Week 7

Ch4: IS and the Design of Work

 Chapter 4
IS and the Design of Work
Work Design
 Work Design Historical Comparison
Pre-industrial society
o The farmer
Late 20th-century society
o Your parents or grandparents
Digital-age society
o You
 Work Design of the Digital Age
IT enables brand new ways of working
o Better, faster communication
o Collaboration tools
o Virtual/telecommuting

Jobs concept replaced by work concept

IT can enable employees to better perform in roles
Work must be redesigned to properly leverage the increasingly
important role of IS
o A framework!
 Digital Age Work Design Framework

Ask yourself five basic questions when designing work:

What?
Who?
Where?
When?
How?
Figure 4.1 Framework for work design.

(c) John Wiley & Sons

IT Impact on Work
Impact of IT on Work
IT has proliferated into nearly every aspect of work across nearly all
industries
The introduction of information systems resulted in a paradigm shift
related to how work is performed
Well examine how IT impacts work by reviewing ITs enablement of:
o Communication & Collaboration
o Telecommuting & Mobile workers
o Virtual Organizations and Teams
How IT Supports Communication & Collaboration
Communication
Major technologies have affected communications in todays work
environment
o Examples?

Collaboration
Digital natives introduced the use of social networking and blogs
into the workplace.
o Examples?
 IT Supports Collaboration

Thomas Friedman, the author of the popular The World is Flat, argues
that collaboration is the way that small companies can act big and
flourish in todays flat world.
The key to success is for such companies to take advantage of all the
new tools for collaboration to reach farther, faster, wider, and deeper.
Telecommuting and Remote
Work
 Telecommuting and Remote Work
Telecommuting
o Workers use telecommunications instead of commuting to the office
o May or may not be some in-office work to be done
Remote work:
o work from wherever they are.
o Typically outside geographic area of company
Telecommuting popularity

Telecommuting has been around since the 1970s but has gained popularity

since the late 1990s.

In 2008 many people telecommuted:

o 17.2M Americans *

o 33.7M people worldwide *

American telecommuters are expected to increase in next few years as more

work is performed from remote locations.

o +29 million telecommuters (43% of the workforce)
(* according to World at Work)
Driving Factors of Telecommuting

Shift to knowledge-based work

Changing demographics and lifestyle preferences
New technologies with enhanced bandwidth
Reliance on web
Energy concerns

John Wiley & Sons

Disadvantages of Telecommuting

Managers position
o Evaluation challenges
o Feeling of loss of control
o Abuse of privilege

Managers accustomed to traditional work models may strongly resist

telecommuting.

John Wiley & Sons

Disadvantages of Telecommuting

Employees position
o Self-discipline
o Flexible schedule may lead to blurred lines between
personal and business time
o Disconnected from culture
o Off-shoring or outsourcing risk

John Wiley & Sons

 Figure 4.5 Advantages and disadvantages of telecommuting.

Employee Advantages of Telecommuting Potential Problems

Reduced stress due to increased ability to Harder to evaluate performance, increased
meet schedules, heightened morale, and stress from inability to separate work from
lower absenteeism home life

Geographic flexibility Employee may become disconnected

from company culture

Higher personal productivity Telecommuters are more easily replaced by

electronic immigrants

Housebound individuals can join the Not suitable for all jobs or employees
workforce

John Wiley & Sons

Other Issues in Remote Work
Managerial Issues
Planning, business, and support tasks must be redesigned to support
remote workers.
o Training
o Policies
o Business processes

Security Issues
BYOD
Impossible to make remote workers totally secure
Real World Example

Best Buy, the leading U.S. retailer in electronics, completely transformed its view of the
ordinary workday.
Known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses, it ushered in a new approach to work:
Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE).
Brainchild of two passionate employees who thought that Best Buy managers were
mired in analog-age inertia and did not recognize that employees could use technology
to perform work from a variety of places.
ROWE is a program that allows limitless flexibility when it comes to work hours.
Employees can choose where and when they will do their work as long as project goals
are satisfied.
Employee decisions about working hours and location are framed by 13 guideposts
the most surprising of which is every meeting is optional.
Real World Example (Cont.)

Best Buy claims that productivity soared 35% between 2005 and 2007 on
ROWE teams, and voluntary turnover plummeted 45%.
This helped Best Buy save $16 million each year.
Other companies (IBM and AT&T) have adopted similar strategies.
The nature of work is changing before our eyes, and information technology is
supporting, if not propelling, the changes.
Virtual Teams
Virtual Teams

Two or more people who:

1. Work together
2. Geographically separate
3. Use technology to communicate

The same drivers for telecommuting can be applied to virtual

teams.
Advantages of Virtual Teams

Global pool of resources

o Find an expert without relocation or travel
Follow the Sun
o Cooperate and leverage time zone differences for efficiency
Disadvantages and Challenges of
Virtual Teams
Considerable number of challenges that could turn into
disadvantages
Different time zones
Loss of subtleties of face-to-face communication
Trust latency
Cultural differences
 Figure 4.7 Comparison of challenges facing virtual and traditional teams.
Challenges Virtual Teams Traditional Teams
Communications Multiple zones can lead to greater Teams are located in same time zone.
efficiency and communication difficulties. Scheduling is less difficult.
Communication dynamics (e.g., non- Teams may use richer communication
verbal) are altered. media.
Technology Team members must have proficiency Technology is not critical, and tools are not
across a wide range of technologies. essential for communications.
Technology offers an electronic repository. Electronic repositories are not typically
used.
Work group effectiveness may be more Task technology fit may not be as critical.
dependent on alignment of the group and
technologies used.
Team Diversity Members typically come from different Because members are more
organizations and/or cultures which makes homogeneous, group identity is easier to
it: form.
-Harder to establish a group identity. Because of commonalities,
-Necessary to have better communication communications are easier to complete
skills. successfully.
-More difficult to build trust, norms, etc.

John Wiley & Sons

Issues in Virtual Teams

Managerial
Management style must be fluid and dynamic
Observation impossible
Providing feedback is important.
Policies about the selection, evaluation, and compensation of
virtual team members may need to be enacted.
Communication Challenges

Open lines
Frequent
Need appropriate technology to support communication
Occasional Face-to-face meetings
Other times well-managed synchronous meetings
Technology Challenges

Consistent tech across team

Seamless infrastructure
Established Policies and norms (unwritten rules) needed
IT Alters Employee Life
IT Alters Employee Life
Three ways
o Creating new types of work.
o Enabling new ways to do traditional work.
o Supporting new ways to hire and manage talent.
 Creating New Types of Work
IT has created many new jobs and redefined existing ones.
4.1M IT workers
o According to Bureau of Labor Statistics
New types of jobs:
o Knowledge managers
o Community managers
o Communications managers
 New Ways to Do Traditional Work
Jobs that existed as early as 50 years ago are now done by computer
Tasks and skillsets needed for certain jobs have changed
Data entry workflow is faster.
o Captured as close to the source as possible:
web-based entry.
GPS signal.
RFID code.
Cost of and time to access information has plummeted
4 Ways IT Has Changed Hiring

1. Workers must know how to use the technology for their job or be
trainable.
2. IT utilization affects the array of non-technical skills needed in an
organization.
3. IT has become an essential part of the hiring process (online job
postings, online applications, etc.).
4. Companies increasingly realize that hiring is changing.
Acceptance for IT-induced
Change
Gaining Acceptance for IT-Induced
Change
Employees may resist the changes if they view them as
negatively affecting them.
o If they do not fully understand or are not prepared, they may
resist in several ways:
Denial
Sabotage
Convincing of unchanged status quo
Refusal
Lewins Stages

Unfreezing
Changing
Refreezing
Kotters steps relating to Lewins stages - Unfreezing

1. Establish a sense of urgency

2. Create the guiding coalition
3. Develop a vision and strategy
4. Communicate the change
5. Empower broad-based action
6. Generate short-term wins
7. Consolidate gains and produce more change
8. Anchor new approaches in the culture