On January 20, 2025, an executive order mandated that federal employees return to in-person work full-time. It’s interesting to see a sweeping mandate like this because sometimes telework works. Today, I’ll give some examples of why it works. Keep in mind, my perspective is from being a Chief Information Officer managing IT Departments. Before anyone thinks I’m taking sides, I’ll write a follow-up article with the opposite perspective right after this.
Minimizing Distractions in Shared Spaces
Imagine managing a team in a small office. One of the biggest productivity killers is idle chatter. It can be frustrating to overhear casual conversations that gradually pull more employees away from their tasks. While some discussion might be work-adjacent, enriching knowledge and fostering collaboration, they often spiral off-topic, taking people out of productive work. You can try various tactics like subtle hints to refocus, but direct discipline can create a tense environment. The beauty of telework is that it eliminates these ambient distractions, allowing employees to focus on their tasks.
Protecting Deep Work for Technical Experts
The tiered customer service model ensures efficient use of expertise. Ideally, customers attempt self-help first, then escalate to the help desk, and only if necessary are the most complex issues passed to higher-level experts.
In an office setting, this process is frequently bypassed. When technical experts are physically accessible, people tend to walk right up to the network engineer or systems administrator to solve minor issues the help desk could easily handle. This disrupts the expert’s workflow, making it difficult to maintain focus on high-level projects. Remote work enforces the proper use of the ticketing system, ensuring specialists spend their time solving the complex issues that require their expertise.
Enhancing IT Efficiency with Remote Work
Another advantage of telework is the efficiency gained through remote assistance tools. In a traditional office setting, IT staff often asked by customers to travel from desk to desk, or even building to building, to address technical issues. This pulls them away from other tasks and limits their capacity to help more than one person at a time. In contrast, remote work allows the IT team to handle multiple tickets simultaneously using remote desktop tools. A single support tech can troubleshoot several issues concurrently, significantly increasing the number of problems resolved in a day. Again, remote work reinforces proper use of support channels, reducing ad-hoc requests and streamlining problem resolution.
Those are my examples of why telework serves as a catalyst for efficiency and reducing unnecessary distractions. If COVID-19 taught us anything about telework, it’s that some professions can actually be pretty productive while working from home.