The other day I came across an online issue of Foreign Policy magazine, and its author said there are two ways to dramatically reduce oil consumption:

(1) Use railways instead of trucking to ship commodities more than 100 miles; and

(2) Distribute the workforce by allowing individuals to labor off-site, mostly from home.

Telecommuting has been tried, with only partial success. Why hasnt it really taken hold?

I believe it hasnt caught on because were used to managing personalities instead of results.

Take a call center as an example.

Walk through it and you can see who is on the line, engaged with customers and who is goofing off. A stern glance at someone can tell them youre displeased and he should get back to work.

Likewise, a smile can serve as a small reward to acknowledge that someone is doing the right thing.

While there are ways to monitor electronic activity remotely, theyre not as effective as eyeballing your associates.

Without the ability to be in a workers immediate presence, managers feel at a loss, and if someone is out of view, he could be doing anything with his time. This is, at present, organizationally unacceptable.

We need to define work carefully in terms of results if we want to manage telecommuters.

That call center can be distributed, and today, many are, with associates making their calls from home. If reps are being asked to set appointments, their productivity is easily measured, using traditional means such as determining the number of appointments per hour (APH) theyre getting.

But productivity of this type cant be easily or quickly improved.

You have to know when reps are on or off the presentation, and this is difficult to track and correct if youre separated by 50 miles.

Still, its not impossible.

We need to devise new tools for monitoring, measuring, managing, and motivating the remote workforce. When we have done this, we can save gas, while making work more enjoyable and achieving.