Virtually victorious
PwC tells us to prepare for a very different 'office' in five years' time. How can HR prosper in this virtual working work?The internet came into common usage in the mid to late 1990s. That’s less than 20 years ago. In that brief time, our working lives have been so transformed that it is now difficult to imagine how employees functioned at all without trusty email and search engines on side.
So it’s little surprise that a recent global PwC survey of 10,000 workers and 500 HR employees found most people expecting more of the same to come. The majority of respondents (53%), for instance, believe that technological breakthroughs will transform the way people work over the next five to ten years.
More specifically, ‘The Future of Work: A Journey to 2022″ found that only 14% of UK employees want to work in a traditional office environment and one in five people say they want to work in a ‘virtual’ place where they can log on from any location or use collaborative work spaces.
The virtual workplace isn’t new. But the PwC research goes so far as to suggest one future scenario (an ‘Orange World’) in which telepresence and virtual solutions allow for a level of remote working and globalised networks that ultimately fragment the workplace, leading to the decline of large corporates – and with them their HR teams.
In this world, HR is largely transactional and outsourced as a wealth of smaller companies hire an increasingly diverse group of freelancers and contractors to work on an affordable, ad hoc basis.
Virtual talent
Whether this forecast ends up hitting even close to mark is probably anyone’s guess at this time – it is in fact only one of three potential future worlds PwC describes. But what is certain is that the virtual workplace is on the rise – and HR managers will increasingly need to be able to manage the implications of more individuals and teams working remotely.
Equipping employees with the technology will be the simple part of this. (See the recent thoughts of one of our tech columnists here.) The challenge will be recruiting the right talent to work effectively in virtual teams and then finding a way to engage and develop remote workers so that they stick around.
If HR fails to embrace the corporate opportunities presented by a virtual world (cost efficiencies and global reach, to name but two) then the risk is that HR teams might begin to look irrelevant, as they are increasingly only used to manage a diminishing number of full-time, office-based employees.
But how can HR executives prove their worth in this respect? Here are the top five tips for making HR work in a virtual world.
1. Embrace a different recruitment tack – not in the sense of hiring individual freelancers for one-off projects (although no doubt there will be demand for this) but by recruiting full-time employees into largely virtual teams based in disparate locations. Selection processes will need to be devised to source a different type of talent – people who show initiative and who can work independently but with the superior communication skills needed to make remote collaboration work. Just picking the guy/gal who likes to work alone will not do.
2. Establish policies and procedures to ensure that virtual workers know exactly what is expected from them and when. Clear guidance for remote workers and teams is critical, as well as clarification as to how exactly performance will be monitored and rewarded. Firms will need to avoid going overboard though – teams should feel supported, not weighed down by endless and paranoid-sounding rules from afar.
3. Think career development. Just because the team is virtual doesn’t mean you can renege on training. Virtual workers still want to develop their careers and if your HR team can offer good e-learning and in-house opportunities then you’ll be more likely to hold onto your best virtual talent. Think out of the box too. Virtual teams may need different training to office workers – for example, in effective communication skills.
4. Put communication first. Use technology (Skype or WebEx to name an obvious two) to bring virtual team members together as often as possible. It’s too easy for remote workers to disappear into the virtual woodwork. Considerable effort needs to go into giving each team member a presence. Consider giving virtual teams a place on the company intranet and/or create a professional social networking platform for them to interact on a more informal basis.
5. Don’t forget the importance of reward and recognition. Out of sight should not be out of mind. Devise a process to regularly communicate progress on projects and then ensure individual team members get regular feedback and ‘public’ recognition of a job well done.
Engaging in all of the above may seem challenging when combined with all of the on-going demands of people management in-house. But as corporates take on more virtual workers, it will inevitably become an increasingly important part of the HR role.
And with that will come opportunity for HR. By engaging and nurturing virtual teams, individuals are less likely to abandon corporates for a more flexible freelance or contract experience. After all, many workers still want the job security big business can provide.
In this symbiotic kind of relationship, HR professionals and virtual employees can thrive creating a future of work that doesn’t diminish either and is beneficial to both.
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