Boundaryless Workforce Vary by Workers' Age, Position, Company Size - Ceridian Employer Services

These results on generational differences are just one of eight key themes and findings identified in Ceridian’s original research, "The Boundaryless Workforce." The study surveyed senior executives, human resource managers, boundaryless workers and their direct managers on the challenges and benefits of the new work arrangements. For purposes of this study, the boundaryless workforce was defined as work arrangements that include one of the following practices: telecommuting, virtual teams, flexible time and pay plans, and temporary, project-based professionals.

"With 91 percent of companies using some form of boundaryless work practice and most planning on increasing their usage in the future, it's clear that boundaryless work is here to stay," said Robert Digby, senior vice president of marketing for Ceridian Employer Services. "The survey shows that the successful use of these arrangements depends on the technology tools that are put in place and the overall planning related to the effort."

Key Themes and Findings

1. Current and future practices: Ninety-one percent of respondents currently are using boundaryless arrangements, and many plan to increase their usage in the next two years.

2. Technology tools and resources: Boundaryless workers and their managers are two-to-three times more likely than senior executives to endorse investing in technology tools and training to make boundaryless work arrangements successful.

• Detailed Finding – 47 percent of workers and 41 percent of managers support providing boundaryless workers with employee self service software, compared to only 14 percent of senior executives. Self service lets employees access personal information such as home addresses, benefits declarations and W-2 forms from remote locations by using the Internet or a company intranet.

3. Attracting and retaining workers: Half of respondents said boundaryless work arrangements are highly successful in attracting workers, and 60 percent said they are highly successful in retaining employees.

4. Generational differences: Younger workers are twice as likely as older workers to see more benefits and fewer problems with boundaryless work arrangements.

• Detailed Finding – 31 percent of workers and managers over the age of 50 believe boundaryless workers are less respected than their traditional counterparts, compared to 10 percent of workers and managers ages 19-29 and 13 percent of workers and managers ages 30-39.

5. Professional growth and work-life balance: Workers ages 30-39 are almost twice as likely as other age groups to say that boundaryless work arrangements contribute to greater job satisfaction and work-life balance.

6. Productivity: Approximately half of all respondents said that boundaryless work arrangements increase employee productivity. This contrasts sharply with the opinions of boundaryless workers and their managers – only 17 percent believe they are more productive than traditional workers.

7. Employee and job success factors: One fourth of the managers surveyed believe boundaryless arrangements have negative ramifications for boundaryless workers.

• Detailed Finding – 24 percent of managers believe boundaryless work has a negative impact on an employee’s career, compared to only 10 percent of workers.

8. Company preferences: Larger companies and multi-site companies are more likely to use boundaryless work practices than smaller companies and single-site companies.

• Detailed Finding – 52 percent of companies with more than 5000 employees currently offer telecommuting, compared to 27 percent of companies with less than 100 employees.

"The study shows that younger workers – the future of the workforce – believe they can use technology to maintain a strong connection with the office, regardless of where they are," Digby said. "With so many workers saying they are comfortable using resources like intranets, automated time and attendance, and employee self service, boundaryless work will only become more important in the coming years. Companies that find the right ways to use boundaryless work today stand to gain a great competitive advantage in the future."

Methodology

The study compared and contrasted the perceptions of 401 randomly-selected senior executives, human resource managers, boundaryless workers and their direct managers on issues arising from the use of these arrangements. It also examined the current and projected use of boundaryless workforces, implementation challenges, effects on productivity and worker careers, and technology and resources needed to support these new work arrangements. An independent research firm conducted the survey in the third quarter of 1998. The sampling error is plus or minus 5 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level. From Ceridian Employer Services

"The Space Race", Paul Weinberg, Report on Business, Nov '97

Get ready for an office setup where – guess what? – you may not even have your own desk. It’s called hotelling, and its boosters have no reservations: This is the ’90s way to go "Gruesome,” is how Bob Izsak describes that final week about two and a half years ago, when most of the employees at the Toronto office of the Deloitte & Touche Consulting Group were formally stripped of their permanent offices and told to surrender voluminous paper files. The orders were clear: Shred the files, store them in the central filing system or take some of them home. All new data were to be stored on the computer network.

“You knew who was going to accept this and who was going to reject it just by whether they’d cleaned out their office or not,” recalls Izsak, director of technology at Deloitte & Touche. That, and who was or was not smiling.

Welcome to hotelling, where no one “owns” a workspace any more. Instead, in a process managed and maintained by a co-ordinator, or “concierge,” spare desks, offices and conference rooms are booked for the time required through an elaborate reservation software system, which also directs the employees’ telephone calls to their apportioned location. At Deloitte, each consultant is allowed only one or two personal file drawers, depending on seniority, for a limited number of paper files.

Hotelling might be described as the structural and cultural underpinnings for the mobile workforce, where outbound employees carry their entire office on their portable computers, and E-mail and important documents are moved back and forth electronically between a client site and the office LAN (local area network) or the corporate data base.

New to Canada, hotelling is a cost-saving strategy that has started to show up in the management-consulting, financial and high-technology sectors, in which organizations find themselves with a lot of unused leased office space because their employees are out much of the time visiting and serving clients. Originating in the United States, where to date it has gained a greater toehold than it has in Canada, hotelling is very much a product of the 1990s, says one of its leading advocates, Michael Brill, president of the Buffalo Organization for Social and Technological Innovation (BOSTI) and a professor of architecture at the University of Buffalo with a special interest in office design and systems analysis. “What happens is that organizations trying to be frugal with resources look around their offices and say, ‘This is a ghost town,’” says Brill, who thinks more desk-bound, sedentary jobs such as computer programming and senior management are not likely to be hotelled unless there is a lot of selling that takes place out of the office.

Neither Brill nor his Canadian counterparts have any statistics on how far hotelling has penetrated business or government in North America, although Brill notes that in the United States, virtually all of the client-serving positions in the financial services sector are hotelled. Here in Canada, Bob Fortier, a former federal Treasury Board official specializing in telework and other flexible work arrangements, currently an independent consultant and president of the Canadian Telework Association, says that hotelling is still such a relatively new concept that it has not yet received the attention of data-collecting bodies such as Statistics Canada.

Advertising agencies would appear to be a natural milieu for flexible work arrangements, but so far, with the exception of the widely publicized “virtual office” at TBWA Chiat/Day, hotelling has not yet penetrated the well-established ones. Among the smaller and newer boutique agencies, where recent developments in office technology have made working at home or on the road more feasible, it’s another story. “It’s the way people operate these days,” says Patrick Allossery, editor of Strategy, a Canadian marketing trade publication.

One area where hotelling is being seriously considered in Canada is the federal public service, where BOSTI president Michael Brill is currently advising a hotelling pilot project at the Toronto-North York office of Revenue Canada. With his fire-engine red suspenders and frenzied hair (“my wife refers to it as the crazed rabbi look,” he jokes), Brill hardly fits the image of a corporate planner. Nevertheless, he credits himself with inventing hotelling in the early ’90s, at the Chicago office of Ernst & Young, when they were consolidating three buildings into one. His organization had been hired not only to analyze the way the work was organized, but also to try to determine if there were opportunities to use less space. “What we recommended for their auditors and management consultants, who were out 65% to 90% of the time,” he says, “was literally running the place like a hotel.”

Ironically, BOSTI itself has not been hotelled. Brill’s explanation is that despite being consultants, he and the staff are usually in their offices, and use each other’s spaces constantly. In any case, hotelling is an inevitable part of the competitive process in the economy, he insists. Others, however, like Larry Haiven, associate professor of industrial relations and organizational behaviour at the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Commerce, suggest that many of the current business restructuring fads, such as re-engineering and rightsizing, “end up damaging organizations.” Robert Propst, who invented the now-ridiculed office cubicle 30 years ago, has publicly expressed his regret at the negative impact his workplace aid has had on the mental health of employees by packing the maximum number of people into the minimum amount of space. Hotelling, the newest restructuring trend, does genuinely appear to cut office leasing costs, but it also tampers with the idiosyncratic way jobs are accomplished. As British essayist Bruce Chatwin put it, although human beings are natural wanderers, they contradictorily “have the emotional, if not the actual biological, need for a base, cave, den, tribal territory, possessions or port.”

Chatwin could almost have been describing the Mississauga, Ont., office of Revenue Canada, where each day, in a stripped-down version of hotelling, 250 outbound auditors laden with files have to compete for desks on a first come first served basis. No reservation system is in place to co-ordinate demand for space. The result: a bullpen of tension, frayed nerves – even fistfights – in a profession not known for excitability. “Every person becomes territorial, even though they’re supposed to share,” says one of the auditors, who is also a local union steward. “A desk that’s free in the morning when you come in might be claimed by another person who comes in 15 minutes later and says, ‘Hey, that’s my desk, my special chair.’”

The poisoned atmosphere at the Mississauga Revenue Canada office, where 75% of the auditors have filed individual grievances against the employer through the collective bargaining system, does not augur well for their ability to catch tax cheats and bring in valuable revenue for a supposedly cash-strapped federal government. Siu Lai, a full-time auditor and member of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), the local branch of the union that represents the auditors, says it doesn’t help that there’s been no pay raise for federal workers for the past six years.

While a spokesperson for the local management dismisses these views as the complaints of a few disgruntled auditors, hotelling’s detractors challenge that assertion. Ralph Herman, a spokesperson for PIPSC, says that hotelling, in its various incarnations, hurts productivity because it eliminates the informal socializing and learning among employees sitting next to each other. “As an auditor, just like in any profession, you need to talk to your associates. You need to run ideas past them. What do they think about something like this? Have they seen this before?”

Michael Brill, who has introduced hotelling at another Revenue Canada branch in North York, makes no claims that it will boost employee productivity. “There are no drops in job performance or job satisfaction; there are no increases either,” he says. “But then, it is not designed to increase job performance or job satisfaction.”

The 400 auditors at North York, also members of PIPSC, are not exactly thrilled with the loss of their permanent workspaces under the hotelled arrangement now in place there, but there’s been no hailstorm of grievances against the employer. That could be because a better planned, $2.5-million hotelling pilot project complete with a reservation system, which has been under way here for about two years, appears to be working well enough that local management provides tours for interested parties from the private sector. It’s hard to quantify the savings achieved, since in that same period there has also been a merger of the GST and income tax offices within the department. Nevertheless, the pilot project is a model for what might transpire for this and other federal government departments, says Don Renaud, a verification and enforcement section manager for Revenue Canada in North York. He estimates that in his branch, where auditors are out of the office 50% to 80% of the time, there is a ratio of three or four auditors to one workstation. But that ratio is meaningless, counters soft-spoken auditor and local union steward Al Lalli, because it includes, in addition to full workstations, less attractive workspaces such as the lunchroom and “touch-down” spaces – small cushioned chairs that his members use only when nothing else is available. So far, the auditors have reluctantly accepted the situation, but this might change, he says, when waves of newly hired auditors begin arriving, with no apparent plans by management to expand available office space. “Talk to me in four or five months. It may not be as calm here.”

Lalli also says the technology is “less than was promised,” although improvements are gradually being introduced. Teams of auditors are supposed to share a “neighbourhood” of workspaces, but sometimes a miscalculation occurs in the reservation system and not everyone can be accommodated. Other frustrations have included insufficient storage space, and touch-screen reservation terminals that were not always functional.

Brill suggests that losing a permanent workspace is “probably a minor inconvenience” for nomadic professions like consulting. Yet even at Deloitte, it took a year before hotelling was fully accepted by the staff, Bob Izsak says. “It was a tough transition,” adds hotelling co-ordinator Sandra Durocher, who still occasionally takes flak from disgruntled employees. “People thought it would go away.”

On the fateful day that the Toronto consultants were told to pack up their personal belongings, they had already been bombarded with messages from the managing partner emphasizing hotelling’s importance for their operation’s success. Attempts were made to lighten up the proceedings: Employees were given bathrobes to wear with “Hotel Deloitte Touche” printed on the back. And in three-hour mandatory sessions, they had their questions answered by outside specialists described by Lynda Brest, a Deloitte & Touche consultant and a change management specialist, as “specialized facilitators who are good at surfacing conflict and resistance, and helping the group work toward a resolution of it.”

Still, junior employees were particularly resentful at having to give up their permanent offices while more senior people – about 60 out of 250 consultants in the Toronto branch – managed to keep theirs. While this was not reversed, senior people have been requested to give up their spaces for others when they are unoccupied.

More pressure was put on the minority of “malingerers” who attempted an end run around the hotelling system, Lynda Brest recalls. Their tactics included delaying the office cleanup, sitting in space that had not been reserved, or booking space for a block of time just to ensure that nobody else would have a crack at a favoured spot.

Some kinks do remain in the Deloitte hotelling system. At times, there are more consultants than workspace available, which can result in having to double up. This “overbooking” is caused by continued growth for the consulting practice in the Toronto office, coupled with the policy of drawing in expertise for local projects from other sections of the Deloitte global organization. Durocher is confident, however, that the problem will be resolved once more offices are available on another floor in their office building. Which makes at least one of hotelling’s goals – the need for less leased real estate – appear somewhat illusive, at least for the foreseeable future.