like American Express and McDonald’s, were allowing work at home as of
1984. Many more companies might be. They might have kept quiet, however,
fearing either (1) union resistance or (2) pressure from employees who
wanted to telecommute before management was ready for them to do so.
“I look outside my Manhattan window and think some cities are going to
be transformed—streets will be empty,” _InfoWorld_ quoted an ESU
official.
That might have been stretching it. In 1984 only several thousand people
were full-time telecommuters on a payroll. But Jack M. Nilles, coiner of
the word “telecommuting,” said the number may have reached twenty
thousand if you included other people.[59] Lone individuals,
stockbrokers, even a software house organized “on-line,” were trying it.
And Nilles, a future studies researcher at the University of Southern
California, was predicting perhaps as many as ten million wired workers
by 1990. He said most of the ten million would telecommute only part
time. Still, that would be a huge number, perhaps one-fifth of the
information workers in the United States.
Footnote 59:
Nilles is in a position to keep track of statistics associated with
telecommuting. He has done numerous telecommuting studies as a senior
research associate with the Center for Futures Research at the
University of Southern California. Nilles has written an important
pioneering work in the field—_The Telecommunications/Transportation
Tradeoff: Options for Tomorrow_.
In this chapter I am indebted not only to Nilles but also to work that
the Stanford Research Institute did. SRI’s three-part study, completed
in May 1977 for the National Science Foundation, appeared under the
main title _Technology Assessment of Telecommunications/Transportation
Interaction_. The first part is _Volume I: Introduction, Scenario
Development, and Policy Analysis_, by Richard C. Harkness, available
for $17.50 in paper and $4.50 on microfiche as PB-272-694, from the
National Technical Information Service, U.S. Department of Commerce,
5285 Port Royal Rd., Springfield, Virginia 22161. The second is
_Volume II: Detailed Impact Analysis_ by Harkness; $70 in paper and
$4.50 on microfiche, PB-272-695. The third is _Volume III:
Contributions of Telecommunications to Improved Transportation System
Efficiency_ by A. E. Moon and J. M. Johnson, E. P. Meko, H. S.
Proctor, and C. D. Feinstein; $14.50 in paper and $4.50 on microfiche,
PB-272-696. Needless to say, Alvin Toffler’s _Third Wave_ (New York:
William Morrow, 1980) contributed greatly to popular interest in the
subject of telecommuting.
You might beat the crowd in the most obvious way—by becoming a
do-it-yourself telecommuter, perhaps without even leaving your present
job. “Wired to Work” will explain. You’ll also learn how your company
might benefit from large-scale telecommuting. Even small firms can come
out ahead. A growing translation service in Washington, D.C., squeezed
into the basement of the owner’s home, lends tiny Radio Shack computers
to workers.
Telecommuting may very well help your firm reduce real estate costs;
hire better people, clerical and professional; and get a head start on
your competitors, mixing high tech with decency and managerial common
sense. No, I’m not going to suggest putting a “For Sale” sign tomorrow
on your corporate skyscraper. Telecommuting isn’t for every worker or
every company. American bureaucracies, however, public and private, are
not yet tapping the full potential of telecommuting. As far back as 1970
Commerce Department statistics showed that half of American workers
dealt in information, whether it was travel agenting, technical writing,
or filling out 10K forms.
Match those statistics with Jack Nilles’s estimate that more than 2.5
million nonfarmers in the United States already work at home, and you
can appreciate telecommuting’s prospects.
Fuller’s case, in particular, shows how countless Americans might leap
at the chance to telecommute.
His employer was a bureaucracy, a huge one, hardly a trendies’ citadel,
lacking an official telecommuting program, and yet he carved out his own
niche as a wired worker. The Navy allowed a few other men from his
office to write and think at home. But the resourceful Fuller went a
step beyond; he took the initiative of hooking himself up
electronically. And he told me, “I’ll never again work where I don’t
want to be.” It seemed so logical. Now that telecommuting was
technologically possible, why shouldn’t employees _ask_ for it? Why
shouldn’t telecommuting be a grass-roots movement among professionals in
large organizations, not just the province of corporate planners and
rich escapees from Wall Street? Moreover, with his down-to-earth wisdom
expressed plainly in a Georgia accent, John Fuller couldn’t be shrugged
off as a dreamy hacker.
The purists might not have accepted Fuller into the telecommuting fold,
since he was still spending at least one-quarter of his forty-hour week
in other people’s offices. To me, though, he was all the better an
illustration of how people and companies could gracefully change over.
As an in-house consultant, Fuller went from office to office, telling,
for instance, how the Naval Academy could set up a cost-analysis formula
for its laundry or how a base commander could consolidate two computer
systems. His “clients” were not completely “on-line.” And he appreciated
the value of face-to-face meetings where he could smooth ruffled
feathers with southern humor. “I may look like another alligator,” he
would tell bureaucrats intimidated by the presence of a management
consultant, “and I may be taking you away from your work, but I need
information from you to help you do it better.” Fuller would also stray
into his boss’s office from time to time for library research and to
remind people he was still breathing.
Every few days he reminded them in other, more meaningful ways. He would
load up his little Heath computer with disks containing the report he
was working on and a communications program. The computer would then
pipe the output to his modem, which sped the results to a Wang word
processor in his office—well, his former office.
A secretary would capture the information on a disk, watching in
appreciation as Fuller’s work flashed across the Wang’s screen at
several hundred words per minute.
“The secretaries don’t admit to being threatened,” he said. “They’re
still busy transcribing the stuff the other guys bring in. And if the
others were transmitting it like me, they’d still need to do the final
formating, editing, the modifications required of these things.
“Besides, there’s got to be someone there who answers the phone.”
Baby-sitting a computer by the phone doesn’t sound like the most
challenging task, but one day many of the secretaries themselves may
work at home.
Granted, some management-level workers worry that telecommuting would
lower their own job status by forcing them to work keyboards. “If I were
a civilian at some companies and I sat down at a keyboard and composed
my day’s work,” Fuller admitted, “a clerk or administrative-type person
might complain to the personnel office that I was clerical rather than
professional and should be demoted.
“As the younger generation of managers grows up with keyboards and rises
higher in the power structure,” Fuller said, however, “you’ll find the
stigma fading.” By century’s end, moreover, a voice-controlled computer
might sell for less than $1,000. Good-bye, typing! You may still use a
keyboard, actually—but just to clean up sentences where the computer
confused “sleigh” with “slay” or muddled similar combinations.
Should you, then, even today, follow Fuller’s example and make yourself
a telecommuter?
Consider:
_1. How much public contact does your job require and in what form? And
how much contact do you have with your coworkers?_
Fuller didn’t need to have strangers passing through his office. His
job, rather, called for him to go to “clients.” Also, he was working
on his own projects, not entangled in office-wide activities, and he
didn’t need constant feedback from his boss.
_2. Does your job require much office politics, and how secure are you
in it?_
John Fuller was about to retire. Had he been a young manager
fighting for a promotion, he might not have chosen to remain most of
the time out of his boss’s sight. Then again, he did have the
benefit of a superior more enlightened than many. His boss wanted
results, not mere attendance.
Margrethe Olson, an associate professor at New York University’s
business school, warns that some telecommuters may suffer at
promotion time. She correctly wonders about “the long-term career
potential of an employee in an environment where visibility is still
critical to promotability.” In a 1982 paper Olson observed: “Some
form of management by objectives, either informal or formal,
generally needs to replace ‘over the shoulder’ supervision, in
spirit as well as in fact.” As she once said, “Culture changes more
slowly than technology.”
Keep in mind the experiences of a vice-president of a New York
consulting firm who telecommuted from Florida.
When the _New York Times_ interviewed him, he insisted that he
remain nameless, lest the wrong people in the firm find out about
the arrangement.[60] “I still think there’s a mentality around there
that people who work at home are not working,” he said, adding,
however:
“I like to have uninterrupted periods of work alone. If I have to
stop and go to a meeting for two hours, I lose more than two hours.”
Footnote 60:
The example of the Florida-based telecommuter is from “Rising Trend of
Computer Age: Employees Who Work at Home;” _New York Times_, March 12,
1981, p. 1.
_3. What becomes of the clerks and secretaries whose work your
telecommuting may change or reduce?_
Fuller’s “disappearance” from his regular office didn’t put anyone
out on the street. It merely lightened the secretaries’ work loads.
_4. How expensive, and how much trouble technically, would telecommuting
be to your company and to you?_
In Fuller’s case it was relatively easy. His office already had the
word processor, and as a computer hobbyist he already owned the
Heath micro. Ever ingenious, he devised an easy way of entering data
so the Wang, which justified margins by the paragraph, could
function with his home system, which did so by the line. (See Backup
XI, “The Micro Connection: Some Critical Explanations,” for more
tips on links between your own micro and the office’s.)
John Fuller’s electronic hookup cost next to nothing. A modem like
his—the device allows a computer to talk over the phone—would sell
for about $100 today. Faster modems may cost $300-$600.
It pays to check out technical specifications and shop around. The
old compatibility rule applies here: don’t believe that any
combinations of equipment will work together until you’ve actually
tested them out. Obtain a store’s promise that you’ll win a refund
if the systems won’t talk to one another electronically. You’ll also
need to make sure that the computers have communications programs
that function together. A good communications program for a
micro—one that’s easy to use and lets you store information to be
transmitted—can cost less than $150. Even free software may work for
you. I didn’t pay a cent for my MODEM7 program, which the writers
placed in the public domain.
Normally, as a do-it-yourself telecommuter, you should favor micros
over “dumb terminals.” At least make certain you can easily
accumulate large masses of material to shoot out over the phone
lines. That way you’ll conserve your company’s phone and computer
resources. Suppose, however, that somehow they’re both unlimited and
you don’t mind a phone line being tied up while you’re dumping
material into the big corporate computer. Then maybe you can get
away with a dumb terminal costing just a few hundred dollars.
_5. How do you normally gather information in your job? By phone? By
looking over written material? By tapping into your company’s
computer?_
If facts normally reach you by phone, you can install a special
business line and tell your colleagues that, no, they won’t disturb
you at home—that your work is what the line’s for.
Written material is trickier, of course. One answer may be a
facsimile machine, which could cost more than your computer but may
be justified if drawings are part of your work. In the future, even
cheap personal computers will have attachments to scan written
documents and zip the images over the phone lines. Already some
expensive Wangs offer this feature.
Meanwhile, like Fuller, you may want to catch up with written
material by visiting your office every few days, or you may try a
formal or informal messenger service—perhaps a coworker.
If you must tap into your company’s own computer, make certain you
can do so without any data-security complications. And consider how
accessible your corporate data base is to begin with. Maybe there
aren’t ways of conveniently plugging in—in which case you’d better
rid yourself of plans for do-it-yourself telecommuting.
_6. Would your family leave you alone while you telecommuted?_
You must work out a deal with them that includes a place to work
without interruption, rules for phone messages, and so on.
_7. What about potential marital problems?_
“If you work in your employer’s office, your spouse doesn’t show up
very often,” says Walter I. Nissen, Jr., a programmer-consultant
who, off and on, has been telecommuting in various jobs since the
late 1960s. “But if you’re home, your spouse can get angry at you,
face-to-face, right there.” He finds telecommuting to be easier with
his wife now working as a social worker.
_8. Do you have the drive to do your job alone?_
“I’m not a Theory X man,” says Fuller, referring to the school of
management that says people work best with the boss peering over
their shoulders.
Don’t mess with do-it-yourself telecommuting if you aren’t a
self-starter—a useful trait even in corporately initiated programs.
Don’t recommend it to anyone lacking this trait.
_9. Can your boss measure your performance objectively? This isn’t
necessary but it helps._
Michael K. Caverly, a recently retired captain and John Fuller’s
former supervisor, couldn’t give any precise figures comparing the
overall quality of the telecommuter’s work to earlier times. But
Caverly was plainly delighted. He believes that Fuller performed
better without having to worry everyday about the horrors of rush
hour. “I almost feel guilty about it,” he said of Fuller’s
diligence. “He would rework a problem all night long, and I’d feel
almost as if I were taking advantage of him. In our office we did
thirty-three studies one year, and John’s studies were the only ones
that came in on time all the time.”
Jeremy Joan Hewes is also sold on telecommuting. “Can you work at home?”
Hewes’s own boss asked when he hired her for _PC Magazine_, an
independent publication for owners of the IBM PC.
“That’s where the computer is,” she replied happily.
It made sense. Hewes had her North Star micro there, after all. What’s
more, she’d written a book on “worksteaders,” as she called them, and by
her late thirties had worked at home most of her professional life. So
why not use her North Star there and modem her stories in? She might
even edit others’ articles sent over the phone lines. The magazine
wouldn’t have to jam another human sardine into the cramped offices it
then occupied above a restaurant in northwest San Francisco. She could
work better alone. The pay would be the same for her hundred hours a
month. And she could enjoy tax breaks on computer equipment, supplies,
even some of her rent.
The magazine, in return, ended up getting more than five thousand words
a month from her, sometimes double that amount, while, at the same time,
as an associate editor, she regularly oversaw at least one other writer.
She also did additional work for which she was paid beyond the hundred
hours.
“It’s a lot less chaotic at home,” said Hewes, who also was writing
books. “I don’t have to dress up. I normally wear jeans or corduroys. I
can start work at dawn in my bathrobe and answer the phone that way if
it rings while I’m headed for the shower. I don’t have to drive through
traffic jams every day. Or stand up for twenty minutes on a bus, hanging
on for dear life to a pole, jolting along the street. I work in
surroundings I’ve created.”
She created them with both the IRS and aesthetics in mind. Her
apartment, near the Golden Gate Bridge, was on the second floor of a
seventy-year-old house with high ceilings and leaded bay windows. A
bookshelf and wooden cabinet set the computer area apart. Her keyboard
and video screen were atop a custom-crafted table with fruitwood edges;
she can work alongside her cocker spaniel-poodle, and through the bays
she could see a doll-repair shop. It was vintage San Francisco. No
matter that neighbors’ punk-rock music once besieged her ears or that
practice pitchers sometimes thudded tennis balls against the house or
that apartments cluttered what once were sand dunes. Several times a day
she switched on her answering machine, a device she deemed necessary for
worksteads. Then she’d swim laps at a nearby pool or walk her dog amid
cypress and eucalyptus trees, perhaps with friends, perhaps alone,
perhaps mulling over future articles for _PC_, where she once warned
would-be telecommuters of the need for “regular breaks from the
concentration of work.” At the same time she lectured herself and others
on the need for self-discipline. She trained her friends to realize that
she was earning a living, not goofing off—a confusion that may fade as
telecommuting becomes a more mundane pursuit.
She kept her sanity and a schedule—well, a writer’s equivalent of a
schedule—by remembering how she had promised to research X material by Y
date and how she _would_ complete an article on time. “I go to an
editorial meeting,” she said, “and I say, ‘Here’s what I want to write
for the March issue.’ They say, ‘Oh, gosh, someone else is doing that,’
or, ‘Why don’t you do this?’ or, ‘Fine, hand it in by the fifteenth.’”
“Rarely,” Hewes said of her editors, “can I imagine them calling me at
eight in the morning to transmit a story in an hour.”
Mostly, in fact, she sent in her stories at night through her computer.
Her IBM—she loyally bought one to replace the North Star—talked over the
phone to the magazine’s machine with an automatic-answer modem. She
could tell the office computer to save her copy on a disk. Except for
light editing and formating, no human normally needed to type another
keystroke; _PC_’s computers tied in with the printer’s.
It sounds HALish, depersonalized, but like Fuller, she and others at the
magazine tried to infuse their work with as much warmth as they could.
No one at _PC_ was leaving martinetlike orders—unaccompanied by
conversation, phone or otherwise—on the green screen. And Hewes
painstakingly consulted over the phone with her writers. Moreover, while
Hewes worked from home at least seventy of the hundred hours, she was at
the _PC_ offices several times a week to socialize, pick up mail, and
swap ideas. And she would have come in, occasionally, anyway, even if
she lived fifty miles from the magazine. (Also, she was in the field for
face-to-face interviews, just as Fuller, working for the Navy, would
visit his “clients.”) As the telecommuting movement grows, workers and
supervisors alike should remember to _see_ and _speak_ to others, not
just key to each other.
Whatever the case here, both Hewes and _PC_ were tickled with her
telecommuting arrangement. “We’re not paying for office space,
electricity, desk space,” said David H. Bunnell, then publisher and
editor in chief. “She even provides her own coffee.” An office for her
might have cost the equivalent of $1,200 a year. More important,
however, Bunnell happily noted the thousands of words she writes for
each issue: “She couldn’t be more productive, and she does her research
conscientiously. Like the article she did on printers. It was obvious
she’d surveyed twenty or thirty manufacturers in the field.”
Close to a year later, Hewes told me that she was no longer
telecommuting regularly. Bunnell had been so happy with her work that he
had appointed her editor at the book division of _PC World_, which he
had started after leaving _PC Magazine_. Hewes still loved the concept
of telecommuting. But she understood its limits better. “When I was an
associate editor of _PC Magazine_,” she said, “I was actually more of a
writer than an editor, and I didn’t have to be as much a manager as I am
now. But now I have to juggle ten book projects and do budgets and go to
several meetings a week. My ideal thing would be to go to the office two
days a week and work at home the other three. I figure I’ll work on that
for next year. Now all I’ve got to do is get everyone I need to see to
come in the same two days that I do!”
Bunnell himself offers another qualification in praising
telecommuting—not everyone has the needed discipline—but he says
telecommuting can work especially well for people who write or sell. One
New York magazine publisher, in fact, developed a special computer
system for handicapped people, featuring written prompts to keep sales
pitches consistent. And Bunnell thinks that telecommuting can work for
executives, too, with the right system, taking advantage of computerized
records of the words they keyed in.
Can clerical-level workers, however, also telecommute happily?
A South Carolina case illustrates both the blessings and _potential_
pitfalls of telecommuting for clerical people.[61]
Footnote 61:
The South Carolina facts come from “Rising Trend of Computer Age:
Employees Who Work at Home,” the _New York Times_, March 12, 1981, p.
1; “Computers Turn Dens into Offices,” _USA Today_, May 9, 1983, p. 1;
and “Home Computer Sweatshops.” _The Nation_, April 2, 1983, p. 390.
In addition, I talked to Ann Blackwell and her husband, Tim, assistant
vice-president of basic and major medical claims at Blue Cross-Blue
Shield, in South Carolina.
Blue Cross-Blue Shield there says it isn’t running an electronic
sweatshop. The telecommuters’ rewards are roughly comparable to those of
the regular office workers, and some cottage keyers can actually come
out far ahead. The program has been going on for years. And there’s a
long waiting list.
Ann Blackwell, one of the keyers, transmits her work back to Blue Cross
at the crack of dawn; then she can fix breakfast for her two children
and take breaks for household work and lunch. “I’d rather do this than
go to the office,” she said. “I don’t have to dress. I don’t have
someone looking over my shoulder all the time to see if I’m working.”
In a typical day a “cottage keyer” processes 360 claims forms from
doctors. The pay is sixteen cents a claim, or $57.60 for the 360, minus
a levy of $10.20 for equipment rental, meaning that the worker ends up
with $47.40 before taxes.
That’s $2.18 more a day than full-time employees at Blue Cross receive
for similar work, if you consider the full timers’ benefits like
holidays, sick leave, vacation, and disability and health insurance. A
good clerk could earn some $12,000 a year. And $12,000 is nothing to
sneer at in South Carolina where many living costs are low.
However:
1. The cottage keyers are paying more than $2,600 a year to rent their
machines. Doesn’t this smack of company-store tactics in a mining
town? Why not finance the purchase of the worker’s own machine, which
he or she might pay off in a year? Blue Cross official Tim
Blackwell—who has given his company some useful feedback based on his
wife’s experiences—defends the steep charge for the machines. He says
it’s actually an incentive. The more a cottage keyer works and earns,
the smaller will be the percentage of her income going to pay for the
terminal cost.
2. The telecommuters don’t get the security that full timers do.