WorkHome

Work@Home

Mark Canepa, executive vice president of Sun Networking, says, "11,000 out of our 33,000 employees now work from home and have no office in any building. I myself have no office, nor do most executives at Sun. We have these banks of executive-style offices, and we may reserve them in advance much like a hotel room at the Marriott. In fact, we have eight-tenths of an office per employee for those who need to physically be here. We've invested heavily in an adaptive work environment and have neatly virtualized every employee's office with SmartCard technology." Sun's SmartCard is a credit cardlike device that once swiped through a reader renders the adjacent computer to the last full configuration that this user previously desired. SmartCard resonates well with Inescapable Data because it exploits common hardware by virtualizing individual environments, enabling its users to be rapidly comfortable regardless of location.

The cost savings of work@home are substantial. From the employer's perspective, the cost savings come from many different sources. IBM, for example, will save from $8K to $14K for each employee who elects to give up a permanent office (dependent largely on local real-estate rates). The productivity gains can be substantial, and employees become more willing to work through their morning and evening "drive times" and are perhaps even more willing to take a 10 P.M. or 5 A.M. conference call. Equally important, employee morale and happiness typically improve because the employee is less often caught in the middle between work and home-life demands.

From the employee side, the cost savings can be substantial as well. Commuting costs drop to near zero because employees go into the office only occasionally (a significant benefit given the sky-high price of gas and the average commute in the U.S. being more than 40 miles round trip). Daily trips to the coffee shop, the corner deli, and to the company cafeteria can be eliminated as well. Add in the value of being there when your child gets off the school bus, the value of a family dinner ready at 6:30 P.M., and the value of seldom missing a soccer game, and we are building happier employees.

But office buildings still exist. "We call it the Edifis complex...a lot of companies still feel they need to have a building in order to feel like a real company," states Jack Nilles, owner of JALLA, a long time tele-work consultant group. "It takes them a few years, and then they realize they might not need as big of a facility," continues Nilles.

Sun's view of the office building of the future is refreshing. "We see a large cafeteria-type area, much like food courts you'd see in a mall, courtyard-type setting. Surrounding this area are various conference rooms for more private meetings, but by in large, people will meet right there in the social atmosphere of the food court, peppered with 'wireless everything,'" describes Canepa, who explains that Sun is already doing this in some locations. The need for company buildings will still exist, at least partly because we do indeed need to work face to face some of the time and we personally value the importance of human contact. The advantage of the new world is that at least some significant part of our daily office lives can be conducted outside of the office setting and equally as effective (given that the tools and technology are now pervasive between the home and office). A bit more control and flexibility has been given back to the employee in exchange for more work hours, typically.

During the course of our interviews for this book, we met with more than 45 senior executives, and it was surprising to see a clear division between managers who understood and embraced the move toward work@home and those who did not. Primarily, the division was along age lines. Those over 50 would look at us like we had three heads, typically saying something like, "How do I know they are working?" Younger managers are far more likely to embrace work@home probably because they are living it within their own organizations. They would often recite with pride just how many different geographic territories their teams spanned. Nilles explains that the underlying resistance to work@home stems from lack of training. "Managers panic when they start to have employees work at home. They have never been trained to manage remote or nonoffice employees. They need to understand the various tools and tactics that can make it a fabulously successful experience for both sides."

For what it's worth, youngsters of today (college kids) will be our work force of tomorrow, and they are growing through times of remote work themselves. Most, if not all, colleges offer e-learning style classes wherein students do not even have to show up for classes physically. The lecture, homework, and even tests are administered online. If not, the class is at least significantly enhanced by companion Web materials. The point is this: The new worker generation is ready to accept nontraditional methods of accomplishing tasks because they are living it.

Job Moves to You

Two decades ago, IBM insiders used to joke that the letters I-B-M stood for "I've Been Moved." Job offers often came with an expectation to relocate at the whim of the corporation. In contrast, now IBMers have a new meaning for the old acronym: "I'm By Myself." In an Inescapable Data world, work moves to the person rather than the other way around.

Here's an increasingly common scenario. You're a manager in a Boston office of a mega-size systems and services company. A job requisition opens up and allows you to fill a position you have had vacant for months. However, because the company is trying to maintain a level head count, you must first attempt to fill the job from within before looking outside. With 160,000 employees, there is a good chance that one of them has the right skills matrix you desire. However, there are 1,000 office locations around the globe, so the odds of the right and best person for job within your current facility are extraordinarily slim. So you look for, find, and hire Dick, a well-qualified candidate out of San Jose because he is the right match for the job. No matter that Dick is 3 time zones and 3,000 miles away. You're comfortable because you have high-speed Internet, instant and text messaging, good ol' e-mail, and a cell phone to keep you in constant touch. He can even afford working in some additional "boundary hours."

Here's another increasingly common scenario: Another of your employees quietly mentions she is having trouble getting their youngest off to school in the morning. Similarly, being home to help care for her husband's aging parents later in the day is also becoming increasingly important (a theme excruciatingly familiar to a large number of people). She states that she actually has plenty of hours in the day to do everything, including her demanding job, but she is having a hard time working around these family issues. Too often, she has to take sick days, but most importantly, her stress level is elevated. When in the office, she spends a significant amount of time just checking in with everyone at home to be sure things are under control.

Finally, she pops the question: "Because Dick is working productively out on the West Coast and we only ever see him 'virtually' through conference calls and e-meetings, do you think I can work from home, too? I'll be sure to put in even more hours saved by no commute and I'll be more efficient balancing my home and work life. I have DSL at home, and with the VPN, I can access every server as if I were here, in the same way Dick can. Can I telecommute?"

So the dominos fall. As a manager, it is incredibly hard to justify how one employee can be remote and part of the same group doing the same work and not allow others to exploit the same flexibility. So it is best to embrace the opportunity and learn how to properly manage such a situation because it is simply in evitable. Work@home can also reduce stressa serious concern for young families trying to raise children and maintain two income streams at the same time.

Nilles is enthusiastic about multiple levels of "wins" in the telecommuting model:

We can demonstrate conclusively that people actually work more and accomplish more work when they work from home. The typical office workplace is no library. The level of distractions and interruptions is very high. For the at-home worker, the level of personal home activities roughly matches what they consume for time by calling home and trying to patch-together babysitters and other care givers. There are three huge gains: 1) They don't rigidly end their workday at 5:15; 2) they have far fewer distractions from people coming in and chit-chatting about the weekend and TV shows; and 3) when they are doing focused work, it is finished earlier and with higher quality.

There are 80 million "information workers" in the U.S. (people who work in typical office settings primarily using computers for their work). According to JALLA, typically 20 percent to 30 percent of those people are what is called location dependentthat is, they physically need to be in the building to perform their job (receptionists, many medical-related jobs, and so forth). Doing the math, there could be as many as 60 million people who currently have "cubes" in some undifferentiated office building who could be more productive and happier working from "anywhere" in the Inescapable Data connected fashion. We are not in the business of giving out investment advice, but it sure looks like a good time to sell your office real-estate holdings.