Creating a Distance Working Culture

I am not sure as to what my part was to making this happen, but this week my college sent out a new “Telecommuting Policy & Procedure.” Employees can petition for a review of their job and duties to see if they are suitable for off-campus work. One of the biggest influences on this situation is the speed and response issues of our curriculum course management system, Blackboard. This term is the first where the service is hosted off-site. This is great for providing high-speed communication to our off-campus students, but when our faculty are on campus, they cannot communicate with the server efficiently due to the college’s low bandwidth.

The impact of allowing faculty to work from home is wide-ranging. The institution would no longer have to buy a PC for them to use, provide electricity and facilities for their offices, and the administrators gain a little more trust from their subordinates because they are showing they trust and respect their staff as professionals. The policy is slightly different from my contract as it establishes protocols for checking email and voice mail, and times the worker should be available. Because of my equipment setup here, I am connected just as if I were on campus. I don’t foresee the college pushing out IP phones to people’s homes.

I do wonder about tech support issues though. If your computer breaks and you use it to do college work, who fixes it and upgrades the software. How will remote users get to their network files, and if they use the VPN like me, who will trouble shoot that? This is where we will begin to see the economic and HR issues begin.

While there have not be any takers, yet, I will be interested to see if there is any financial impact of telecommuting reflected in the budgeting decisions this fiscal year. I also wonder how this will affect the organizational structure of the departments if they are broken up with some working from home and other, either less tech-savvy or apathetic traditional workers staying back on campus. What will department chairs do to keep themselves in the loop while giving the faculty or staff member the freedom to work remotely? I also wonder what this might do to the endless strings of meetings we have grown accustomed to.