A CRITIQUE ON TWO CHEERS FOR THE VIRTUAL OFFICE
 (THOMAS H. DAVENPORT, KERI PEARLSON)
Source: Sloan Management Review, Summer 1998
by Hari Rajagopalan, Management Development Institute, Gurgaon.

"Only connect, that was the whole of her sermon Live in fragments no longer Only connect ... ... ... " These lines are from E. M. Forster's "Howard's End".

In today's context, they stand for the need to connect and constantly do so without compromising on human relations. More significantly, when the workplace is increasingly transforming into a virtual office where there are no boundaries of space and time, the effective management of the workforce screams for attention.

The title itself makes a statement in that it says "two cheers" and not "three cheers", as is commonly used. To the observant reader, it would seem that Davenport and Pearlson have laid their cards face-up on the table. But this is merely a reflection of the general direction that the article has taken - upbeat about the benefits of a virtual office although apprehensive about the cost in terms of loss of organizational culture, employee bonding with the company and the slow death of face-to-face communication.

The authors conducted a survey of hundred Fortune 500 companies during the summer of 1995 to find out how common the phenomenon of virtual offices is; where they are found and how managers react to it. Also, the authors interviewed managers and workers at ten firms where virtual offices were firmly entrenched. While the survey looks at the issues related to virtual offices from a quantitative viewpoint, the interviews give the reader a better understanding of the ground situation.

The potential benefits of a virtual office arrangement include - cost savings (especially those relating to maintaining an establishment), increased productivity and morale, higher flexibility, better handling of employees who are not willing to relocate and the ability to turn the organization into a 24/7 operation.

The other issues to be handled when shifting to virtual office solutions are mainly people issues. While the authors have handled matters such as isolation of workers due to computer-mediated communication, lack of cohesion among group workers, distraction etc, they have been ambiguous about the specific direction the workplace of the future will take. This is possibly because they know that nothing is more dangerous than prophesying about the future.

The perception among a section of workers is that in the virtual set-up the tight leash of management only gets tighter. It is merely that the lines representing control have been glossed over by the wired office. For the un-empowered remote worker, it merely is a transfer from the iron cage to the doghouse.

The virtual office presents a plethora of interesting issues for that centre around new forms of control. How is control maintained when there is no direct supervision? How will control function when organizational members are dispersed throughout a number of locations and working odd hours to suit their creative and work needs? If not, what mechanisms arise to provide coordination and some unity of goal direction?

These questions assume that the virtual office is less controlled, in some ways, than traditional organizations. Another worthy line of investigation is whether instead the virtual office actually increases the opportunity for top management control via surveillance of online activities and higher time demands, extending into the organizational
members' home lives.

These control issues foretell potential tension between owners or high level executives and employees. How do these groups symbolically construct meanings for the virtual office? Do they create rival understandings or compatible visions of their organization? These questions will remain unanswered till virtual offices become the natural way of doing business.

It would make sense if any kind of business that is purely white-collar and information-intensive goes the virtual way because the primary thing being moved around is information, and with telephones and the Internet, that's a very easy thing to do. But issues of trust, teamwork and effective substitute or otherwise for face-to-face communication and visual control will have to be sorted out as and when they arise.

Davenport and Pealson rightly indicate that managing people, information, teams, processes and facilities, however, they have skirted around the legal issues regarding responsibilities and authority. They have also highlighted the fact that, for people with a high need for affiliation and social contact, the shift to virtual office is likely to lead to lower satisfaction.

It might seem that the authors have relied more on the interview than the survey for their conclusions, but that is probably the best way to go about it since the implications of virtual offices are barely being understood fully by academics and management alike.