Telecommuting

By Robert Moskowitz

What It Takes To Succeed With Telecommuting

Findings From The Latest American Telecommuting Association Survey

A comprehensive survey of companies with active telecommuter programs has revealed a pattern strongly associated with success in adapting to this new way of working. According to the survey just published by the American Telecommuting Association, only a few organizations have written off the idea of telecommuting or have had severe problems making it work. Most have found great success with telecommuting. More importantly, the survey found that the firms reporting the most satisfaction and success with their telecommuters also had four or more of the following elements in place:

* A Designated "Champion" Of Telecommuting

Many times, a company's "champion of telecommuting"--the de facto expert and advocate--is appointed to the role by upper management. But it is important to remember that some very successful champions have been volunteers who simply wanted to increase the number of telecommuters within their organizations.

   However he or she may originally get the responsibility, though, the champion usually plays a critically important part in the success and future proliferation of telecommuting within the organization.

   Many volunteer champions of telecommuting began by tentatively experimenting with working at home. When they experience a modicum of success, they eagerly tell everyone who will listen how great the arrangement is working out for them. Soon, the organization's managers and potential telecommuters are continually seeking them out for answers and opinions on telecommuting.

   Other telecommuting champions prefer to concentrate more on conducting thorough searches through books, newsletters, reports, studies, and other materials, trying to educate themselves about the details and the overall sweep of telecommuting possibility. As word gets around, others begin coming to the champion for advice, support, and corroboration to management of the benefits to be obtained through increased telecommuting.

   The most important work of the telecommuting champion within an organization, however, is to keep the ball rolling when others who have been hot for the idea suddenly begin to blow cold. Anyone with experience in organizational decision-making and politics knows that the pendulum regularly swings between these two temperatures, and that the lack of heat--however temporary--can freeze or even kill any fledgling program that lacks a natural constituency to support it.

   By continuing to push the idea and the practice of telecommuting during these "dark" times, a telecommuting champion can keep the number of telecommuters growing toward the critical mass needed for this method of working to "take off" within the organization.

* Clear And Measurable Objectives For Telecommuters

Regardless of the work actually done by telecommuters, the survey shows that companies most satisfied and successful with this new way of working tend to be those that consistently evaluate telecommuters' performance on the basis of written, specific objectives.

   Most times, these written objectives are projected-oriented, individually negotiated and agreed to between the telecommuter and his or her supervisor. But in a growing number of instances, the written objectives are longer-term, and form a permanent part of the telecommuter's job description.

   Either way, they allow supervisors of telecommuters to feel they have a tool to verify how effectively the individual is performing without physically seeing them in action eight hours a day, five days a week. Written objectives also have the benefit of helping telecommuters feel sure they are delivering precisely what the organization is expecting, despite working at a distance from the central office.

* Clear Policies And Procedures

Whether or not registration, training, and monitoring of telecommuters were centralized within the organization, the companies that reported themselves most satisfied with telecommuting were those that had developed and published a set of policy and procedure guidelines for all telecommuters to follow.

   These guidelines generally cover such diverse topics as:

   * Training parameters for telecommuters

   * Qualifications for telecommuting

   * Reporting requirements of telecommuters

   * The individual's and the organization's responsibilities for equipment and office furniture needed for telecommuting

   * Present and future commitments of the organization to its telecommuters, and of the telecommuter to the organization.

   Clear guidelines make the telecommuting experience more uniform for everyone working this way within a single organization. They also provide people working as telecommuters the same kind of solid basis for expectations and requirements that people working within the central office have long enjoyed.

* Flexibility

An important trait for almost every business nearly all the time, flexibility becomes particularly important when conventional employees become telecommuters and begin functioning outside the relatively controlled conditions of the central office. This is because telecommuters regularly experience unusual and relatively unpredictable situations, demands on their time, and personal preferences. These can include anything from a power outage, to the need to care for a sick child sent home from school, to a strong urge to work on one particular project instead of another.

   Organizations that reported the most success and satisfaction with telecommuting tended to be the same ones in which management expressed particular willingness to adjust both day-to-day and long-term business procedures to meet changing necessity or to gain advantage. Generally speaking, the greater the organization's proclivity to "study" a situation or resist making reasonable changes, the less success and satisfaction it obtains from its telecommuters.

* Good Screening Procedures

Although working successfully as a telecommuter is not particularly difficult, organizations that field a flock of successful telecommuters are generally those that require some preliminary screening of applicants for telecommuting privileges.

   These companies tend to screen their employees two different ways: First, they screen individuals to make sure they have the temperament and motivation to succeed as a telecommuter; second, they screen employment positions to make sure they involve enough regularly recurring tasks that can reasonably be done on a telecommuting basis.

   Although I'm not aware of any formal profile of the temperament and motivation of a successful telecommuter now in existence, certain skills and traits are clearly needed for success at telecommuting. At a minimum, these include: the ability to work independently, the ability to plan at least a few days in advance, the ability to communicate clearly, and a strong desire to succeed.

   As technology changes and improves, the types of work that can successfully be done by telecommuters continue to expand. Basically, any work that requires the individual to physically be at a certain location is presently out of bounds, and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future. But any work that can reasonably be accomplished without reference to where you do it is well within the bounds of what telecommuters can accomplish. At a minimum, this includes most forms of: thinking, reading, writing, planning, analyzing, computer work, contact work, general research, creative and design work, and more.

* Training On Basic Skills And Techniques

Working as a telecommuter is not difficult. But there are some useful skills and techniques a new telecommuter may take a while to stumble upon or develop. Training can dramatically shorten this learning cycle and help a new telecommuter hit the ground running.

   The most useful training topics generally include project planning, time management, and interpersonal communications. Telecommuters also benefit from training in how to use any specific technology--like communicating computers or fax devices--they don't already use in the central office.

   Some of the same training also proves valuable for those who will begin supervising telecommuters.

Telecommuting Cuts Into Real Estate Demand

It has been obvious to many people for a long time that the trend toward telecommuting is reducing the need for office space among employers who embrace this new way of working.

   For example, if just half your workforce telecommutes just one day a week, you've just reduced your need for office space, utilities, parking, and all the rest by 10%. And that savings falls right to the bottom line. Estimates are that 2-3 million individual offices or cubicles that would have been occupied today are now either empty, or unbuilt, because of the trend toward telecommuting. Within the next decade, that number may double.

   But there are other, more subtle ways in which the trend toward telecommuting is likely to hurt real estate values in the future.

   First, the tools of technology are reducing the work of support staff like secretaries and couriers. Consider a typical office with a supervisor or manager, six or eight professional or white-collar specialists, and two or three secretaries. A few years ago, there would have been twice as many secretaries. But let's consider only the present and future. As the professionals or specialists continue changing their ways of working, they generally make more frequent use of word processing, scanners, fax modems, email, voice mail, computer networks, computerized file transfers, and the like. The more they do this, the less they need secretaries and others to help them. Within five years, those two or three secretaries will likely be reduced to just one.

   This trend, repeated in every work group, every department, and every division of every organization, gets translated not only into fewer people doing the support work, but into smaller spaces being allocated to people in these positions. The result, on both counts, is much less need for square footage in the typical central office.

   In addition, these same tools of telecommuting are being used to facilitate a new approach to retailing. Stores need less space for inventory today because they can use the new tools to better track and analyze their patterns of product sales. Wal-Mart and Home Depot are among the pioneers in this area. Success at predicting demand for product, in turn, allows for smaller inventories of slow-moving items and "just in time" re-ordering of the big sellers. In the future, when a greater volume of retail sales are handled over the Internet instead of in person, inventory levels will drop even further because these orders can be shipped from a few centralized warehouses rather than from many fully-stocked stores conveniently located in every target community.

   The manufacturers who supply these retailers are also requiring less real estate, for at least three reasons. First, they can produce and ship goods more quickly when and where needed, so they don't need to warehouse so many finished goods to meet orders. Second, the trend toward smaller-sized products for telecommuters' home offices further reduces the amount of real estate needed for fabrication and storage of these products. Third, manufacturers can insist on "just in time" deliveries of raw materials and sub-assemblies from their suppliers, thus reducing their own need for large stockpiles to keep their factories humming.

   Between manufacturers and retailers lie the distributors, who need less real estate primarily because they can now survive with smaller warehouses. On the inbound side, distributors can count on receiving replacement goods from the factories as quickly as their inventories are drawn down. On the outbound side, distributors can hook their inventory systems to their customers', and thus anticipate and project future orders based on current and past sales patterns.

   Another area where real estate demand is declining, and will continue to do so is retail banking. Telecommuters are among the prime candidates for online banking services. Since an automated back-office facility can serve tens or even hundreds of thousands of banking customers from a relatively low-rent district, this trend is going to decimate the need to own or rent the property now used for local community branch offices.

   As the number of telecommuters increases toward the projected 20-25 million by the year 2000, the impact on the $3.3 trillion commercial real estate market is likely to be profound. According to Barry Libert, managing director of Arthur Andersen's Real Estate Transformation Group, office space occupancy is already down to the same levels we saw around 1970. Libert says a telecommuting-induced drop in real estate revenues of 10-20% could cut commercial real estate values by one-fourth!

   You may not think this is important, but real estate is at the center of about 20% of the US Gross Domestic Product, and about 40% of all US wealth. Anything that changes the traditional growth patterns of real estate usage and value will profoundly affect us all.

Copyright © 1997 Robert Moskowitz. All rights reserved.

Attention: Telecommuting Lawyers

The "Women in the Profession" Committee of the Young Lawyers Division of the American Bar Association is conducting a study to learn more about lawyers who are currently telecommuting. Their goal is to develop a model telecommuting policy for legal employers, and also to publish a report on the telecommuting habits and practices of today's lawyers.

   For purposes of this study, a telecommuting lawyer is defined as one who works for pay from his or her home on a regular basis, even though he or she also has an office outside the home. Lawyers who work from home only on evenings, weekends, and days off are not to be counted as telecommuters in this study.

   Participation in the study can be anonymous, if you wish, and will provide invaluable assistance in the Committee's and the ABA's efforts to educate legal employers about the advantages of telecommuting, both for themselves and for the telecommuters.

   For more information on how to participate, contact: Nicole Belson Goluboff, 750 Kappock St., #905, Riverdale, NY, 10463, (718)548-0940.