Redistributing the Workplace - ' Historical Precedents '

Historical Precedents

CIO Insight: Why do some organizations look at a distributed work force and then have second thoughts?

Grantham: The central barrier to this new way of working has been the resistance of middle management to moving to a new management paradigm. It's the old, "If I can't see 'em, how do I know they're working?" That's coming back up underneath all of this. From what we see that's really a red herring. Good management is good management whether or not the person is sitting elbow to elbow with you or they happen to be across the country. We've had distributed work forces all along—we call them salespeople, right?

If you want to go back in history, you got great examples like the Hudson's Bay Company, whose headquarters was in England but most of its operations were in Canada, and it took three weeks to get a letter from one to the other. These are false issues. But in the past six months we've seen a realization on the part of large corporations that they have to step up to that and offer their middle management new types of training and education to get over this issue. Because you've got CEOs saying, hey guys, we're just going to do this. You go figure out how to do it, but we are going to do it. So it takes clear vision and direction from senior leadership, and that's starting to happen now.

CIO Insight: How is the nature of work going to change?

Grantham: It will differ depending on the particular situation. Within five years the number of people in your company who are known as employees will decrease by about 45 percent. That's not to say you're still not going to be connected to that group of people, but you're going to be connected to them as independent contractors, as small companies. The major thing that's going to change is the implied social relationship between employee and employer. If you've got 45 percent fewer bodies, you have to manage their support infrastructure, HR policies, IT provision and facilities. You've got a lot of options to change how you do business. It will be more like the Hollywood model, with the central core being the producers of the business, and everybody else coming in and playing their part and then getting offstage and then coming back when they need to come back.

It's a whole different way of running things, which is going to require new leadership, and I also feel that it's going to be a driver for ubiquitous wireless. You need that wireless broadband as the glue to bring all this together. Look what Starbucks is doing. Starbucks is developing into an alternative work location, where the cost of the facilities and the networking is born by the employee.

It's not just coffee anymore. I think it's just a great idea. It's a stroke of genius on their part. What they've realized is that there's a trend and demand for high-tech workers to have a location to go to conduct business other than a central office or their home. And Starbucks is close to ubiquitous. They're everywhere. So they put in a wireless network, and folks come in, get their Frappuccino and sit down and plug into the Net and do their e-mail.

CIO Insight: What are the implications of this changed work force?

Grantham: You will see an increase from about 7 percent of the work force today who are routinely working out of their homes a couple of days a week. I think that's going to go up to about 25 percent. My numbers tend to be very conservative, by the way.

The first implication is the demand for a business enterprise that provides this infrastructure to that part of the work force—administration of health benefits, management of 401(k) or retirement plans, remote network repair for your computer. Somebody's got to step into the void and provide all of that support. You're talking a quarter, a third, maybe 40 percent of the American work force. That's a large number that is going to need all of that stuff around them, and who's going to provide that? Traditionally, we got it from the company we worked for.

There are public policy implications in terms of what kind of training and education people require and how that's going to be delivered. In my neighborhood the community college is now providing credit courses to train managers how to manage at a distance. That's a pretty significant shift. I think there are real estate implications in terms of housing prices and the construction of housing. A market for the work-at-home residence will emerge, and not just converting the second bedroom to an office.

CIO Insight: If there's another terrorist attack, how will that influence these ideas?

Grantham: It's just going to speed it up, and I think it's a question of when instead of if. People are starting to think about these things, they're starting to plan for them, but they don't see the immediate need right now because the economy is where it is. But another serious terrorist attack in a major metropolitan area would probably pull the time frame of this from five years back into two.