By Melanie Turek
Senior Vice President, Nemertes Research

New York--January 2005. It will come as no surprise that enterprises are becoming increasingly “virtual” every day. But the term “virtual workplace” is often defined in different ways. For some companies, virtual workers are those who work in truly remote offices, across the country or the globe. For others, virtual workers spend most of their time on the road. But we believe the true definition of virtual workers is this: employees who are physically separated from their managers, co-workers and/or immediate reports, even if they themselves work at a headquarters or large satellite corporate office.

Although a significant number of companies report a large number of employees working away from headquarters—as much as 90% on average, according to Nemertes’ benchmark, “Convergence: Reality at Last,”—that doesn’t mean those employees are necessarily “virtual.” Employees who work together with their team members and managers in a location separate from headquarters may require a unique network architecture, but as far as collaboration goes, there may be nothing virtual about it. More relevant are those employees who regularly interact with other employees who are located in different buildings, cities, or even countries; who span a variety of time zones; and who may or may not share the same documents and applications.

“It’s a way of life that’s occurred over a number of years—we’re moving people around and changing roles, and lots of people work at home,” says the CTO at a professional services firm. “Also, it’s a big goal to limit turnover. Ensuring we can make our IT staffers happy and effective is what makes that happen.” How to keep them happy? One way is to let them work from home or small offices located close to where they live, says the CTO, noting that he’s had only two IT employees leave the company in the past two years.

One multi-billion dollar company has 80% of its employees stationed in remote offices, and 15% in home offices full time. Why? “Cost savings. Business-expansion requirements. And people like the idea of more flexibility,” says the firm’s director of communications and networking.

Business growth accounts for a lot of the change Nemertes sees in the number of virtual workers. “Some groups have grown faster than other groups, and you just can’t locate the new people where they maybe need to be,” says an IT director at a billion-dollar professional services company. “We’re more flexible in working with people to retain them as employees. Also, we have a lot of services, but our value proposition comes from working with all of them, and that requires teamwork, even across boundaries.”

Except in very discrete cases, most employees need to work with others outside their immediate team or peer group at some time or another, and often they need to do so on a regular basis. That’s where the virtual workplace gets interesting—and that’s where real-time communications technologies come in.

Nemertes’ research shows that as many as 90% of employees are working in remote offices—that is, corporate offices ranging in size from one employee to thousands, and which are not considered a headquarters location. The number generally varies according to company size: Smaller companies are more likely to have a larger percentage of workers at headquarters. Almost all participants expect the number of remote-office workers to grow, both as their businesses grow (especially through mergers and acquisitions) and as they try to cut costs by taking advantage of lower-cost office and facilities fees in smaller cities and suburban locations.

It’s still rare for companies to have a large number of home-based workers, which we define as employees who work at home full time, and who don’t have an office at a corporate location. On average, participants report that 8% of employees are full-time home-based workers. A significantly larger percentage report allowing employees to work from home part-time, however.

Employees who spend a large amount of their time on the road pose an interesting challenge for IT, and for business managers. These employees usually have an office at a corporate location, but often they are not in them. They need access to their co-workers and their applications both as office-based employees and as remote workers.

On the technology front, they often do not have access to a PC or high-speed Internet connection, which makes them poor candidates for participation in video or Web conferences. But they are heavy users of Blackberries and other mobile devices, so they’re usually available by instant e-mail, and, if their companies offer it, wireless IM. Audio conferences also are very popular among this population, which is ripe for find-me/follow-me capabilities and others that simplify the task of calling into such an event (including finding the right bridge number and ID information). And because road warriors are often sales people, service technicians, and other types of employees who regularly engage with back-end systems such as customer relationship management programs and supply chain software, they are in a position to leverage real-time alerts and updates—bots that automate information delivery and action.

But road warriors are also, as a general rule, quite independent. They’re often used to working on their own, with little immediate supervision or monitoring. As a result, getting them to adopt real-time communications technologies that involve presence, and threaten to infringe on that same independence, can be a challenge.

Indeed, while disparately located workers can clearly benefit from real-time communications—because the people they need to speak with most, and most often, are by the nature of their situation difficult to see and reach—they are often also the ones who need the most convincing to use it. Addressing such cultural barriers is the first step to a successful implementation.

Melanie Turek is Principal Research Analyst and senior partner at Nemertes Research LLC, a leading research firm that provides in-depth analysis of the business value of emerging technologies. Ms. Turek can be reached at 970-871-6110 or melanie@nemertes.com.