Telecommuting Rewires Traditional Views of the Workplace

Byline: Kirstin Downey Grimsley

What was once a "Jetsons"-esque vision of the future has become established fact: A new study shows that more than 80 percent of full-time American employees work via electronic communication, either because they labor off-site or work with those who do.

Only 17 percent of full-time workers have jobs in which they don't regularly communicate by phone or computer with colleagues who are off-site. All the rest handle some work that involves people in another location, according to the survey, conducted by the American Business Collaboration, a venture funded by nine major U.S. corporations to focus on work/life issues.

Cases in point:

* Ralph Senst, 46, an International Business Machines Corp. vice president, oversees 3,000 workers, including 300 researchers, from a small office in a converted attic room on the third floor of his Victorian home in Winnetka, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. He ventures downtown only about twice a month to his regular office in a high-rise at IBM Plaza in Chicago's Inner Loop.

* Kathleen Borie, 43, who seeks out new clients for accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, conducts business meetings from the family room of her Burlingame, Calif., home. At 8 a.m. on Tuesday, she orchestrated a teleconferenced meeting with a prospective client in Walnut Creek, 38 miles from her house. Joining them were a partner from the San Francisco office calling in by cell phone from his car and a Silicon Valley partner speaking from his office in downtown San Jose.

* Christine Stegman, 45, national sales director for Abbott Laboratories' line of diabetes products, oversees 445 sales representatives in 46 states. All are essentially remote workers: They start their mornings in their home offices and spend the rest of the day moving from one doctor's office to another, pitching the drugs Abbott has developed.

It's a revolution in the way people work, unfolding within just a few years, rendering outdated even the terminology we use to describe work. Whose work is central now, and who is working remotely?

"It's a challenge to our mental model," said Arlene Johnson, vice president of WFD Consulting, which oversaw the study. "So many things assume a central workplace, with those who work elsewhere out of the norm, the exception, the oddity. In fact, working over a distance seems to be the new norm. The future is now -- it's already a reality."

Employers once reluctantly granted permission for workers to do their jobs from other locations. It was viewed as a perk to retain valued employees who loathed their commutes. Now, though, bosses see it as a way to get more work out of people who are already productive, Johnson said.

"A common wisdom is you let people telecommute for their convenience and hope it won't hurt the company too much," she said. "But in fact there are real advantages in productivity, retention, commitment to the job -- all positives effected in off-site arrangements."

The survey found a wide array of ways people are working from home and on the road. Regular telecommuters work from their homes, usually a few days a week. Others telecommute from their home irregularly, at least several days a month. Remote workers almost never go to the office. Mobile workers move from place to place, using their homes, cars and hotel rooms, along with customers' offices, as their primary places of business. Customer site workers are expected to stay at the client's workplace instead of at their own employer's.

According to the survey, managers, co-workers, employees and their family members report that workers who telecommute are happier and more productive than many of their office-based colleagues. For example, although these workers generally put in a longer day than people in the office, they were less likely to describe themselves as feeling "physically and emotionally drained" at the end of the day.

Many remote workers, though, lack at least some of the basic equipment that is considered essential to white-collar work today: laptop computers, desktop computers, printers, copiers, fax machines, multiple telephone lines, high-speed Internet access, cell phones and pagers.

While 93 percent of the on-site workers surveyed have desktop computers, for example, only 75 percent of off-site workers have them, the survey found. Similarly, 78 percent of traditional workplaces have high-speed Internet access, but only 62 percent of off-site workers have it. Many off-site workers lack a specific place to work, often conducting company business at the kitchen table.

Meanwhile, the survey found that equipment distributed for home use is often given out in ways that make little practical sense, Johnson said.

"People get assigned technology based on status, when it is often really the secretary who is managing the mega-programs," Johnson said. She added that at-home workers laboring without the right equipment suffer more computer crashes and equipment snafus than those who are given better equipment. That problem, she said, is common to both the off-site and on-site worker.

Of all workers, employees who work at customer sites are actually the most likely to feel alienated, unhappy and eager to find other work.

Another problem the survey found is that although workers are quickly moving off-site, little attention is being paid to the issue of how best to manage off-site workers. While some workers quickly take to off-site employment, others, particularly new hires, require additional supervision and assistance from their bosses to remain effective.

Abbott Laboratories' Stegman, who was herself a sales representative before she became a manager, said it is essential for supervisors to keep in frequent telephone contact with their remote employees and arrange for the team to gather regularly.

"Sometimes it's a little bit lonely," she recalled. "You go in and out of offices where they are all together, but you're not part of the group. . . . I was always glad to get a call from my manager, letting me know I was part of a team as well."

The American Business Collaboration, which financed the study, is a $125 million program established a decade ago by nine major companies -- Abbott Laboratories, Allstate Insurance Co., Deloitte & Touche, Exxon Mobil Corp., GE Corp., IBM, Johnson & Johnson, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Texas Instruments Inc. -- to finance work/life pilot projects and experiments.

The group's telecommuting survey is unusual because such studies have rarely included the views of those affected by telecommuting -- managers, co-workers and employees' family members -- in addition to the views of the telecommuters themselves. This 360-degree analysis, conducted through telephone interviews with 2,000 adults and samples of their family members, was followed up by online interviews. The survey, which included only full-time employees of companies with 500 or more workers, was conducted in March and April.

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