v-Fluence Blog

Fast Company article on managing teleworkers

The November 2005 issue of Fast Company contains a great interview with Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham, cofounders of Work Design Collaborative LLC. The article focuses on the challenges of managing teleworkers. Towards the end of the interview, Grantham and Ware make some really salient points on the importance of "making explicit some of [the] informal implicit interactions."

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What are the benefits of a distributed work model?

Jim Ware: Most companies see it as a chance to take out a significant operating cost. But there's pretty clear evidence that distributed workers are more productive. They're not spending as much time commuting, in hallways gabbing, or in meetings that are fairly unproductive. And people tend to give that time back to the company.

Charlie Grantham: If an executive were to come up to me and ask, "Do you think my company would benefit from moving to this new operating model?" the first question I'd ask is, To what degree does your company depend upon creativity and innovation for competitive advantage? There's a wealth of talent out there that normally can't be tapped into if you have to move the people to the work.

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