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No need to go to work

Virtual collaboration tools are making employees more productive.

By Georgina Guedes, Contributor
Johannesburg, 03 Aug 2015
Kgomotso Molefe, PPC
Kgomotso Molefe, PPC

Telecommuting and virtual collaboration technologies allow company employees to work from just about any location as if they were in their office. This is having a massive impact on the shape of the modern business, as CIOs have to consider the infrastructure to support these kinds of interactions as well as the security and human resource policies to control them. Research conducted by Forrester and Cisco in 2012 projected that the collaboration services market would grow at 14 percent annually over the next four years, reaching $67 billion by 2016. It also suggested that cloud-delivered services will represent 35 percent of the total collaboration services market by 2018.

Given an increasingly mobile workforce with solutions designed to deliver their desktop environments to any device in any location, most companies have developed some kind of collaboration infrastructure and are making their way through the murky waters of implementing policy to support this.

Distance learning re-envisioned

The University of South Africa (UNISA) is in a unique position as far as virtual collaboration goes because it has always been an institution that facilitates communication from remote locations. However, the days of students frantically rushing to post assignments into drop boxes at specific locations are long behind this learning institution. Now, thanks to collaboration tools, the organisation is on its way to becoming a virtual one.

Deon Van der Merwe, deputy executive director in charge of ICT, says the university is far along in its journey of transitioning from an open distance learning organisations to an open distance e-learning organisation by 2030.

Currently two groups of employees work from home. Some professors come in only weekly or alternate-weekly to the UNISA offices, and carry out their work from a home office that was set up by the university.

"We supported them with connectivity, computers and printing facilities, although printing is becoming less important," says Van der Merwe. "We didn't close their offices down, but, in future, we will have a hot-desking solution in place."

The next group is tutorial support, which includes assignment markers, who facilitate teaching and learning over online platforms and engage with smaller groups of students online from wherever they are. "These tutors are temporary appointments and we've never had them on campus, so they have to have their own infrastructure set up," Van der Merwe says. This replaces the extremely cumbersome process of shipping papers back and forth between the tutors and the university.

Of course, the students now also engage with UNISA over virtual platforms. Van der Merwe says that there are currently over 308 000 students registered through myUnisa, with the second registration of the year expected to bring this number to over 350 000. They engage in over 17.5 million transactions (from downloading coursework to posting on bulletin boards to submitting assignments) online.

The ICT team has even developed its own open-source Adobe Acrobat plug-in to support the marking of PDF assignments.

It's not everybody's revolution

Kgomotso Molefe, the CIO at PPC, says that very few virtual collaboration or telecommuting solutions have been implemented at his organisation. "The scope and risk are minimal so far," he says.

Because of this, he and his team haven't had to conceive any new policies to support the solutions where they do exist.

However, there are a few telecommuters among PPC's workforce, and Molefe lists managing their output, ensuring that they have the right tools to do their work, and pushing their work schedule and tasks through to them as the key areas of focus for him when overseeing them.

Where there's a will...

He also says that once some staff members are allowed to telecommute, it's hard to limit the same capability for others, and it can be challenging to explain to the office-bound staff that they cannot be afforded the same flexibility.

He manages the telecommuting staff based on output and ensures that the workload is evenly distributed for both the office-bound and the telecommuting groups. This ensures that there is balance in performance expectations and that the teams are being judged fairly on their outputs.

We have established policies for security, not just provided the toolsets, because these systems are how we run now.

Johan Bosch, Microsoft

At the other end of the spectrum, Microsoft is seven years into its journey to migrate the company, in its entirety, into the cloud. A large part of this has been the implementation of virtual collaboration tools within the workplace.

"We implemented concepts around mobility, collaboration and social media as a part of how we run the organisation," says Johan Bosch, the company's CIO. "It's an ongoing journey, but we believe that Microsoft is now a model of how these concepts can be used in a big organisation." As they launched on their journey into virtual collaboration, they implemented certain goals and policies around savings and security.

"We have established policies for security, not just provided the toolsets, because these systems are how we run now. We have zero tolerance - everything that can be in place is in place," he says.

Despite these well-established security polices, they have user-friendly policies for collaboration within the organisation, with yammer providing a space for social collaboration, and OneNote allowing document sharing around the globe. "And we don't print anymore because we collaborate about documents online."

Interestingly, whereas most organisations experience a push from internal staff for virtual collaboration and telecommuting opportunities, the biggest challenge that Microsoft faces is bringing in new people who have not yet adapted to this kind of environment. "This process of social collaboration can be strange or foreign to people. It can be difficult for them to adapt to a world where the formalities have been taken away. So we have to instil that behaviour change."

He says with everything taking place in real-time, the organisation and its people moves so much faster. This means that risk management becomes a challenge. "So we've had to create policies around the governance and management of this kind of immediacy."

He says that these kinds of solutions have saved the company around six to seven percent over the last three years of moving into a collaborative environment. At the same time, this new working environment has had a positive impact on overall productivity. "There have been interesting changes in productivity levels if you start measuring the hours saved in travel time to meetings, and collaborating over documents rather than holding meetings."

In all regards, Microsoft has shown that there are cost savings and massive productivity benefits to be realised in embracing collaboration solutions - but it takes time, effort and behaviour change so a full organisational commitment to the process is required.

However, as cloud services become more prevalent, connectivity improves and the cost savings become even more apparent, it's only a matter of time before hot-desking, telecommuting and virtual collaboration become the bricks and mortar of future organisations.

This article was first published in Brainstorm magazine. Click here to read the complete article at the Brainstorm website.

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