Telecommuting: has its time come?

Home Office Computing survey of Fortune 1,000 companies and government organizations - includes related articles negating telecommuting objections, persuading supervisors to allow telecommuting and a profile of senior editor Nick Sullivan's telecommuting experiences?

by Amy Bellinger, Helen La Van

The phrase the best of both worlds probably applies better to the idea of telecommuting than to almost anything else you can think of. Not everyone is bold enough to start a home-based business, but having a corporate job that you do at home, complete with full salary and benefits, is an out-of-this-world situation for many people.
As strong proponents of the telecommuting movement (a quarter of our staff works from home at least part-time), HOME OFFICE COMPUTING got feedback from human-resource personnel and employee managers at more than 100 Fortune 1,000 companies and government organizations to feel them out on corporate America's attitudes about working from home. Here's a look at what we discovered.
Because of the many compelling reasons to hop on the bandwagon--office-expense reductions, employee retention, compliance with pollution-reduction legislation 30 percent of the organizations we surveyed reported sponsoring a telecommuting program. And more than half of those had a formal, written work-at-home pohcy.
Some respondents said they know telecommuting will come to their organizations eventually, but they are not ready for it just yet. Unfortunately, nearly all of the employers without a work-at-home program say there is less' than a 10 percent chance their organizations will adopt telecommuting at all.

According to our survey, the most important factor used by personnel staff to determine whether a worker may telecommute is a demonstrated ability to work independently. Further, a wide range of titles--from MIS director to word processor--are allowed to telecommute, according to our survey. Seventy-two percent of the respondents felt the best reason to let people work at home was to retain valuable employees. Traffic and pollution were deemed important reasons by 71 percent of the respondents.
Most companies with telecommuting programs in our survey said family considerations were also compelling reasons for starting a program. Sixty-three percent felt that easing home/workplace conflicts, which has fueled other alternative working movements such as job sharing, part-time professional work, family leave, and flextime, was the top reason to implement telecommuting in the future. And, surprisingly, office-expense reduction fell toward the bottom of the list, with a 58 percent rating.
Pacific Bell in California is one company that has jumped on the bandwagon, not only for its own employees, but as an advocate of telecommuting in the business community. "We tried out the concept in Los Angeles in 1984. The Olympic Organizing Committee told the major city employers to get their people out of the business districts during the two weeks of the Olympics," said Carol Nolan, telecommuting project manager. "It worked. Now we have about 1,000 happy employees in the program, most of whom work at home one day a week."
When the survey asked how employees' productivity differed, if at all, between the office and home, home-based workers got a good report card. Fifty percent of the respondents said telecommuters are more productive at home, 46 percent said there was no difference, and only 4 percent said their homeworkers would be more productive back at the office.
The overall satisfaction rating from companies with telecomrouters was high--from the point of view of both the telecommuting employees and their direct supervisors. There are problems, though. Survey respondents were asked to report negative and positive comments heard from telecommuters and their supervisors. The most frequently mentioned problems cited by telecommuters themselves were isolation, difficulty of communication, lack of opportunities for promotion, coworker resentment, and all kinds of problems with meetings-- scheduling them, missing them, and not knowing about them.
From their supervisors, comments such as "Telecommuters can't keep in the information loop," "Employees are not always available when they are needed," and "Non-telecommuters resent the situation" were common.
While we heard from strong proponents of telecommuting in the survey sample, there was also a sizable contingent of naysayers. More than 60 percent of the respondents didn't support telecommuting, had not studied the issue, did not believe it should be studied, and did not think there would be any telecommuting going on in their organizations, even in the year 2000. The most common reasons they gave centered on management resistance and supervisory issues. Nearly 57 percent of the employers spotlighted upper-management resistance as the reason they hadn't investigated telecommuting.
Some respondents were frank in their assessment of management's lack of readiness, writing in reasons such as "conservatism of the organization" and "fear of loss of control." "I would not be surprised to learn that organizations give the idea of telecommuting a flat-out no," says Gil Gordon, president of Telecommuting Consultants, a firm based in Monmouth Junction, New Jersey, that counsels large companies on telecommuting. "If you ask someone whether they like sushi, and they don't know what it is, they'll ask, 'What is it?' If you tell them it's raw fish, they'll tell you they don't want any. But if you fix them an appetizing example, it's a different story.