Abstract

Xerox Corporation was often listed among the Fortune 500 companies because of the quality of its products, customer satisfaction, leadership, and corporate responsibility. The company attributed its success to its employees and valued them as its greatest asset. Xerox provided its employees with a variety of flexible work arrangements based on feasibility, including remote, part-time, temporary, and short-term jobs. Xerox launched the Virtual Office Program in 2013 and by 2018 more than 8,000 employees in the US alone (11% of the domestic workforce) were working remotely 100% of the time. The roles covered job functions such as customer care, tech support, data entry/verification, image tagging, quality control, systems development, software programming, and administrative/business support. Due to the diversity of job roles and geographic distances, Xerox’s Virtual Office Program faced some challenges related to work supervision, authority-responsibility contexts, and performance management. To deal with these challenges better, the company improved its technology infrastructure in partnership with Cisco. This helped the employees to collaborate from anywhere with their colleagues, partners, and customers, using secure voice and video conferencing applications, versatile messaging tools, and mobility services. Xerox’s virtual office program helped the company rank high in terms of workplace satisfaction and employee motivation. Xerox also expanded this program to include veterans and military spouses. Through its Heroes@Home program, Xerox hired qualified veterans and military spouses for at-home employment opportunities. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2018 more than 35% (around 55 million) of the people in the US were ‘gig workers’ and that this number would increase to 43% by 2020. This offered opportunities for Xerox to expand its Virtual Office Program.

Learning Objectives

The case is structured to achieve the following Learning Objectives:

• Understand the importance of a competency-based approach to job analysis for hiring full-time or part-time remote workers
• Understand the benefits and challenges of executing a Strategic HR policy
• Understand the importance of Telecommuting as a HR Policy to attract talent
• Examine the organizational and technological initiatives taken to implement the virtual office program
• Understand how an HR practice helps in achieving organizational outcomes like reducing costs

Keywords

Telecommuting; Remote workforce; Gig Economy; Work-from-home; HR Policy; Hiring; Talent Management; Recruitment; Job Analysis; Work-life balance; Employee Costs; Motivation, Retention