The Management Benefits of Telecommuting

“We're empowering them to be as close to being their own boss as someone can be and still get their paycheque. So when that person begins self-supervising the manager now is relieved from a lot of the hour-by- hour, day-by-day direction. I mean they’re still in touch with these people by phone and email and occasionally in person but they really see a dramatic change in just the simple issue of how they spend their time during the week. Their spending less time fighting fires, less time running into people in the hallway, and more time doing the kinds of advanced planning and thinking that presumably draw on the skills that got them into that manager's job.

The other thing that I often here from managers – and this is kind of a revelation to them – even the most anti-telecommuting managers end up coming back saying that managing people from a distance has made them better managers of the people who are in the office. In the sense that all the management 101 skills that we've said for years managers should be doing. That is, setting standards, giving feedback, doing development plans – all that basic stuff that managers could avoid through the luxury of close contact - they now have to do when they are managing remotely. And once they begin doing it with their remote staffs they can't help but doing with their in-office staffs as well.

The double benefit is not only this notion of the gift of free time but they become more disciplined managers, and more effective managers of their office workers as well.”

Gil Gordon interviewed on ‘The Cranky Middle Manager Show #2’