Are Empty Offices Unimpressive to Customers?
photo credit: Nevada Tumbleweed
One anti-telecommuting argument often used by management is that having too many telecommuters leaves the office feeling like a ghost town. The downside of this, they say, is that customers visiting the site will think that the company is either understaffed or inefficient.
This is similar to a phenomenon I experienced in graduate school. Alumni donations funded a new computer lab. Though the new lab was impressive, there were too few computers for all the students that needed to access it. The obvious solution to long lines of students waiting for the short supply of computers was to allow remote access to the lab. That way, many students could be logged in to each computer at any given time. Despite the wild success of this change and unanimous support by students, the department decided to eliminate remote access. Why? When alumni came to see how their donations had been used, they were upset to see the computer lab sitting empty. Remote access was restored after some of us designed a scoreboard-like device that hung prominently in the lab and displayed how many of the computers were being accessed. Seeing that 30 students were using 10 computers ended up being more impressive than a packed lab with a line out the door.
One of management’s arguments about telecommuting may be correct. The reality is that a company with many telecommuters and a large office space is inefficient. The solution is not to hurt productivity and force workers back into the office but rather to reduce office space. Doing so will have costs, but a smaller site also has lower operating costs. That transitional period between when telecommuting policies are implemented and steps are taken to capitalize on those policies can be somewhat awkward. A company can save money by downsizing to a smaller office space, filled with the remaining employees who do not telecommute. A small, buzzing office, coupled with comments that an additional 60% (or whatever) of the workforce telecommutes, certainly stands to impress. Such comments can go a long way even if you decide to stay in your larger office space. Companies might even go so far as to display how many workers are currently logged in remotely, much as we did with the computer lab at school.
Giving the impression of being a smaller, more agile and customer centric company which embraces newer technology and policies to keep employees happy and efficiency high does much more to add to customers impressions than a more sparcely populated office takes away from them.
