Telecommuting * By Robert Moskowitz
While telecommuting offers a great many interesting and exciting advantages for all sorts of industrial and population groupings, it is used to further economic development, and justified primarily on this basis, a lot more often overseas than in the US.
One way we may be catching up to Europe and the rest of the world is through a current effort to promote telecommuting as an aid for those with physical disabilities that would normally make regular commuting to a workplace very difficult. (Remember, though, that hiring telecommuters does not release an employer from the applicable requirements under the Americans With Disabilities Act and other laws to equip workplace facilities for easy access to all.)
The strongest such initiative has been pushed by the National Telecommuting Institute (NTI), in conjunction with the President's Committee on the Employment of People with Disabilities. Their plan is relatively simple: employers that hire low-income, homebound individuals with disabilities should not have to pay for any of the voice and data line charges incurred on connections between the employee and the company.
In addition, the NTI's proposal suggests that if a homebound individual needs training to prepare for a telecommuting position, the cost of connecting the trainee to the trainer via telephone lines should also be free to the parties involved.
To compensate the service providers who lose income from such a policy, support should be provided from existing "universal service" support mechanisms.
The basic premise is that eliminating long-distance telephone charges would send a signal to employers that hiring the disabled and homebound need not cost anything extra. More practically, it would also remove one of the important obstacles to increased employment of individuals with severe mobility impairments, allowing them to join the nation's workforce as telecommuters in greater numbers than ever before.
To date, the number of employers offering full-time telecommuting jobs to physically disabled candidates is very small. A key reason is that even when jobs are made available, the cost of connecting to the employer's offices on a regular basis using standard voice or data lines, and in some cases a long-distance service, can be prohibitive.
As many employers have already found out, disabled individuals constitute a wonderful workforce for certain types of jobs. They greatly value their jobs, leading to very low turnover, higher levels of motivation, and candidates with relatively strong qualifications for most open positions.
The problem is that homebound individuals with disabilities are often prevented from finding useful employment because of the difficulties of traveling to job interviews, training venues, and work sites. This is a shame, because these are often fully capable people who, in many cases, could work full-time jobs if they would be allowed to do so as telecommuters.
A 1994 survey of Massachusetts vocational rehabilitation counselors found that about 12% of the individuals receiving vocational rehabilitation services could perform and would accept a wide range of jobs if they were able to work from home, but could not perform the same types of work if they were required to report to the employer's location every day. The nature of these individuals' disabilities, coupled with their limited transportation options, simply made it too difficult for them to hold a conventional on-site position.
In 1995, a total of 1,250,314 individuals with disabilities nationwide received state vocational rehabilitation services. There were even more people who were disabled and looking for work, but unable to find it.
If you extrapolate the 12% finding in Massachusetts to people in state vocational rehabilitation programs nationwide, there appears to be an estimated 150,000 homebound individuals who can and would work if given the opportunity to telecommute.
State vocational rehabilitation agencies are usually willing to incur the one-time expense of providing homebound individuals with the computers and software they need to work as telecommuters. However, there is no funding source available to cover the ongoing expenses of telecommuting, including any long-distance telephone charges.
Although the direct cost of covering the long-distance charges incurred by disabled employees who are telecommuting might run into the millions of dollars per year (it takes only 840 telecommuters making $100 per month in long-distance telephone calls to generate more than $1 million in annual long-distance charges), the benefits of such a change would be far more enormous.
For starters, such a change would drastically reduce the need for federal and state governments to provide public assistance benefits to thousands of homebound individuals, who could suddenly earn a great deal more money than ever before. Increasing the number of homebound individuals in the workforce would also increase the number of productive individuals, the number of taxpayers, the need for related business and personal services, and so on.
For more information on the effort to get long-distance charges dropped for disabled telecommuters, contact: Dr. M.J. Willard, National Telecommuting Institute, 1505 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA 02135. (617)787-4426; fax: (617)787-3806. Email: mjwillard@nti.org .
The Personal Assistant is a pure phone service offered by Call Sciences, a company based in Edison, NJ, that's beginning to offer its services nationally. They've just rolled it out for use with local telephone numbers in Southern California, Chicago, Miami, and New York, but it's available anywhere via 800 numbers instead of local ones.
Here's how it works: Personal Assistant gives you a brand-new telephone number which people can dial to reach you, regardless of where you might be at any given time, and regardless of what telephone, email, voicemail, cellular, or wired-in telephone services you're purchasing from any other companies. Personal Assistant requires no hardware or software at your end of the line, and it allows you to gain very tight control over all your inbound and outbound communications activities, regardless of how many different places you visit, live, and work.
You're working at home on a typical Monday, and your customer wants to talk to you. She calls the one number she always uses to dial you, and the Personal Assistant instantly and silently routes the call to your home phone. But you're not there to answer, so the Personal Assistant picks up the call and plays a standard message, asking who's making the call and promising to try to find you. It then rings the second number you've listed for Mondays, which might be your cellular phone. You answer and the Personal Assistant announces that you have a call and plays the clip of the caller's name and reason for calling that it recorded a few seconds before. It then allows you to take the call immediately, right from your cellular phone, or to duck it. If you decide to duck the call, the Personal Assistant tells the caller it couldn't find you, and shunts the call to your voicemail where the caller can leave a message.
When you retrieve your voice messages, you can scan through them and decide how to handle each one: erasing it, saving it, forwarding it to one or more other people, or immediately returning a call. Messages that callers mark as "urgent" are moved to the head of the queue, so when you pick up your messages you hear them first.
If the caller left a number, Personal Assistant can dial it for you automatically. If you're calling in for your messages from long-distance, you can return calls from within your Personal Assistant account, at very favorable long-distance rates. (If you get your long-distance service cheaper, you can leave Personal Assistant and make your calls manually.) When you finish with a return call from within Personal Assistant, you can instantly resume hearing the remaining messages in your voicemail.
Personal Assistant can remember a complete week's schedule of where you'll be, including different "follow me" options for days, evenings, and weekends--plus days and hours when you want to be unavailable. This gives the Personal Assistant a wide range of choices of where to try to find you at any time of the day or night that someone tries to call you.
But as your schedule changes, you can override your default schedule instantly, at any time, with new instructions about how to handle your incoming telephone calls. These special instructions can remain in force for as long as you like, up to 999 hours, before the Personal Assistant goes back to following your default schedule.
You can also give out your single Personal Assistant number to people for use as both your voice and your fax line. The Personal Assistant can easily distinguish between the two types of calls, and handle each one differently. For example, you can schedule (or override the default schedule) to have your faxes sent to a particular fax number where you'll be to receive it, or you can have your incoming faxes held in storage for pickup whenever and wherever you want it.
If you call in for your messages, you can hear the "envelope" information for each fax message you've received, which includes the sending phone number, the date and time, and the number of pages sent.
Even better, you can log onto the Web and access your Personal Assistant system, where you can preview your faxes right on your screen. Then if one seems important, you can send it to a fax machine for printing, forward it to others, or save it for later viewing.
There's also a "call screening" feature that allows you to choose whether the Personal Assistant just switches each call to you, or first gives you the option of accepting or deferring the call.
If you use a pager, the Personal Assistant can page you when you get a call, with--depending on the capabilities of your pager--a great deal of information about the caller.
If you prefer, Personal Assistant can even send you a electronic message notifying you that a call has come in.
Callers have options, too. For example, a caller can press 1 to leave a message in your voicemail, or can press 0 to connect with a human attendant (if you've enabled this option), or can press 3 to get connected to your pager.
Personal Assistant includes powerful voicemail capabilities. It will dial the phone numbers of individuals or lists of individuals and with each of them leave your message or a message originally left for you. It can also forward and broadcast faxes.
Once you've accepted a call, you can still transfer it back to your own voicemail. This is useful if you've finished discussing a matter with a caller and now he or she wants to give you a follow-up phone number or the detailed figures relating to a particular project. If you've taken the call in your car, or in the middle of a jog, you may not want to get out a pencil and paper to take notes. So you can simply ask the person to leave the information with your voicemail, then transfer the call and hang up.
Call Sciences has designed the Personal Assistant system to be useful for telecommuters who move around among several specific locations, for "hoteling" workers who don't have a dedicated workspace, for consultants who work at various client sites but need a single stable phone number where others can feel confident of reaching them, and for today's highly mobile executives who are constantly traveling but can't afford to be out of touch.
Because Personal Assistant is entirely a standalone service, it leaves you free to get your telephone, paging, email, and other services from any supplier you wish. Your Personal Assistant service can accommodate them all, and instantly reflect any changes you make, as often as you want to make them.
One of its most comforting features is the "availability codes" for use by callers. You can activate as many as five independent ones. One for your significant other, one for your boss or partner, and the others for clients or customers who may temporarily need to reach you on a moment's notice. When a caller punches in one of these "availability codes," he or she can override the system and get through to you, even when you've told the Personal Assistant to tell everyone you're unavailable. Once you change one of these availability codes, the people to whom you've given it are no longer able to override your Personal Assistant settings.
For more information on The Personal Assistant, contact Call Sciences at 1-888-877-4225, or check their Web site at http://www.CallSciences.com .
Copyright © 1997 Robert Moskowitz. All rights reserved.