Virtual collaboration in knowledge work: from vision to reality

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/1352-7592.htm

TPM 15,7/8

Virtual collaboration in knowledge work: from vision to reality Pasi Pyo¨ria¨

366 Received January 2009 Revised April 2009 Accepted April 2009

Department of Social Research, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland Abstract Purpose – This paper aims to serve as a reminder that all work arrangements, including the present case of distributed work, have their costs and benefits. Design/methodology/approach – In addition to a literature review, the paper presents empirical evidence from two case organizations in the field of technology industries and knowledge-intensive business services. Findings – In contrast to common assertions in the theoretical literature, distributed work is not always an outcome of technological advancement or a proactive choice blessed by management, but often a necessity dictated by the competition or customers. In the case companies here, a distributed organizational structure was recognized as a necessary compromise, although the associated costs gave cause for some concern. Rather than virtual cooperation, the knowledge workers interviewed valued opportunities for face-to-face interaction and informal contact and networking. Nonetheless the benefits of distributed work were thought to outweigh its potential costs. Originality/value – Regionally distributed work involves many similar problems as traditional telework from home. To avoid potential risks, partial work distribution is advisable to most organizations. Keywords Teleworking, Knowledge management, Virtual work, Information society, Finland Paper type Case study

Team Performance Management Vol. 15 No. 7/8, 2009 pp. 366-381 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1352-7592 DOI 10.1108/13527590911002140

1. Introduction It is increasingly difficult in the information society to define and demarcate working hours and places of work. Although virtual organizations still remain rare, there are a number of jobs that could – at least in principle – be organized independently of time and place by using modern information technology. Changes in the social division of labor have also contributed to reducing the dependence of work on time and place. An integral part of this development is the growth of knowledge work, i.e. jobs requiring a high level of formal education, symbolic skills and IT use (Blom et al., 2002; Pyo¨ria¨, 2005). In particular, people in expert jobs often take their work home or on the road (Hislop and Axtell, 2007). Other typical environments for knowledge work include meetings, training seminars, customer consultations, corporate functions and even leisure parties. Indeed there are increasing numbers of people who have difficulty drawing a clear line between what is work and what is not. Examples of relatively new forms of flexible work organizations include the deployment of management teams in different countries, product development projects across different time zones and mobile telework. Increasing globalization, heightened security awareness, and tightening This article was written as part of the Academy of Finland project No. 124312 “Successful Organisations and Employee Well-being in Knowledge-intensive Work” (SOWK).

traveling budgets are all factors that will foster further growth for virtual environments (Davison et al., 2006). However, this should not be taken to mean that the time or place of work have lost all meaning. Even in the IT industry, which is often considered to be less bound by the limits of time and place than other branches of the economy, the distribution of work across geographical boundaries has proved harder than usually expected (Koski et al., 2002; Steinbock, 2004). The reason for this is simple enough. Every successful business operation needs a strong infrastructure and a socially stimulating environment, and for this purpose it must have its own local base and focus. Telecommunications problems are not a major obstacle to the geographical distribution of work; the main difficulties and obstacles lie in the availability of competent people, customer contacts and transport links. Even from the individual’s point of view the distribution of work has not lived up to expectations. Advances in technology have added to the flexibility and mobility of work, but even so most people still attach more importance to their workplace community than to the flexibility afforded by telework (Pyo¨ria¨, 2003). In Finland (where this research was done), official statistics indicate that eight percent of the active labor force in 2008 did telework, the definition being paid work done outside the regular workplace under an employment contract (Lehto and Sutela, 2009). In the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics, the corresponding figure for 2005 also was 8 percent (Ruiz and Walling, 2005). Whilst there are some discrepancies between these studies, the statistics do show that telework has increased, but the reality remains far removed from the early forecasts in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Huws, 1991). In the following, focusing on Finnish knowledge workers, I will present a critical assessment of the costs and benefits of distributed work in the light of the research literature and two empirical examples. The two case companies in the Finnish IT industry concretely demonstrate how regionally distributed teamwork differs from more traditional ways of organizing work. Although the knowledge workers interviewed for this study recognized that this arrangement was an organizational necessity, they were keen to stress that geographical distance severely hampers cooperation and communication. Finland is a useful subject for a case study, for two main reasons. First, this is a technologically highly advanced and networked country, perhaps pointing the way to the future. Indeed Finland has been rated among the world’s leading information societies – a social and cultural “laboratory” for the design, production and implementation of IT (Benner, 2003; Blom et al., 2002; Castells and Himanen, 2002; Pyo¨ria¨, 2007b; Statistics Finland, 2004). The Finns have always been eager to adopt new technologies and innovations, which may explain the fact that various forms of distributed work arrangements are more common in Finland than in most other European countries (Gareis et al., 2008). Second, teamwork is more prevalent in Finland than elsewhere in Europe. As of 2005 about two-thirds of the wage earning population in EU-27 reported working in teams. In Finland the corresponding figure was 74 percent. (Lehto and Sutela, 2009.) This is important because teamwork seems to be positively related to the practice of distributed work. Teamwork structures may allow employees to overcome fears of social isolation that might result from working outside the regular workplace. (Suomi et al., 1998.)

Virtual collaboration

367

TPM 15,7/8

368

Last but not least, Finland is a large and sparsely populated country, with no more than 5.3 million people living in an area larger than Britain. Therefore, Finland should make a suitable ground for distributed organizations. However, the promises of distributed work have not yet been fully delivered, even though this has been singled out as one of the key objectives of national regional policy – we are talking about a social innovation in its infancy. Despite the critical tone of this article, it is not intended here either to dispute the benefits of distributed work or to uncritically defend traditional work arrangements. The motive of the article is simply to demonstrate that distributed work arrangements much like other forms of organizing work have their costs and benefits (see also Morgan, 2004; Pyo¨ria¨, 2003; Taskin and Edwards, 2007). 2. Work in virtual environments In the past decade or so, work researchers have given increasing attention to questions of distributed work (Hinds and Kiesler, 2002; Information Technology & People, 2006). Other concepts that frequently appear in the research literature include virtual work, virtual teams and virtual organizations; mobile work; electronic work or e-work (the term recommended by the European Commission); and, most popularly, telecommuting or telework (Jackson, 1999; Vartiainen et al., 2007). By definition, distributed work arrangements encompass many different alternatives to working at the traditional office, including satellite work centers, neighborhood work centers, flexible work arrangements, generic offices (recently renamed as hoteling), and telework (Be´langer and Collins, 1998, p. 137). In particular, knowledge workers – who in the research literature are often described as “mobile nomads” (Davis, 2002) – typically work in different kinds of project environments or networks that are characterized by low hierarchies, high flexibility and low dependence on time and place. However, it is maintained here that the concept of virtual cooperation is highly problematic, both theoretically and empirically. It is not just pedantry to point out that the popular telework notion of “telepresence” cannot coincide with the cohesive interaction that characterizes the ideal-type teamworking environment. The deepest source of contradiction is that no technical interface can every fully replace face-to-face interaction, which according to many organizational theorists is a necessary precondition for an informal organizational culture in workplace communities, for their team spirit and above all for the communication of tacit knowledge (Groth, 1999; Pyo¨ria¨, 2007a). In the words of philosopher Michael Polanyi: “we can know more than we can tell” (Polanyi, 1966, p. 4). What he means by the concept of “tacit knowledge” (or, more accurately, tacit knowing) is that most of what we know remains unarticulated or unconscious. Riding a bicycle, to quote one of Polanyi’s most famous examples, is a completely different matter from explaining what exactly it is we are doing when we are treading the pedals. Even though many of Polanyi’s examples refer to physical skills, he points out that all social action involves experiential knowledge that is difficult to explicate, and in this regard even science cannot be considered a superior form of knowledge. In the present context of work organizations, Polanyi’s idea can be interpreted to mean that following the example set by others is an important and necessary part of the socialization of new employees into the workplace community.

But there are those who take a different view (see, e.g. Rasmussen and Wangel, 2007; Stenmark, 2000). Researchers who emphasize the benefits of virtual work are convinced that it is possible to communicate tacit knowledge even electronically. Working online, they insist, does not prevent the accumulation or dissemination of tacit knowledge; these processes are merely continued by other means. I have no intention to try and dispute this view, either, for as the development of the Linux operating system and other open code software has shown, it is possible to attain even highly sophisticated cooperation without physical interaction “here and now”. Advocates of virtual work are also keen to stress that information networks and systems can compensate for the loss of tacit knowledge that is bounded by time and place, among other things by accelerating the accumulation and use of explicit knowledge and by supporting the development of technical standards and formal expert language. Besides, even cyberspace is a social space that has its own culture, rules and norms of interaction. Although it has been suggested that e-mail communication, for instance, is more prone to conflict than face-to-face conversation, it is just as easy to imagine that the opposite could be true. In the best case electronic communication can be very democratic because the prejudices and power differences between the parties involved are not immediately apparent (Hertel et al., 1995). It is easier to focus on the matter at hand if you do not have to worry about formal status differences. However, the position defended in this article is that the opportunities created by purely virtual work are limited because electronic distribution of knowledge does not, in itself, provide a solid enough foundation for long-term cooperation (Hislop, 2002; Nandhakumar and Baskerville, 2006). The diffusion of IT networks does complement and diversify the knowledge work environment, but it cannot replace traditional work arrangements. Electronic interaction also creates new interfaces between traditional social institutions and networked virtual communities, which are still in the process of evolving. In other words, the old and new modes of interaction are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but they are closely interwoven and in the best case mutually complementary (see also Beise et al., 2004). 3. Linux as a case in point So what about Linux? As was briefly mentioned above, Linux is a textbook example of what can be achieved by virtual cooperation. However, it is important to bear in mind that Linux has in many ways been a unique development project and therefore caution is advised in drawing generalizations (see Moon and Sproull, 2002). In contrast to what many media reports suggest, creator of the system Linus Torvalds did not develop his idea entirely in cyberspace, but he began work on it while still a student at the University of Helsinki in the early 1990s. Even though programming is mostly a solitary activity, the Department of Computer Science at Helsinki supported Torvalds’ efforts by giving the talented young student a teaching job and a spiritual home. As Torvalds himself says in the Linux history he wrote with David Diamond: Over the years, some have suggested that the university was trying to get credit for Linux. That wasn’t the case. The department had always been very supportive. They even gave me a job that enabled me to work on Linux on their time. And that was in the early days, so nobody was saying, “Let’s push this because someday it will be famous” (Torvalds and Diamond, 2001, pp. 128-9).


369

TPM 15,7/8

370

Torvalds did have his own “spiritual fathers”, too. Perhaps most prominent among them was Dutch Professor of Computer Science Andrew S. Tanenbaum, who developed the Minix system and whose influence is readily acknowledged by Torvalds himself (Torvalds and Diamond, 2001, p. 52). On the one hand Torvalds was very much inspired by Tanenbaum, but on the other hand he was sharply critical of the shortcomings in Minix and he was keen to show that he could do better. And of course that is exactly what he proceeded to do. Another important source of inspiration for Torvalds was Richard Stallman, one of the most influential advocates of open source software. Stallman, described by Torvalds as the “God of Free Software” (Torvalds and Diamond, 2001, p. 58), is known above all for his concept of “copyleft”. Where “copyright” prohibits or restricts the free circulation of knowledge, “copyleft” not only allows for this but demands that this right of freedom is passed on. It is precisely this that is thought to have made Linux such a revolutionary innovation. Torvalds does not, however, regard the free circulation of knowledge as the antithesis of commercialism, as Stallman’s views might suggest. Indeed Linux is available in both free and paid versions, for instance through the Nasdaq-listed Red Hat company. Although Linux can be installed free of charge, this does not explain its popularity at least in the business world where updates and technical support for operating systems and other software are always a bigger cost than the software itself. Torvalds explains the popularity of Linux by its technical superiority over competing products, i.e. Windows and Unix systems and, on other hand, by widespread anti-Windows sentiments in the IT community. In Torvalds’ words: Open source is about letting everybody play. Why should business, which fuels so much of society’s technological advancement, be excluded – provided that they play by the rules? (Torvalds and Diamond, 2001, p. 164).

The point to note in this connection is that logic behind the development of Linux and other open source software represents a rather exceptional way of organizing social action, one that is hardly applicable in typical work organizations except for rare exceptional cases, such as experimental and groundbreaking R&D. Although the community of amateur programmers who are still working to develop Linux are organized and regularly meet at professional conferences, the operating system originally came about as a result of a voluntary effort rather than paid contributions. Today, most open source program development takes place in private business companies. This is important because traditional wage labor, with all its problems and contradictions, still remains the foundation of social order. The visionaries who argue that we have all become creative knowledge workers are, unfortunately, in the wrong (Megill, 2004). The same goes for those who speak of the growth of a leisure-style work ethics at the expense of the Protestant ethics of duty (Himanen, 2001). Only a fraction of all IT experts are true innovators like Torvalds who enjoy relative freedom to exercise their creative imagination. In another sense, too, Linux is anything but a typical example of how R&D is organized in the IT industry: that is, the experts involved in the development effort have worked around a set operating system kernel, adding components to that core.

Linux’s programming core is an invariable, non-negotiable set of rules that provides the framework for all development. In other words that kernel defines the general parameters for the development of Linux, even though the course of that development and the ultimate destination remain open. It is because of this structure that Linux can be developed free from the constraints of time and place. Having said that, this is not an entirely ahierarchic exercise in the sense that Torvalds holds the copyright to the Linux brand and ultimately controls the programming kernel. In any event most business organizations, with the possible exception of small self-organizing teams composed of just a few experts, need bureaucracy and hierarchic power relations in order to coordinate their work, and in the last instance the course of business development is determined by the ever-changing markets and by customers’ needs and demands. Whereas the development of Linux can be compared to groundbreaking exploration, a typical IT project begins with an overview of customer demands and requirements and, if successful, concludes with an end-product that satisfies those demands – the less uncertainty there is between the beginning and end of the project, the more successful it can be considered. 4. Distributed work in the IT industry The two case studies for this research in the IT industry clearly highlighted the importance of adjusting to customer needs as well as the role of tacit knowledge. The analysis makes clear how virtual cooperation is drawn in different directions – it is very much a balancing act between the costs and benefits of distributed work. Organizational distribution was in neither case an unequivocally successful arrangement or a total failure; it was first and foremost a compromise dictated by customer demands. Although the observation about the importance of community and customer orientation may seem like stating the obvious, that observation is made especially interesting by the reported experiences of the interviewees about the contradictory structure of their work organizations. On the one hand it was recognized that distributed work was a necessity dictated by customers, on the other hand it was considered a hindrance to fruitful cooperation. In both organizations, the knowledge workers interviewed made it clear that what they wanted was not so much virtual interaction as closer physical interaction. 4.1. Research methodology and data The two case companies in this research are an IT consultancy business and a telecommunications operator. Both are large organizations by Finnish standards, and they have business operations outside Finland (employing several thousand persons in a number of countries). In addition to the work of tracing the histories and public visibility of the companies, informal discussions and non-participant observation, 11 interviews were conducted following the common guidelines of case study research (Yin, 1989). The decision was made to collect the data from one relatively small unit in each case. Together, the units represent a distinct organizational culture based on virtual teamworking thus making a suitable object for the study. In the IT consultancy, which markets itself as one of the leading builders of the information society, the focus was put on a team that was distributed between three different locations and that specialized in the development and maintenance of


371

TPM 15,7/8

372

information systems for the health care sector. First the unit’s leader was interviewed, after which follow-up informants were selected. These included four project managers, one programmer and the person in charge of the company’s occupational health and safety. The unit employs about 20 software architects. At the telecommunications operator, which had operations in six different locations, the unit concerned was called the “voice switching team”. The team is in charge of the repair and maintenance of nation-wide telephone and data network. In this case four operations experts and their supervisor were interviewed. As a whole, the voice switching team employs around 20 persons. The data were collected via focused semi-structured interviews in 2006 (Kvale, 1996; Rubin and Rubin, 2005). That is, all interviews followed a similar basic structure (themes), but depending on the situation, individual questions and the way the questions were asked varied. The following themes were explored in the interviews: . teamwork and project coordination; . telework; . the use of IT; . educational needs and the recruitment of new employees; . customer relations and collaborative networks; . organizational changes; . reward structures; and . work atmosphere. During the interviews new questions were also formulated spontaneously within the limits of the given themes. This strategy allowed for carrying out the interviews in a flexible yet systematic way. Since then, the author has maintained contact with the interviewees via e-mail and kept track of the businesses by monitoring media reports. Another methodological guideline was to treat the interviewees as informants. At the beginning of each interview it was emphasized that the interviewer was not interested in obtaining any delicate personal information or company-specific business secrets; the respondents were regarded as experts in their own field of proficiency. The interviewees were chosen to represent different positions in their corresponding organizations. In both case organizations the informants were contacted through one key person, who acted as a mediator between the interviewer and the organization. This allowed for the assessment of their suitability for the study. These key persons were critical to the smooth running of the study. Each interview, lasting up to 120 minutes, was tape-recorded and transcribed. After the first round of analysis, written feedback was provided to the participants; and, finally, this was followed by informal discussions. As a final methodological note, it is worth emphasizing that the results of the study apply to distributed expert organizations depending on virtual collaboration. It is apparent that a more balanced account of different organizations would be necessary in order to analyze distribute work on more general a level. 4.2. IT consultancy firm In recent years the IT consultancy has been wrestling with the same kinds of problems as most other businesses in the IT sector. The bursting of the technology stock bubble

in the new millennium and the readjustment of the industry to the new competitive environment meant that significant cost-saving exercises were needed in order to improve business performance and profitability. The situation has remained uneasy ever since. Many IT businesses missed the growth train in the aftermath of the technobubble, and in autumn 2008 the economic outlook nosedived yet again. Since the onset of the financial crisis that started in the USA, it has become much harder even for many successful businesses to secure the funding they need. However, IT industries learned a more valuable lesson from the bursting of the technobubble than they have from the current economic uncertainties. Following the downturn around the turn of the century, technology companies had to take a long hard look in the mirror and recognize that the only true measures of business viability were profitability and customer satisfaction. Although the consultancy firm suffered less damage from the technobubble and the slowdown of IT investments than many of its rivals, it was still unable to avoid painful redundancies and rationalizations. At the time of writing, rumors of a possible takeover are keeping staff at the company very much on the alert. The IT consultancy unit singled out for closer analysis was established in its present form at the beginning of 2003, following a decision to merge two formerly separate teams. This move was mainly motivated by the desire to improve customer service by pooling together a larger number of experts in public welfare services. As was noted above, information systems for the health sector are the company’s most important domestic market segment. Since the public sector is one of the consultancy’s most important customers and since the IT infrastructure both in Finnish local municipalities and in central government is highly fragmented, companies that provide IT support services need to have not only broad-ranging expertise, but also a local presence in all hospital districts throughout the country. It is estimated that there are up to 500 different information systems in use in the Finnish public health care sector alone, and most of these systems do not communicate with each other. There are several different platform systems, and in major hospitals there can be up to a couple of hundred clinical applications that are used by specialist doctors in their day-to-day work. The main reason for this extraordinary diversity is that health care units have had complete autonomy to decide on their IT acquisitions, even though it would clearly have made more sense to have a concerted investment program. As a consequence, the productivity benefits from new technology, for instance through electronic patient records, have remained rather elusive. Indeed, the integration of public sector information systems is one of the major challenges facing Finnish information society today. For reasons outlined above, the IT consultants interviewed felt that the regional distribution of their team gives the company a strategic competitive edge, even though it does hamper cooperation among individual employees. However, they saw no alternative to the distributed organizational structure. The maintenance of health care information systems requires a physical presence at the customer’s site and immediate response to customer feedback, as was pointed out by the project manager quoted here: I mean for the customer this is really excellent because we have these systems all around the country. This is one of our strengths, the fact that we have offices all around Finland. But


373

TPM 15,7/8

374

then it does present its own challenges for everyday work. You do perhaps lose that element of experience and tacit knowledge between employees. You certainly don’t get to know other people nearly as much (project manager, IT consultancy).

As well as contributing to more efficient customer service, the distributed organizational structure was considered to facilitate staff recruitment. Although most IT expertise in the country is concentrated in and around the Helsinki area, not all experts want to live in the most congested area of the country. For this reason it is essential that major IT firms have a presence at least in the country’s biggest university towns. The systems manager who raised this point did, however, remind of the drawbacks of distributed work: You won’t necessarily find the expertise you need in all sectors in one small town. IT is such a broad and diverse field that it’s impossible for any one person to know it all. Even though we’re geographically scattered, that doesn’t really matter too much so long as the job tasks are independent. The situation is certainly more difficult when you have two people in different locations working on the same project. That’s bound to cause problems. And then we also have these teleworkers. Full-time teleworking is always difficult to arrange; part-time or even two or three days a week is fine (Systems manager, IT consultancy).

The observation by this Systems manager regarding the difficulties of organizing full-time telework supports the earlier observations by the author of this article. Part-time telework is a good compromise. A few days a week of telework will not yet isolate the employee from the workplace community, but it will be enough to reap the benefits of telework. While the systems manager was critical of what can be achieved by distributed work, his superior, the team leader said he actively encouraged teleworking, especially if the initiative was taken by team members themselves. Nonetheless just one of the 20 experts on the team actually teleworked. The programmer in question had initially worked from home but then read from the local newspaper about a telework center nearby that was shared by several companies, suggested that he move there and eventually received the official permission from his employer. Among other employees in the unit, teleworking was more or less occasional and unofficial. From 1997 I worked at home on my own, via modem, and then in autumn 2001 this telework center came up. When I read about it in the newspaper I thought this was perfect for me. Fortunately the company decided to join in and gave me a laptop and permission to work from the center (programmer, IT consultancy).

However, even this programmer did not work from the telecottage full-time. According to his own estimate he spent about 40 percent of his working hours at the telecottage, while visits to customer sites, training and team meetings took up the remaining 60 percent. 4.3. Telecommunications operator’s maintenance diagnostics unit Whereas the IT consultancy’s distributed organizational structure was a necessity dictated by customer demands, the geographical distribution of the teleoperator’s maintenance diagnostics unit was a legacy inherited from the era of analogue telephone communications. In the 1970s and 1980s maintenance was still a local job and maintenance staff were based in the immediate vicinity of telephone exchanges. Now that all exchanges have been digitalized, the maintenance of telecommunications

has largely become a matter of remote diagnostics. Locating and resolving faults and malfunctions has become knowledge work in which the most important tool is the PC and the most important channel of communication the Internet. However, the telecommunications experts interviewed for this study were not in favor of centralizing maintenance diagnostics in one and the same place. Although most day-to-day repair jobs involve information system maintenance, the telecommunications infrastructure also requires physical maintenance and, occasionally, local troubleshooting. The interviewees acknowledged that maintenance diagnostics can, in principle, be done from anywhere there is a fast enough internet connection, but even the occasional need for physical presence is considered sufficient grounds for a distributed organizational structure. I mean this job used to be completely local, there was no way you could have done this remotely. You needed to have staffing in every location (operations expert 1, telecommunications operator). In the 1980s when the first digital exchanges were installed, our job description did change quite dramatically. You certainly didn’t need your soldering bit any more. Operations changed completely. We started out with these stupid terminals, but then came the PC and remote access. Things have really changed since the days of wiredrawing and soldering, it’s all on your PC now (operations expert 2, telecommunications operator).

The most surprising observation in the telecommunications company was that the knowledge workers interviewed said that company management had explicitly prohibited telework. However the head of the maintenance unit said that he did occasionally give permission for staff to work from home if they specifically asked. The company’s policy is all the more curious if one considers that, like its rivals, the telecommunications operator is in the business of marketing teleworking arrangements to both private and corporate clients: Well I’ve asked my superiors, both my former and my current boss. Both said that if you do the odd day and report it then that’s perfectly okay, but not on a permanent basis because apparently that’s not acceptable to management (operations expert 1, telecommunications operator).

The telecommunications operator’s attitude to teleworking can only be described as paradoxical. If it is unable or unwilling to promote telework in its own organization, how can it credibly market telework solutions and services to prospective customers? The teleoperator has subsequently revised its policy and begun to encourage telework among its own staff, but apparently with little success. After the interviews it transpired that a company-wide development project had been launched with a view to promoting telework. An outside consultant (who was not aware of the interviews conducted for this research) hired by the company contacted the author to ask his opinion about the benefits of telework. In his e-mail the consultant described the status quo with regard to telework as stagnant. The problem, he continued, was being addressed in the following ways: . people in jobs that lend themselves to telework and interested in doing telework can exchange their desktops for laptops;


375

TPM 15,7/8

.

.

376

with the completion of new office space, teleworkers can try out a hot-desking system where workstations are shared rather than delegated to individual employees; and teleworkers can sign fixed-term telework contracts with the telecommunications operator and revert to the old arrangement if it does not work out

When the author later got in touch with the consultant to ask how the project had been going, he replied cautiously that work was still in progress: Part of the reason is that our HR department has been overworked and has had neither the time nor the energy. But the situation is now clearing up and we’re trying to encourage HR to get back on track (consultant, personal e-mail message).

After this message, things remained quiet for a very long time; there were no e-mails from the consultant and no reports in the media. Indeed if the project had been an immediate success, it would undoubtedly have featured prominently in the national media. Instead, the company had launched a major push for videoconferencing in a bid to reduce foreign travel by staff. According to newspaper reports these efforts received a significant boost in autumn 2008 as the credit crunch continued to expand. Like many other businesses, the telecommunications operator announced it would be cutting travel expenses in the wake of the international downturn. 5. Increasing physical distance detracts from cooperation Despite the differences between the case companies reported above, there was one important feature that employees in both organizations shared in common: they all wanted to have closer face-to-face cooperation. Communication between employees in different locations was primarily by means of e-mail and telephone. The telecommunications operator also made active use of videoconferencing, as described above. Furthermore, the companies arranged regular team meetings to bring all team members together around the same table. This, however, was considered far from adequate to create a strong sense of cohesion and team spirit. The team leader in the IT consultancy made no secret of the problem. He said creating a team spirit was one of the key management challenges in his organization. He acknowledged that the team was relatively newly formed, and it is well known that the creation of a strong organizational culture is always a slow process. On the other hand, as the knowledge workers were distributed between three different locations, that was definitely not going to make the task any easier. So far there had been only a few joint meetings, and even among the people who worked in the same office there was hardly any real sense of togetherness. In the words of the team leader: Our community in the workplace is a series of closed doors along the corridor.

He was highly critical of teleworking: I don’t believe in all-out telework, and I hope no one else does either. All it does it passivates. I do, on the other hand, have great faith in different mixes of telework and ordinary work. They can help to create very flexible systems and arrangements in the workplace (team leader, IT consultancy).

Comments by team members reflected much the same kind of dissatisfaction with the current situation:

Well of course ideally the team would work more closely, but in our case this is just something that has been forced upon us. The team has been put together more or less artificially (project manager, IT consultancy).

At the telecommunications company, too, there were critical comments about the lack of cohesion and cooperation, although not quite as vocal and vociferous as in the IT consultancy. Here, learning on the job and inducting new employees were considered major challenges that caused problems with the division of labor. To some extent the problem was technical, but predominantly it was social and organizational. The telecommunications experts interviewed said that virtually everything they did in their job was based on and coordinated by the defects and malfunctions logbook. This is a register of all malfunctions reported by customers, and it includes statistical data on practical maintenance operations undertaken by individual employees. From the point of view of work and organizational processes, this kind of conveyor like coordination mechanism is seemingly very simple and efficient: as soon as the system reports a new fault, any employee who is available can answer the call and tackle the problem. In an ideal situation, this system would allow employees to deal with problems in the order they are reported, as soon as they have sorted the previous one. This, however, is not always how it works in practice. Some interviewees said that younger employees tend to shy away from more complex malfunctions as they are concerned they may fail and above all because they do not feel they can rely on the help and support of colleagues. Most of these difficult jobs, therefore, are left to the more senior experts. Help and advice is obviously available via telephone, e-mail and videoconferencing, all of which are in frequent use, but virtual cooperation is not considered a satisfactory substitute for the physical presence of another person. Another problem raised in the interviews was the lack of group pressure emanating from virtual teamwork: It’s not fair if half the people keep slogging away and then the other half just couldn’t care less, because I mean it’s easy in teamwork to get lazy because we don’t see each other. In a sense we can become invisible, you know just say I’m sorry but I’m a bit busy right now [. . .] (operations expert 1, telecommunications operator).

6. Conclusions and practical implications The dilemma between physical distance and the social function of work is not easy to resolve. The problem concerns not just organizations distributed to different locations or different countries. Even the simplest allocations of office space under the same roof can have a decisive impact on opportunities for cooperation and fruitful interaction. In his classical study Managing the Flow of Technology, Allen (1977) showed that in practice, R&D engineers working in traditional office settings only discussed their work with colleagues in neighboring rooms. As soon as the distance exceeded 30 meters, physical presence was no longer relevant to communication. Allen’s conclusion was that it makes virtually no difference whether employees are located 30 meters or 3,000 – kilometers apart! This perhaps explains why open plan offices have so widely replaced traditional office rooms. Although Allen’s conclusions should be taken with a pinch of salt, they do offer an interesting perspective on why it has proved difficult to distribute work across time


377

TPM 15,7/8

378

and place: physical proximity remains essential for fruitful collaboration in most jobs and especially in knowledge work teams. The findings presented in this article lend support to Allen’s work in an important way. In the case organizations studied, the absence of continuous face-to-face interaction resulted in a less than optimally balanced division of labor. The problem was inadequate mutual adjustment. Virtual cooperation was considered to hinder learning, collaborative problem-solving and the development of informal organizational culture (see also Be´langer, 1999; Bentley and Yoong, 2000). As a consequence, all this added up to a less than optimally balanced workload among individual workers. Indeed, common sense as well as practical experience tells that physical proximity fosters spontaneous interaction, which facilitates the creation and communication of tacit knowledge. For example, laying out team members’ offices in a circle around a central conference space, which also houses coffee machines, and so forth, is one design that encourages maximal informal contact among all team members (McDermott, 1995). The point is that when people are located close to each other, team members from different functions are more likely to have serendipitous conversations about problems as they encounter them, just like Allen observed over 30 years ago. Regardless of these critical remarks, distributed work has its advantages. As a matter of fact, practically all relevant studies concerning Finland indicate that this is a potentially useful way of arranging work in the future, possibly a win-win-situation for both employers and employees, offering more advantages than traditional arrangements (Hanhike, 1998; Luukinen, 1996; Pekkola, 1993; Pyo¨ria¨, 2003; Suomi and Pekkola, 1999; Vartiainen et al., 2007). However, in order to smooth out any problems that might occur, only a part-time distributed work arrangement is advisable. Although empirical evidence remains mixed and incomplete, available research suggests that partial work distribution has little disruptive impact on intra-organizational communication, which is one of the main concerns among employees pondering the pros and cons of staying out of the office (Duxbury and Neufeld, 1999). Some studies also indicate that most employees who are interested in teleworking would prefer to not stay away from the office longer than one to three days a week (Teo et al., 1998). If, however, a full-time telework arrangement is implemented, it should be ensured that teleworkers are provided with appropriate technical and educational support. Extra measures to compensate for isolation and to maintain professional relationships are also advisable. As a necessary minimum, there should be opportunities for regular meetings and engagement in informal social activities. Moreover, a teleworking initiative should never be imposed, and only those who show the right aptitude and desire to work in this way should be selected as teleworkers (Coulson-Thomas, 1991; for step-by-step guidelines for teleworkers and their managers see especially Gray et al., 1993; Nilles, 1998). Care must also be taken to ensure that prospective teleworkers’ communicative tasks are mostly asynchronous in type, for example involving e-mail or fax, which have the advantage of being spatially and temporally independent media. In turn, the analysis I have provided here indicates that tasks requiring a lot of synchronous communication, especially collaborative problem-solving and negotiation, are the least likely to be successfully distributed.

In spite of the unrealistic future visions, the distribution of work is now an everyday reality and, as has been shown above, work arrangements that are independent of time and place have their benefits. The regional distribution of work organizations, the expansion of business networks and telework are opportunities whose full potential has not yet been realized. References Allen, T.J. (1977), Managing the Flow of Technology. Technology Transfer and the Dissemination of Technological Information within the R&D Organization, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Beise, C.M., Niederman, F. and Mattord, H. (2004), “IT project managers’ perceptions and use of virtual team technologies”, Information Resources Management Journal, Vol. 17 No. 4, pp. 73-88. Be´langer, F. (1999), “Workers’ propensity to telecommute: an empirical study”, Information & Management, Vol. 35 No. 3, pp. 139-53. ´ Belanger, F. and Collins, R.W. (1998), “Distributed work arrangements: a research framework”, The Information Society, Vol. 14 No. 2, pp. 137-52. Benner, M. (2003), “The Scandinavian challenge: the future of advanced welfare states in the knowledge economy”, Acta Sociologica, Vol. 46 No. 2, pp. 132-49. Bentley, K. and Yoong, P. (2000), “Knowledge work and telework: an exploratory study”, Internet Research: Electronic Networking Applications and Policy, Vol. 10 No. 4, pp. 346-56. Blom, R., Melin, H. and Pyo¨ria¨, P. (2002), “Social contradictions in informational capitalism: the case of Finnish wage earners and their labor market situation”, The Information Society: An International Journal, Vol. 18 No. 5, pp. 333-43. Castells, M. and Himanen, P. (2002), The Information Society and the Welfare State. The Finnish Model, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Coulson-Thomas, C. (1991), “IT and new forms of organization for knowledge workers: opportunity and implementation”, Employee Relations, Vol. 13 No. 4, pp. 22-32. Davis, G.B. (2002), “Anytime/anyplace computing and the future of knowledge work”, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 45 No. 12, pp. 67-73. Davison, R., Be´langer, F., Ahuja, M. and Watson-Manheim, M.B. (2006), “Virtual work, teams and organisations”, Information Technology & People, Vol. 19 No. 4, pp. 299-322. Duxbury, L. and Neufeld, D. (1999), “An empirical evaluation of the impacts of telecommuting on intra-organizational communication”, Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, Vol. 16 No. 1, pp. 1-28. Gareis, K., Lilischkis, S. and Mentrup, A. (2008), “Mapping the mobile eworkforce in Europe”, in Andriessen, J.H.E. and Vartiainen, M. (Eds), Mobile Virtual Work. A New Paradigm?, Springer, Berlin, pp. 45-70. Gray, M., Hodson, N. and Gordon, G. (1993), Teleworking Explained, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester. Groth, L. (1999), Future Organizational Design. The Scope for the IT-based Enterprise, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester. Hanhike, T. (1998), “Telework and teleworkers at Siemens and Siemens Nixdorf in Finland”, in Suomi, R., Jackson, P., Hollme´n, L. and Aspna¨s, M. (Eds), Teleworking Environments: Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Telework, September 1-4, 1998, Turku, Finland, Turku Center for Computer Science, Turku, pp. 370-9.


379

TPM 15,7/8

380

Hertel, G., Geister, S. and Konradt, U. (1995), “Managing virtual teams: a review of current empirical research”, Human Resource Management Review, Vol. 15 No. 1, pp. 69-95. Himanen, P. (2001), The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age, Random House, New York, NY. Hinds, P. and Kiesler, S. (Eds) (2002), Distributed Work, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Hislop, D. (2002), “Mission impossible? Communicating and sharing knowledge via information technology”, Journal of Information Technology, Vol. 17 No. 3, pp. 165-77. Hislop, D. and Axtell, C. (2007), “The neglect of spatial mobility in contemporary studies of work: the case of telework”, New Technology, Work and Employment, Vol. 22 No. 1, pp. 34-51. Huws, U. (1991), “Telework: projections”, Futures, Vol. 23 No. 1, pp. 19-31. Information Technology & People (2006), Vol. 19 Nos 4, special issue on virtual work, teams and organizations. Jackson, P. (Ed.) (1999), Virtual Working: Social and Organisational Dynamics, Routledge, London. Koski, H., Rouvinen, P. and Yla¨-Anttila, P. (2002), “ICT clusters in Europe: the great central banana and the small Nordic potato”, Information Economics and Policy, Vol. 14 No. 2, pp. 145-65. Kvale, S. (1996), InterViews: An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA. Lehto, A-M. and Sutela, H. (2009), The Findings of Finnish Quality of Work Life Surveys 1977–2008, Statistics Finland, Helsinki, (forthcoming). Luukinen, A. (Ed.) (1996), Directions of Telework in Finland. Report by the Finnish Experience with Telework Project, Ministry of Labour, Helsinki. McDermott, R. (1995), “Working in public – learning in action: designing collaborative knowledge work teams”, in Beyerlein, M.M., Johnson, D.A. and Beyerlein, S.T. (Eds), Knowledge Work in Teams. II of Advances in Interdisciplinary Studies of Work Teams, JAI Press, Greenwich, CT, pp. 35-59. Megill, K.A. (2004), Thinking for a Living: The Coming Age of Knowledge Work, K.G. Saur, Mu¨nchen. Moon, J.Y. and Sproull, L. (2002), “Essence of distributed work: the case of the Linux kernel”, in Hinds, P. and Kiesler, S. (Eds), Distributed Work, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 381-404. Morgan, R.E. (2004), “Teleworking: an assessment of the benefits and and challenges”, European Business Review, Vol. 16 No. 4, pp. 344-57. Nandhakumar, J. and Baskerville, R. (2006), “Durability of online networking: patterns of trust”, Information Technology & People, Vol. 19 No. 4, pp. 371-89. Nilles, J.M. (1998), Managing Telework. Strategies for Managing the Virtual Workforce, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY. Pekkola, J. (Ed.) (1993), Telework – A New Touch. Flexiwork Perspectives in the European and Nordic Labour Markets, Ministry of Labour, Helsinki. Polanyi, M. (1966), The Tacit Dimension, Doubleday, New York, NY. Pyo¨ria¨, P. (2003), “Knowledge work in distributed environments: issues and illusions”, New Technology, Work and Employment, Vol. 18 No. 3, pp. 166-80. Pyo¨ria¨, P. (2005), “The concept of knowledge work revisited”, Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 9 No. 3, pp. 116-27.

Pyo¨ria¨, P. (2007a), “Informal organizational culture: the foundation of knowledge workers’ performance”, Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 11 No. 3, pp. 16-30. ¨ ¨ Pyoria, P. (2007b), Understanding Work in the Age of Information. The Finnish Model of an Information Society, VDM Verlag Dr Mu¨ller, Saarbru¨cken. Rasmussen, L.B. and Wangel, A. (2007), “Work in the virtual enterprise – creating identities, building trust, and sharing knowledge”, AI & Society, Vol. 21 Nos 1-2, pp. 184-99. Rubin, H.J. and Rubin, I.S. (2005), Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data, 2nd ed., Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA. Ruiz, Y. and Walling, A. (2005), “Home-based working using communication technologies”, Labour Market Trends, Vol. 113 No. 10, pp. 417-26. Statistics Finland (2004), On the Road to the Finnish Information Society IV, Statistics Finland, Helsinki. Steinbock, D. (2004), What Next? Finnish ICT Cluster and Globalization, Ministry of the Interior Finland, Helsinki. Stenmark, D. (2000), “Leveraging tacit organizational knowledge”, Journal of Management Information Systems, Vol. 17 No. 3, pp. 9-24. Suomi, R. and Pekkola, J. (1999), “Management rationalities and virtual working: adjusting telework to different organisational cultures and rationalities”, in Jackson, P. (Ed.), Virtual Working: Social and Organisational Dynamics, Routledge, London, pp. 121-30. Suomi, R., Luukinen, A., Pekkola, J. and Zamindar, M. (1998), “Telework – the critical management dimension”, in Jackson, P. and van der Wielen, J.M. (Eds), Teleworking: International Perspectives: From Telecommuting to the Virtual Organisation, Routledge, London, pp. 329-36. Taskin, L. and Edwards, P. (2007), “The possibilities and limits of telework in a bureaucratic environment: lessons from the public sector”, New Technology, Work and Employment, Vol. 22 No. 3, pp. 195-207. Teo, T.S.H., Lim, V.K.G. and Wai, S.H. (1998), “An empirical study of attitudes towards teleworking among information technology (IT) personnel”, International Journal of Information Management, Vol. 18 No. 5, pp. 329-43. Torvalds, L. and Diamond, D. (2001), Just for Fun. The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary, Texere, New York, NY. Vartiainen, M., Hakonen, M., Koivisto, S., Mannonen, P., Nieminen, M.P., Ruohoma¨ki, V. and Vartola, A. (2007), Distributed and Mobile Work. Places, People and Technology, Otatieto, Helsinki. Yin, R.K. (1989), Case Study Research. Design and Methods, rev. ed., Sage, London. About the author Pasi Pyo¨ria¨ received his doctorate in the social sciences (sociology) from the University of Tampere, Finland. He has co-authored two books on the Finnish information society. He has published in The Journal of Knowledge Management, The Information Society, New Technology, Work and Employment and Team Performance Management. Pasi Pyo¨ria¨ can be contacted at [email protected]

To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: [email protected] Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints


381