Telecommuting * By Robert Moskowitz
Secondary Social Payoffs From Telecommuting
The Industrial Economy has been so fixated
for so many decades on moving millions of people dozens of miles each way
to and from their daytime jobs that the practical difficulties and social
problems this mode of work engenders have come to seem almost "normal."
But there's nothing normal about building high-rise downtown business centers
that get deserted after sundown, just as there's nothing normal about building
mile upon square mile of bedroom communities with few if any amenities,
gathering places, or cultural resources, and then emptying these vast regions
from morning 'til night of nearly everyone past high school graduation age.
It was bad enough in the 1950s when mostly fathers went to work, and these suburban wastelands were populated mainly by mothers and young children. Today, with as many as 60% to 80% of women actively participating in the workforce, too, the "bedroom community" syndrome has become much worse.
So it's refreshing to realize that in addition to all the primary benefits that telecommuting delivers for individuals and families, employers, and society as a whole, the continuing shift to this more advanced working mode will have secondary benefits for the millions of people who will never telecommute.
When you include work-at-home consultants and entrepreneurs in the totals, about one in every eight American families now houses a person who works at home during the day. Projections indicate that this figure (12%) will grow to almost 20% within the next five years.
Just think of the implications.
Let's begin with the simplest: Crime prevention. Daytime burglaries, for example, will become a lot riskier as the likelihood of finding a block of empty houses continues to decrease. Having more people walking, driving, and observing within our residential communities during the day will almost certainly tend to deter all sorts of crime, vagrancy, and vandalism.
In addition, having neighbors at home during the day creates a stronger basis for community feelings and cooperative activities. During snowstorms, for example, neighbors staying at home to telecommute can help each other shovel out. Younger neighbors can bring groceries for older neighbors housebound by the snow. Even in clement weather, neighbors working at home can use their break times to chat over the back fence, carpool to the grocery store, or accept others' important packages from delivery services.
Moreover, people working at home will tend to enliven and strengthen the local economy, because they'll want the services locally that they're used to finding "downtown," including pleasant, convenient restaurants and coffee shops, and access to professional services from business attorneys to training centers. And when they frequent these local vendors, they'll meet and get to know neighbors they might never encounter if they commuted every day to work outside the community.
The numbers of "latch-key" children should also decline as more kids returning from school to find Mom or Dad busy meeting deadlines from the home office or fold-away workstation. Telecommuting parents can more easily maintain a stronger presence in their children's lives, and exert more influence on their formative years, instead of farming them out to minimum-wage caretakers for fully a third of every weekday, or longer.
It's important to remember, of course, that telecommuting is no substitute for paid child care. There's no way a parent can tend to his or her youngster and still turn out high-quality work at a reasonable pace. Parent and child must both learn that telecommuting from home does not translate to always being available.
But whether a telecommuting Mom or Dad has a paid child care worker downstairs and an office upstairs, or takes the children to a neighborhood day care center before returning home to start work, there are significant advantages to being physically close to your children during the day.
First, you can respond more appropriately to every childhood problem. In the event of an emergency, telecommuting parents can arrive on the scene more quickly and determine the exact intensity of response and involvement that's required. But when you're 20 miles away and Johnny falls down, it's difficult to stay at work and remain effective, and if you leave there's little chance you'll have time to come back later that day and pick up where you left off.
Second, it's easier to share in special events. A birthday party or mini-recital, for example, needn't cost you a half-day or whole day of work. It's easy to take half an hour or an hour from your telecommuting responsibilities and look in on your child's triumph in creating the role of a tomato in the first grade play.
Third, the whole situation is much more relaxed and comfortable. The time saved through telecommuting can instantly translate into extra minutes with your children before and after work. Telecommuting, in fact, makes it possible to spend more time communicating, working out difficulties, and building a stronger relationship with everyone in your family.
What's more, working in plain view of your children provides a good way to teach them the importance and value of hard work. Instead of remaining a vague and remote abstraction that you perform at a remote location, your work becomes a literal reality for your children when you telecommute. As they grow up, they're more aware of what's required, and more willing to commit their talents and energies toward their own success on the job.
This telecommuting-induced community strength need not be torn apart by frequent moves to new locations, either. That's because telecommuters can often negotiate with their employers to avoid, delay, or mitigate the social impact of job-related transfers. When you must physically appear in the office every day, a transfer to another business unit can inevitably require a family move to a new town. But when telecommuting is part of the working pattern, it's more feasible to keep the kids in the same school and live in the same house because the need to travel to the new office is greatly reduced.
Since kids tend to thrive on long-established roots, the differences can be profound. Avoiding the move means your children can retain the same friends, attend the same schools, and feel the security of familiar surroundings much longer than the children of people who must follow their work from one community to another.
When the demands of physical travel still ruled the business world, real estate location was the key factor in setting property values and, by extension, office rents. But now that telecommuting is a reality for millions of workers, and more begin telecommuting every year, the equation for real estate valuation is inevitably being rewritten.
The main reason is that telecommuting and related working patterns create a disconnect between what we do and where we do it. As a result, it's far less important to locate many business operations in particular places.
For example, during the past decade it has become increasingly common to place low-visibility operations such as incoming call centers and back-office processing facilities in urban warehouses and rural locations where property values and rents are relatively cheap. Now the same kind of relocation opportunities are beginning to make sense for "front office" and higher-visibility operations like sales, administration, and in some cases even the executive suites.
What's more, techniques of "virtual" organization now allow larger numbers of people in a wider range of job classifications to accomplish significant work outside the office. Thus, organizations are obtaining a much greater proportion of their work from telecommuting employees, and from specialists working under "outsourcing" contracts.
Today's increasing automation and growing emphasis on working at a distance also allow organizations to accomplish a given level of production with fewer employees--particularly at central sites. As organizations grow leaner at the front lines, they naturally employ fewer layers of management and support staff who must be housed in expensive offices.
All this allows organizations to be equally or even more productive while occupying far less office space. Highly motivated because occupancy costs are frequently a company's second largest operating expense, facilities managers have been quick to recognize the cost-saving opportunities in the techniques of telecommuting and "virtualization."
For example, Pacific Bell has a plan to reduce its administrative office space by 28%--from 9.5 million square feet to 6.8 million square feet--over five years. The company expects to obtain a 25% savings in its occupancy costs.
In the short term, office rents may hold steady or even increase as economic activity picks up and business activity expands. But in the long term, the massive reduction in office and retail space demands will put downward pressure on rents, and thus on property values.
SBC Communications Inc. recently announced that Pacific Bell will begin broadly deploying high-speed Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) service in more than 200 communities across California to satisfy customers' increased demands for bandwidth and faster Internet access--a major boon for computerized telecommuters.
Coupled with Internet and telecommuting applications, ADSL provides online consumers and small businesses with accelerated access to the World Wide Web. As a standalone connection, ADSL allows telecommuting employees and after-hours home workers to connect to their employers' corporate networks via dedicated, secure, high-speed links. All this high-speed data communications capability is delivered over regular telephone lines that, unlike cable modems, provide dedicated bandwidth and secure communications.
The ADSL service will allow users to receive data from the Internet, or to connect to their office's local area network, at speeds up to 6MB per second (Mbps). That's 100 times faster than today's fastest analog telephone modems, which communicate at speeds up to 56KB per second (Kbps).
Due to existing technology and distance limitations, ADSL will not be available to all customers. Initially, it will be offered to about 60% of the households and businesses in Pacific Bell's ADSL-equipped service areas. To receive the service, customers must be located within 16,000 feet of an ADSL-equipped central office and their wiring must meet certain transmission criteria.
While existing phone lines can be adapted for ADSL, extra hardware and software are required, including: an ADSL modem; a "splitter" that divides voice and data line traffic; and a Network Interface Card that connects the modem to a personal computer.
Pacific Bell will provide a one-stop shop for hardware, service, and support and can assist customers in obtaining and installing these devices. California residents can call 1-888-884-2DSL or visit the Pacific Bell Web site at www.pacbell.com/products/business/fastrak/adsl/ for additional information.
Bell Atlantic also plans to begin offering an ADSL-based data service for consumers in mid-1998, followed shortly thereafter by a business offering. The company is evaluating pricing and deployment locations. By the end of the decade, Bell Atlantic expects ADSL service to be the leading high-speed, network access service in its consumer markets.
Bell Canada and other entities in western countries are jumping on the ADSL bandwagon, as well.
Deployment of ADSL technology has the potential to alleviate some of the pressure the tremendous increase in Internet usage has placed on the public switched telephone network. ADSL technology allows the data traffic that flows to and from a user's PC to be connected directly to a packet switch or router, and sent over an efficient high-speed packet data network, thus keeping such traffic from congesting the public switched network, which is engineered for the lower traffic demands of voice telephone calls.
People seeking jobs as telecommuters usually have great difficulty finding a list of companies that are willing to let their employees telecommute. Part of the problem is that keeping such a list up to date is very time consuming. If you're selling the information, there's a chance you'll take the money and run. And if you're not selling the information, there's little incentive to keep the list current.
As of June, 1998, however, one source of such a free list is the following Web site: www.adm-media.com/tools/telecom/ .
Naturally, there's no guarantee companies on this list will hire new employees and let them telecommute. Nor is there any assurance that every company willing to permit telecommuting is listed here. But the list does give you a place to start looking for work as a telecommuter.
Remember, the main tips for getting work as a telecommuter include:
1) Look for jobs on the basis of your skills and abilities, not your willingness to telecommute. The biggest difference is that you might look a little farther from home, since telecommuting will relieve you of having to make the trip there and back five days a week.
2) It's useful to make a job-hunting plan, if only to spell out the specific companies that are your highest potential employers.
3) Network with all your friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. There may be a local employer who is friendly to telecommuting, but if you don't ask the right people you may not find him or her.
4) Don't bring up the idea of telecommuting during the pre-employment interviews until a potential employer expresses some interest in hiring you.
5) Discuss telecommuting with your potential employer in terms of better work and lower costs for the company, not merely in terms of the benefits for you.
Copyright © 1998 by Robert Moskowitz. All rights reserved.