that telework training can benefit whole work forces. Lessons on e-mail protocol or virtual team meetings are spilling over into cubicle and boardroom, helping employees at all levels operate better in a mobile work world.

''We're always reminding people it's got to be a part of how you think,'' said Edward Whalen, managing director of human resources at Boston's Putnam Investments. ''You've got individuals in your eyesight, others in another location.''

Most supervisors, not just teleworkers' bosses, get training on managing remote workers at the investment management company. And while just 12 percent of the bank's work force - or 700 people - formally telecommute, the company recently added additional online training for managers and employees on how to thrive in a virtual work world.

Only 25 percent of midsize to large companies offer training on working off site and 30 percent offer guidelines or polices on doing so, according to a recent national study by WFD Consulting in Watertown. But growing evidence suggests that training is crucial for all kinds of virtual work arrangements to succeed, specialists say.

''This thing that we call telework is morphing into a broader kind of remote or mobile work,'' said Gil Gordon, a telework consultant and author. ''Equipping people to work on the go is really going to be as fundamental a skill as anything we teach people to do.''

Telework has always been difficult to measure because it's been defined in so many ways. People who work at home, once called telecommuters, now are usually known as teleworkers, although the terms ''remote'' or ''virtual'' workers are also used.

In the past decade, the number of Americans working three or more days a week at home grew 23 percent to 4.2 million, according to the 2000 US Census. About 3.7 percent of workers in the six New England states telecommute that often, according to Census data. Nationwide, companies offering some form of telework rose to 37 percent last year from 25 percent in 1998, according to the Society for Human Resource Management.

The numbers leap sharply, however, if other off-site employees, such as road warriors or virtual team members are included, according to WFD's report, based on a national sample of 2,057 employees at companies employing 500 or more. The report, ''When the Workplace is Many Places,'' was commissioned by the American Business Collaboration for Quality Dependent Care, a group of nine large companies that create and fund work-life programs and research. According to the report, about 51 percent of full-time employees sometimes or mostly work off site.

''People still see the workplace as primarily single site-oriented and the people who work from another location are usually perceived as the exception to the rule,'' said Karen Noble, head of WFD's off-site work practice and an author of the report. ''But our research shows clearly that the majority of people are regularly working across a distance from each other.''

At Philadelphia-based insurer Cigna Corp., about 3,100 workers - or about 8 percent of the work force - primarily work from off-site locations. They are formally enrolled in an 'E*Work' program and given a day of classroom training, access to a special help desk and standardized computers, a far cry from the days when telecommuters at most companies simply got a go-ahead from their boss and went home to work, using their own PCs. In addition, Cigna managers of E*Workers get six hours of training, much of which will soon be online.

Lynne Kelley-Lewicki, director of Cigna's E*Work program, believes that this core training is crucial. ''We teach basic stuff such as how to get broadband set up, and how to set up your chair,'' she said. ''But the true essence of creating a long-term sustainable E*Work population is to help them shift to a new work environment with a new culture, protocols and ways of communication.''

In the last year, the company has extended parts of the program to include 7,000 workers who still have an office but often work remotely. But leaders at Cigna also are realizing that lessons from E*Work are rippling through the work force.

An E*Work training tip to send out hand-outs well before a meeting, rather than plopping them on the conference table, helps both teleworkers and traveling workers better participate in decision-making. And some of the first managers who were trained to measure off-site workers' success by results, not face-time, have begun applying such techniques to all their workers.

In its study, WFD found that more than half of all managers supervise off-site employees, yet only one in eight managers receives any training on how to do so. Furthermore, managers with such training are not only more open to the idea of teleworkers but seem to produce better responsiveness and co-worker relations from off-site employees.

Joe Banish, a Worcester-based assistant vice president with Cigna's health care division, admits he was worried when employee Maureen O'Malley proposed working from home more than a year ago. ''I manage by walking around, and being able to see people and have spontaneous interactions with them,'' said Banish.

But Cigna's training and his subsequent experiences with O'Malley have won him over and given him an unexpected gift. Because he can't always wander down the hall to chat, Banish has learned to plan ahead more in many of his work relations. ''The times that are scheduled tend to be more focused, planned out and more frequent,'' he said.

For her part, O'Malley has found that her telework training has equipped her for an increasingly virtual world. ''You're better prepared in documenting and being more precise with e-mail and using the technology that's available,'' said O'Malley, who works at home in Charlton four days a week.

Cigna's plans to move more of its telework training online is echoed by other companies, which view Web learning as a tool for spreading such knowledge beyond telework programs.

At AT&T Corp., where a quarter of the company's 55,000 managers work from home once a week or more, teleworkers aren't enrolled in any central corporate programs. Rather, they log onto a cafeteria-style array of Web-based resources on topics from how to set up a home office to teleconferencing basics.

''At some point, a telework policy will become irrelevant,'' said Joseph Roitz, the company's telework director. ''It's all work. It doesn't matter where it happens.''

That's just about how Kelli Clark, a newcomer to telework at Putnam, sees her job - as a seamless part of the whole, whether she's in view of her managers or not. Clark, who helps unions with their retirement plans, last fall began working four days a week from her home in Dunbarton, N.H., and traveling once a week to Putnam's Andover office.

''I have the same job. I have the same clients. Basically, the only difference is that I have a different phone number,'' said Clark. ''And at least on my team, people are really aware of that.''

Maggie Jackson can be reached at Maggie.Jackson@att.net.

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