Discipline and Structure

by Johan Hjelm of Techdirt / Jan 7

Keeping mobile workers in touch – and keeping in touch with mobile workers – is not different from any other self-governed work. There are two types of structure which are needed: Discipline among the workers; and a clear and well-defined work structure.

To start with the discipline:

When people are not in the office, they must be able to get the information that their co-workers are using easily and efficiently. This means work has to be structured from the start, so that communications can be structured accordingly. Not every task is suited for mobile work. Making sure that everythign works smoothly means routines; discipline means following them.

For those who work from outside the office, the most important thing is to be able to share information with their co-workers efficiently and easily. This does not mean email; if you are on any public email list, it means hundreds of spam messages. Using blogs and RSS is equally efficient. But they must be easy to use, and people who use them must be disciplined enough to enable their co-workers to get the information easily. Cooperating with people outside the company often means email. Of course, urgent requests should be answered urgently – within the same working day.

This also means having good support applications that make administrative work easy, and automates as much of those tasks as possible. A worker which has to fill in forms and discuss them with the secretary every time he wants to get something done is not very efficient. If there has to be meetings (and very rarely there does – except to agree the project plan and task assignments) there must be good support tools for that too. A great teleconferencing system is sufficient, however, if the routine is to take minutes in all meetings – and the routine is to follow them.

The discipline is also necessary to get the mobile workers to publish and backup their work regularly. Making it avilable on their internal blog pages is not only a great way of making sure that others can see what is going on (if they can find it easily, which is a precondition); it is also a simple and useful way to back up work so it does not get lost. If the work always is kept there the most you can lose is a days work. But it means people should not work on hundreds of different things at once, and that brings us to the next structure necessary: Planning and structuring work.

Mobile work is a project: Plan and structure

When workers are independent, deliver according to a pre-agreed plan, and can trust that it does not change, they will work more efficiently (as has already been established on this blog). This goes for everyone, including those who feel that work is a place where you meet co-workers and that you need to ask the manager before even getting coffee. If the work is planned and clearly laid out, and the project plan is agreed beforehand – but there are points where it can be changed without breaking anything – then the workers can be efficient in their own pace. The trick is managing the plan, and not the workers; and get their buyin before the work starts. If they do not agree to the plan, it will only work with lots of painful direct communication between the manager and the workers. Not that direct communication is painful – it is necessary too – but it is a problem if the mobile worker is in a completely different time zone, for instance.

For many managers, it will be a hard problem to agree to a plan and then keep their hands off until the tasks are supposed to be done. For many workers, the idea of agreeing to a plan is somewhat alien. Both have to change.

Motivation comes easily with work satisfaction; satisfaction comes from control, and control comes not only from control over the daily work. But also from control over the project plan. This is why it is necessary for the workers to buy in to the plan beforehand, and why getting them to do this is the most important part of the managers work. If users feel they are involved and that they are driving the work, they will be satisfied when they conclude it successfully.

But with a good project plan which everybody is committed to follow, and the discipline to take minutes, put work on the wiki, blog a couple of times a week – there is no reason the mobile worker should not be equally well knowledgeable about the important part of the colleauges work as if he were in the office.

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