In reviewing the previous post, it is noted that even though we came up with more drawbacks for the employee as a remote communicator, the benefits still outweighed the drawbacks in the long run, due to a better quality of life. But now, let’s talk about the benefits and drawbacks for an organization when working with employees who are telecommunicating remotely.
Benefits for the organization
- Decreasing real estate costs as the writer takes up less work space within the organization.
- Decreasing productivity costs as the employee is paid only when services are needed and completed.
- Having access to the employee 24/7 for immediate and urgent discussions.
- Having skilled, experienced, and trusted professional work accomplished any time anywhere.
- Pressing changes can be immediately communicated to the remote employee.
- Transmitting documents between the remote employee and the organization can be immediately achieved without losing any down time.
- Working and communicating with more remote workers with different skill sets, talents, and concepts can bring more innovations to the organization.
Drawbacks for the organization
- Lacking or loss of good communication.
- Conveying what the organization requires from the remote communicator is challenging.
- Coordinating last-minute meetings can be difficult and stressful.
- Missing team dynamics due to absent members can lead to a decrease in good relationships.
- Losing confidentiality of work required can be detrimental to the organization.
- Increasing costs due to longer conversations resulting from not being able to have one-on-one quick conversations. This can increase costs exponentially especially when there are immediate simple changes that must be made, but the explanation for the change takes more time to explain than to execute.
- Failing to get immediate questions answered. This can cause delays especially if the remote worker is in a different time zone and the result leads to missed deliverables.
- Misunderstanding the environment, goals, and mindset of the organization can occur, especially if the organization deals with global practices.
- Receiving unexpected poor quality or inferior work from the remote writer.
- Losing control over time and expenses relating to the project.
- Losing control of immediate availability of service hence resulting in poor work quality.
- Decreasing in the quality of work received if the writer is based in another country which uses different terms or spellings.
From reviewing both posts, it seems like there are more disadvantages than benefits for good communication between the remote worker and the organization, but companies and individuals still hire flexible writers, organizers, developers, or workers in any field where flexibility is an option. Hence, even though a number of drawbacks seem to exist, having remote workers can be beneficial for both entities as long as good communication is maintained. This is also assuming that the organizations would not hire the remote communicator or writer if they did not trust the employee nor feel that they could not produce consistent quality work.
What have your experiences been for working with telecommunicating workers? What were your positives and negatives?
Gail Zack Anderson, President of Applause, Inc., has nearly 20 years experience in training and coaching. She
provides individual presentation coaching, and leads effective presentation workshops and effective trainer workshops.
Theresa Pojuner is a Documentation Specialist with over 20 years of writing experience and is skilled in many areas of documentation, for example, Style Guides, Training Manuals and Test Cases, wth a specialty n Technical Writing and Procedures.