Why Off-Site Employees Feel Virtually Disconnected

The University of Texas at Austin, McCombs School of Business -

The evolution of communications technology has made it easy for companies to connect
with employees even when they aren’t at the office. But despite the conveniences
of telecommuting, video conferencing, and cloud computing, the potential downsides
of the virtual workplace often go overlooked.

Caroline Bartel, associate professor of management at the McCombs School of Business,
recently completed a study that examines the ways “virtual work” affects employees who work
outside the office, isolated from coworkers. In many cases, these employees start to feel
disconnected from company culture and come to believe they are less respected in their
organizations than their colleagues who work together in person.

Bartel and her coauthors, Amy Wrzesniewski of Yale University and Batia Wiesenfeld at New York
University, examined the relationship between virtual employees’ degree of physical isolation
and their perceived respect in the organization, hypothesizing that the two are negatively
associated. This relationship would explain the tendency for isolated virtual employees to
identify less with the missions of their organizations.

Survey data collected in the study supported this idea. Full-time virtual employees (both recent
hires and veterans) at two different technology companies reported feeling a significant
disconnect between themselves and the rest of their organizations.

"They were feeling removed from the organization in such a way that they felt as though their
status in the organization had dropped considerably,” Bartel says. “That drop in status made
them feel as though they were not respected members.”

Isolation Erodes Perceived Respect

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of American employees who
telecommute at least once a month has more than doubled since 2001, reaching a peak
of about 20 million in 2008. Also the proportion of telecommuters in the labor force increased
from 8 percent in 2006 to 11 percent in 2008. However, there has been an overall decrease
in the proportion of employees that telecommute almost every day — from 51 percent in 2006
to 40 percent in 2008 — suggesting that virtual work is becoming more of an occasional practice
rather than a permanent arrangement for employees.

Many organizations, notably IT companies and government agencies, make virtual work
arrangements to cut the costs of operating multiple offices, or to accommodate employees
whose positions require them to work elsewhere. Bartel wanted to look beyond those surface
goals and examine how these arrangements affect an employee’s relationship with the
organization.

This is a common theme in much of Bartel’s work — it begins with basic observations about
common workplace practices and leads to deeper questions about their unintended
consequences: “Here’s an interesting practice. Here are the obvious reasons why it’s been
implemented. Here are the effects that are showcased, but what else may be going on there —
especially when you're talking about fundamentally changing how people are doing their work,”
Bartel says.

The study defines “perceived respect” as an employee’s personal sense of where they stand
in the organization based on their interactions with others and the feedback they receive. To
measure this, the researchers conducted two sets of surveys. The first went to recent hires
at a large technology firm. A second set of surveys was given to longer-tenured employees
at a different firm. The results of the two were very similar, reinforcing the hypothesis that
physical isolation and perceived respect are inversely correlated.

Bartel says the research also suggests that isolation negatively affects employees regardless
of how long they have worked at a company. Employees who cannot participate in the same
activities and traditions as those who work on site tend to feel disconnected at some level.

Additionally, the survey results indicated that employees are well aware of the negative
influences of isolation. One open-ended question asked respondents to make statements
about how physical isolation affects their status at the company — the researchers categorized
84 percent of the responses to this question as negative, and just 16 percent as positive.

Consequences of Disconnection

Bartel says employees generally feel respected when managers and coworkers hold them up
to the same standards as everyone else at the organization. On the other hand, they feel
disrespected when they are held to different, inappropriate standards or excluded altogether.

The study identifies two main types of disrespect at the workplace: disrespect by commission
(for example, when off-site employees are remotely monitored or supervised more than their
on-site peers) and by omission (e.g., when virtual employees are left out of the decision-making
process). The latter type is a common source of frustration for off-site workers, according to the
study: “In organizations where informal decision making processes are customary (e.g.,
occurring in hallway conversations or impromptu meetings), greater physical isolation disrupts
participation in these normative activities.”

In their analysis of the open-ended survey question mentioned above, Bartel and her colleagues
divided the negative responses into three subcategories to describe the basis of the negative
feelings:

Diminished respect (24 percent of responses) — inclusion (“feeling isolated,” “not really viewed
as part of the practice,” “feel lost in the crowd,” “feel separated from my colleagues and
business unit”) and social reputation (“not seen as credible,” “not getting respect,” “feeling
undervalued,” “not taken seriously”)

Less involvement in projects and decisions (44 percent of responses) — “not involved in the
‘real’ work of this company,” “not a part of key decisions”

Disrupted communication (16 percent of responses) — “hard to keep abreast of policy changes
and resource actions,” “responses are not timely”

Bridging the Virtual Divide

Bartel’s study has several implications for organizations that rely on virtual employees.
The research suggests that if managers help employees feel confident that they are respected
whether they are on site or off, this will encourage the virtual employee to identify more strongly
with the company.

The authors also identify a need to look more closely at the social elements that shape
workplace norms — those practiced by managers and their employees alike — and to consider
how those values might affect an employee’s sense of respect.

And while previous research has suggested that recent hires are less well-suited for virtual work,
Bartel’s study suggests that managers should consider the challenges faced by all off-site
employees, including those who have worked at the organization for several years.

- Rob Heidrick

This article originally appeared here.

Follow The Educated Exec on Twitter for fresh-out-of-the-box business management ideas 
and inspiration at www.twitter.com/theeducatedexec .

If you liked this article, why not rate it? Simply hover your mouse over the five stars adjacent
to the article title at the top of the page and select a star rating.