Home Is Where Office of Future Is : Jobs: Ventura County employees may be soon ‘telecommuting,’ working from home and communicating via phone, fax and computer.
William Moore of Simi Valley recently cut his 45-mile commute into downtown Los Angeles to less than 45 feet.
Instead of scrambling into his car and onto the freeway, two days a week Moore strolls down the hallway to his part-time work space. There, he says he burns quickly though his work stack during uninterrupted mornings. Without the hubbub of office activity, he has the quiet he needs to think, a necessity in his job with the Citizen’s Economy and Efficiency Commission.
“You have to discipline yourself,” said Moore. “But once that’s accomplished, it’s great. I’m more productive. I have more time to spend with my family. And I feel better without that hassle of commuting.”
Moore and 150 others like him who work for Los Angeles County are telecommuters. Since the beginning of a still-growing program that started in September, they do their work from home part of the week. They serve as a model for Ventura County, which hopes to have a telecommuting plan for some of its 5,000 employees by next spring.
The telecommuters represent what officials and futurists say will be an integral part of the solution to clogged freeways and brown skies in the 1990s.
“It is part of the wave of the future,” said John Campbell, president of the Los Angeles branch of the World Future Society and a telecommuting consultant. “On the very short term, in five to 10 years, this will be very widespread. Almost every major employer in the country is looking at this now.”
The benefits to employees and their supervisors alike are significant. Surveys from large private companies and a two-year pilot program among California state employees show that workers want the program to succeed, so they produce more, claim less sick time, and generally put out more energy. They report feeling less stress from fewer commutes; and they feel more important because they have their supervisors’ trust.
Their part-time absence from the office allows other employees to share work space, so more work is done in less room. The surveys also show that with minimal expense, the employer provides a benefit that helps in both recruiting new employees and retaining them, something the low-paying public sector desperately needs when competing with private industry for personnel.
Telecommuting also eases traffic troubles and reduces air pollution by removing cars from the road. That helps employers meet the requirements of Ventura County’s Rule 210 and Los Angeles County’s Regulation XV, which require employers to provide workers with incentives for reducing the number of times they drive alone to work.
“You can’t solve this problem of traffic and air pollution unless you get people to move in non-traditional ways,” said Ventura County Supervisor James Dougherty. “Roads are like jails; as soon as you build them, they’re full.”
Dougherty and County Administrative Officer Richard Wittenberg appointed a committee this month to plan the move. Among the county departments that would be candidates for telecommuting are data processing, planning, budgeting and the Air Pollution Control District.
“You don’t get less, but more productivity,” Wittenberg said. “The taxpayers will benefit and so will employees.”
Specialists in the field say telecommuters typically have jobs that involve analysis, research and development, reports or other kinds of writing, budgeting, typing, architectural drawing or drafting, and computer functions such as programming or graphics. Some who can’t take advantage of these programs work in the service industry, on assembly lines and in health care.
Telecommuters are not top management or low-level workers who require a lot of supervision. And in Los Angeles County, supervisors don’t want to include parents of unsupervised preschool children--too much of a distraction.
Not all telecommuters stay away from the office two or three days a week. Some, like Greg Stewart, a systems analyst for GTE at its Thousand Oaks office, commute from West Los Angeles most weekdays. His telecommuting comes into play in the middle of the night, when he fields emergency calls from the company’s Sacramento data center.
“I worked for the company before telecommuting was widespread,” said Stewart, one of GTE’s 400 employees who telecommute statewide. “In those days, we had a Marina del Rey center, so I would get up and go in there. Now I’ve cut out the hassle of leaving the house.”
Employers have little to lose and much to gain, said Carol Nolan, sales support manager of Pacific Bell’s Los Angeles office.
“Employees think of it as a benefit even though it doesn’t cost the company anything,” said Nolan, whose company has 1,500 people telecommuting statewide. “This is one of those things you can’t stop.”
Nolan exaggerates slightly when she says there is no cost. Employers must invest in training if they want a successful program, cautions Jack Nilles, the rocket scientist turned consultant who has coordinated programs for Pacific Bell, the state of California, and the city of Los Angeles.
Employees need tips on how to manage their time, and supervisors must learn to manage people who are out of sight. Employees must be evaluated not by where they work, but what they do, he said.
“The telecommuters may know what they’re doing, but the poor manager is sitting there thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to get canned because all my employees are at the beach.’ ”
Nilles points to the events following the Oct. 17 San Francisco earthquake. With no training, preparation or screening to determine which people were best suited for telecommuting, hundreds of Bay Area residents began working at home full time. Many later reported feeling isolated and complained of too many distractions, and supervisors were unsure about how to handle an invisible work force, Nilles said.
In addition to training costs, employers may have to pay installation costs for telephones or computers in employees’ homes, as well as long-distance phone bills, Nilles said.
Nilles believes those dollars are well spent.
“For every dollar an employer puts into training and telephone bills, you’ll make back $6 or $7 in increased productivity, employee retention, decreased sick-leave time, less room for office space, etc.,” Nilles said. “The most expensive part up-front is the training, and we see employers getting their money back in one to two years, and in some cases, in three months.”
In Ventura County, officials are pleased by those prospects, but still view telecommuting as an experiment.
“The answer is not in the technology, but in the political will to do it,” said supervisor Dougherty. “We’re big enough to have an impact, but small enough to back out if we have to.”
