It's The Wrong Perspective
Trying to find work as a telecommuter is usually as frustrating and fruitless as expecting to be hired because you have a license and know how to drive to work. In most employment situations, you won't and probably can't find work simply as a pure telecommuter.
But you quite often can find a good, satisfying job and--once established in it--win permission to perform some of your duties on a telecommuter basis.
Once you successfully accept the truth of this situation and shift your attitude accordingly, looking for work you can do as a telecommuter becomes a lot more satisfying. No longer will you be forced to scour obscure Web sites and pore through long lists of computer-programming projects (unless, of course, you're a computer programmer!). No longer must you endure "multi-level" or "network" marketing come-ons and pitches that offer you fabulous success for no-risk, no effort, and no money down.
Instead, you can simply recognize that--except for jobs like surgeon and plumber which today's technology makes impossible to do remotely--there are only two kinds of jobs in the world: those for which telecommuting is already accepted, and those for which telecommuting will soon be accepted. If you're not lucky enough to find one of the former, you'll need only make an effort to develop one of the latter.
First, recognize that an employer organization that isn't getting the results it needs or wants from non-teleworking employees is more easily induced to hire someone of extreme competence and experience, and then will have little choice but to assent to him or her working as a telecommuter some of the time.
Second, understand that telecommuting is not an entirely strange or undesirable concept at many large employers--as rumor would have it. This is particularly true when that company's management is comfortable shipping American jobs overseas. If a company willingly hires programmers in India or keypunchers in Ireland, why should management blanch at the notion of hiring a local employee who'll telecommute from 20 miles away one day a week?
Third, feel confident about the future, because the forces of history are on the side of the telecommuter. With every passing day, more and more evidence mounts in favor of telecommuting; competition and costs conspire to make telecommuting not only more attractive, but more necessary to almost every employer; and die-hard opponents of telecommuting--who tend to be among older generations--move up and out of front-line management, if not entirely out of the employer's organization.
The facts support this interpretation. As many as 25% of human resources managers at large companies say their organizations already employ some telecommuters, or are expecting to employ some within a year. What's more, vast numbers of laid-off professionals and executives have reacted to being dumped from full-time careers by starting their own small companies and consultancies. Rather than burden their new situations with heavy payrolls, many of these entrepreneurs are opting to build "virtual" organizations staffed by telecommuters and other flex-timers.
So one good way to start looking for work you can do as a telecommuter is to start looking for work you can do. Begin by taking a complete self-inventory: What are your strengths? Weaknesses? Skills? Specialized knowledge? Interests? Experience?
Then try to puzzle out what kind of tasks, what kind of responsibilities, what kind of positions, they all add up to?
Once you have a likely industry or job description in mind, begin to research the potential employers. Who are the biggest players? The newest? The most innovative?
Contact each of them just as you would if you were looking for a non-telecommuting job. But in your second or third interview, begin to inquire about the possibilities of telecommuting to the new job one or more days per week.
Take your time. Present your business case thoroughly, in detail. And be ready to answer questions from across the desk. In some situations, there will be little resistance to your idea. In others, you may decide to take a promising job without first obtaining an explicit commitment to telework, with the understanding idea you'll have to prove yourself under difficult conditions before it becomes politically feasible to ask your new employer about telecommuting one or more days per week.
A recent study of ergonomics (the scientific study of work) among private employers conducted by the US General Accounting Office found the most successful injury-elimination programs contain the same basic approaches, and relatively "low-tech" ergonomic efforts at five intensively-studied companies reduce the number of injuries due to poor ergonomics by anything from 2.4% to as much as 6.1%, thereby reducing the cost of those injuries by 35% to 91%.
That's significant, because employers spend about $60 billion per year on workers' compensation costs associated with employee injuries and illnesses. In 1995 alone, for example, there were 308,000 cases of illness due to repeated trauma--precisely the kind of injuries to which telecommuters are prone--a number representing more than 60% of all work-related illnesses recorded that year. In 1997, about 32% of all days lost from work resulted from repetitive motion or overexertion.
It's good to know that much of this lost time and injury-related expense is easily preventable through relatively simple changes in procedures, workstation arrangement, work practices, and so forth.
According to the study, aside from management's commitment to reduce problems caused by poor ergonomics, the core elements of effective programs include:
1) Employee involvement through committees or teams to do such critically important tasks as: consider potential ergonomic problems areas, receive and analyze reports of work-related injuries, generate and solicit suggestions for remedial actions.
2) Identifying problem jobs and tasks. It doesn't matter whether the organization performs detailed analyses of specific ergonomic situations, compiles injury reports with an eye open for jobs and tasks that generate the most injuries, or analyzes responses to specialized surveys from people in various job slots. This identification process works even better when it involves expert observations of people at work, physically measuring workstations, and so forth.
3) Developing "controls" to eliminate or reduce the ergonomic dangers present in the specific situation. So-called "engineering" controls (like shortening the distance a worker must reach automatically to grab something) generally work much better than "administrative" controls, since they generally eliminate that ergonomic problem. In contrast, coaching a worker to stand and walk rather than reach, training a worker to recognize ergonomic hazards, or adding rest breaks may be helpful, but may not be entirely effective.
While ergonomic problems are by no means concentrated among telecommuters, as a group those of us working from home may be at slightly greater risk of ergonomic injury. The reason is simple: in setting up and furnishing a place to work in our own home we usually pay less attention to ergonomic considerations than do the professional office designers who work on the employer's central offices.
The government study cites a specific job situation that might be typical of a telecommuter: 1) the employee talks on the telephone or works on a computer much of the day, 2) management strictly enforces the employee's production goals, and 3) there are only two or three scheduled breaks during the workday. Employees in this situation produced one of the highest rates of "muscular-skeletal disorders" of any group in the study.
The most effective remedies for this group included larger computer monitors to reduce eye strain, and the addition of several ergonomic accessories, including a wrist pad for use with the computer keyboard, head sets for use with the telephone, ergonomic chairs, and larger work surfaces.
While the remedies were simple and inexpensive, the results were very impressive. In addition to time and money savings, the study found efforts to improve workplace ergonomics frequently improved morale, productivity, and quality of output. Some managers also reported that turnover and absenteeism were lower after the ergonomic remedies were introduced.
It also appears that efforts to improve ergonomics cannot remain static. Once the initial phase is complete and the most egregious problems have been resolved or eliminated, integrating ergonomic programs with ongoing productivity improvement and quality-control programs becomes another means of continually improving the organization's overall results.
I recently heard the story of a field service coordinator working for an international company in the interactive television industry. By using a fully equipped home office and specialized adaptive technology, he is able to perform all the duties of his full-time position from his own home, despite being visually impaired.
What's especially interesting about this story is that, because he is working at a distance from his employer's corporate headquarters, only one other member of the company has ever been aware of his disability.
Not only is he able to compete on a level playing field and efficiently complete all the tasks his boss hands him, but since his visual impairment hasn't become common knowledge, all the references and recommendations he might receive when he leaves the company will be completely unbiased--based strictly on his job performance and personal abilities.
A dedicated team player, this telecommuter routinely makes full use of several telephone lines and an array of modern communications technology to stay in very close touch with people working at corporate headquarters.
Although his boss originally believed that on-site supervision would be necessary to obtain top performance and productivity, that's now all in the past. At least one telecommuter has proven you can turn in a great job from a distance--regardless of the strengths and weaknesses that might come into play if you were forced to travel to the central office.
You may not have thought this through, but telecommuting is likely to make significant changes in the distribution of populations throughout cities, suburbs, and rural towns.
For most of this century, cities grew outward from the center as everyone sought newer, nicer places to live that were still within physical commuting distance of good jobs. Cities continued to reflected a broad mix of populations of all ages, socio-economic levels, and career success.
But this pattern didn't last. Beginning in the '60s and '70s, the central areas of cities began to seriously decay as the bedrock businesses that made up their tax bases left town, and as families with the means to make a choice began to follow. The result was the "hollow-core" phenomenon we see so often today in cities and larger towns.
Now with the advent and growth of telecommuting, new forces are beginning to be felt in this constantly evolving demographic dance. Telecommuting is not only changing traffic and living patterns around our cities, but it is actually accelerating growth into certain suburban and rural areas. By freeing people from the need to drive to work five days a week, it makes an extra ten or twenty miles of commuting distance less onerous and costly.
So far, there is little or no evidence that telecommuters tend to originate at, or move out to, greater distances from their jobs. But so what? This may never happen, if only because more and more employers are dispersing their jobs out to where the people they want actually live, rather than centralizing employment in expensive and decaying cities. If jobs continue to follow people out to the suburbs and rural areas, the distance for an average physical commute may actually shorten in years to come.
But the long-term impacts of the shifts due to telecommuting may nevertheless create significant, new patterns in the demographic cross-section of both cities and rural areas.
New research seems to show that telecommuting is still attracting older employees, as well as those at the higher levels of education, management, and the professions. They use the freedom telecommuting gives them--as well as their greater affluence, family emphasis on child-rearing and good schools, and reduced desire for a vigorous nightlife--to justify living farther away from central city areas. Meanwhile, younger people continue to opt for living situations much nearer to "where the action is," not only for the fun of it, but because they often have less opportunity to eliminate their physical commutes to work through telecommuting.
The result is likely to be a long-term population tidal wave of immense proportions, with older, more successful, and more family-oriented telecommuters living farther out from central cities that are dominated by younger and less affluent people.
This is not to say that all rich telecommuters will stay away from every city. But there's reason to believe we'll see fewer of them in urban centers than in suburban and rural communities.
Copyright ©1998 by Robert Moskowitz. All rights reserved.