I work in the service division of a large financial services company. We are looking into expanding out work from home capabilities for call center agents. Anyone have any benchmarking information on training, coaching, motivating and managing telecommuters?

You may find that Best Buy's ROWE (results-only work environment) initiatives, and its subsequent off-shoot company that promotes the practce to other organizations, is a good place to start.

Are you specifically referring to allowing the front line call center folks to field customer calls from home? Aside from the training, coaching, management issues... I cannot imagine the nightmare of legal compliance and security issues in store for your organization.

I don't think I've ever heard of any organization allowing call center front line hourly employees to work from home, so there might not be many benchmarks out there. Your organization could be the first to set a trend!

There is a major Hotel chain that has work from home reservation agents in their Que. You are correct that secuity and service quality were of a concern but it seems to be doing well for them...

As far as management of off-site staff, my organization addressed this last year. Most of our leadership team manages staff in a geographic area. They probably see their teams face to face 1 or 2 days a quarter so management is a challenge. We engaged a consultant to do a 1/2 day program on "Managing from a distance". His name is Bob Judd and is quite simply the best facilitator I have seen in a decade of T&D. Visit his site and have a peek. He's worth a call. www.robertjud.com

Telecommuting has its strengths and weaknesses. As for managing employees, I'd recommend regular (possibly daily) conference calls/meetings. I've found that email is not necessarily the best method of communication, esp. if the telecommuters are writing long, drawn out messages. Also look into instant messaging, which provides real time communication.

As long as the telecommuter is producing results (e.g. taking X number of calls per day, or placing x orders, etc.) then that is a way to evaluate their performance.

This day and time, a lot of companies (esp. technology) are moving towards a virtual workplace. I have an eLearning/tech company and all my employees work remotely from home. Actually, most of my clients are remote as well (have never even met most of my clients f2f!)