As there are two sessions are running simultanuously I decided this morning to go to the Human resources management practices.

The first session in the morning requests for telecommuting: exploring managerial decision making. As the authors were not able to make it to Canada, Wendy Spinks made the presentation instead.

The paper is a study of 65 managers in 6 organizations in 3 countries (NL, UK and Sweden). The conclusion is that managers are either very positive as well as very negative about teleworking. Howver managers still seem to prefer conservative approaches to management such as command and control.

The second presentation by Svein Bergum of the Eastern Norway Research Institute is called “Alternative strategies to manage non-dependent workers at a distance”. Svein looked at four variables that might improve the person-job fit: leadership, competence development, changing the job contents and organizational support in the public sector.

Svein talking about the problems managers of the Norwegian public road administration are facing regarding telework.
The last presentation of the first session by Martin Wielemaker and Andrew Gaudes is on diversity, conflict and trust. Martin talked about relation trust: in order to trust you need to meet this person. Once the trust is there you can move to a computer mediated relationship. He showed us the difference between functional and emotional diversity. In a next step a framework is set-up using a quadrant in which functional diversity versus a social cultural diversity will give an easy to understand overview to decide whether one should use a computer-mediated versus face-to-face meetings.

Martin’s excellent presentation.

The last presentation was by looking at Collaborative Visual Work Environments by the National Research Council Canada’s Institute for Information Technology NRC IIT  which is enganged in pioneering research on remote visual collaboration environments.