County Considers Work-From-Home Option : Workplace: Telecommuting is becoming more attractive with the threat of gridlock looming. County workers may soon get the chance to forgo the daily grind to get to work.

Encouraged by the early success of the county employees’ fledgling peak-hour traffic management plan, the county Board of Supervisors may soon add the option of telecommuting to its program to further reduce highway congestion.

Telecommuting--having employees work some days each week at home, often using computers and facsimile machines to hook up with their offices--is gaining increasing popularity in the private and public sectors as bumper-to-bumper traffic clogs the nation’s highways, particularly in Southern California.

“Telecommuting moves the work to the workers instead of the workers to work,” said Supervisor John MacDonald, who is leading efforts to use telecommuting as one of several tools to improve traffic flow.

During the past two years, MacDonald and Supervisor Susan Golding have developed a menu of plans, including flexible working hours, car-pooling, and subsidized mass-transit passes, to reduce the number of cars on the roads, especially during peak commuter hours: from 7:30-8:30 a.m. and 4:30-5:30 p.m.

“There is no one cure-all solution to our growing traffic problems,” MacDonald said. “Our strategy is to introduce every element that we can to reduce the number of cars and single-driver cars to help reduce traffic congestion. You have to do it in increments and the next logical expansion of our existing plan is to incorporate telecommuting.”

MacDonald is recommending that the county identify personnel and specific jobs that would be suitable for telecommuting, and, if applicable, develop policies to have as many of the county’s 14,000 employees work at home. The board is expected to vote on the proposal Jan. 9.

“Hopefully, by using these different approaches, we can stabilize traffic congestion and then manage it so we don’t end up like Orange or L.A. County, which basically have gridlock from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m.,” MacDonald said.

In fact, the severity of the traffic problem in Los Angeles recently spurred county officials there to begin a telecommuting program too, said Patty Krebs, a spokeswoman for the Foundation for a Quality San Diego, a transportation issues advocacy group. In October, the group sponsored a telecommuting public-awareness seminar in San Diego.

Within the next five years, Los Angeles officials hope 15% of the county’s 17,000 employees based in the city’s central administration building will be telecommuting, at least part time.

According to Krebs, the city of San Diego has also begun feasibility studies to determine if telecommuting would be suitable for some of its employees.

“There are many jobs that you can do at home just as well or better than you could do at the office,” MacDonald said. “Just take the computer, fax machine and modem that you would put in the office and put it in somebody’s home. Such a program would prove particularly beneficial, say to working mothers, who are becoming a larger part of our work force. They wouldn’t have to worry about child care and at the same time they could do their work.”

In addition to reducing traffic and air pollution, telecommuting advocates say there are other advantages, such as less need for parking and office space. Supporters also say telecommuting often increases morale and allows workers to be more productive.

“I think a lot of times we all wish that we can get away from the many interruptions we encounter at the office,” said John Duve, Sandag transportation demand management administrator. Duve said telecommuting could be a potentially valuable component of Sandag’s regional efforts to reduce traffic congestion within the county’s borders.

“If we can get away from the phone, work in the comfort of your own home, in solitude, imagine how much work you could get done,” Duve said.

Telecommuting programs would not be costly, but Duve said that other obstacles could slow its use.

“We’re really in this Information Age with a variety of machines and computers at our disposal that could allow us to work in freedom, but we still manage people as if we were in the Industrial Age,” Duve said. “Management today still wants to be able to watch the worker work, to supervise directly, rather than just measure productivity. Changing our behavior will be one of the first things we have to do before we can take advantage of telecommuting.”

Duve emphasized that telecommuting isn’t reserved solely for those who use high-technology equipment.

“I think there’s a misconception that only people who use computers can telecommute,” Duve said. “There’s plenty of people out there who could stuff a day’s worth of work in their briefcase and just do it at home.”

MacDonald says the use of telecommuting should add to improvements that already have emerged from the county’s existing peak-hour, traffic-management plan.

Last September the board approved a policy to alter county employees’ work schedules to reduce the number of workers traveling on the road during peak commuter hours.

Each county department was allowed to set its own work hours within a certain time frame: workers could not start before 6 a.m. or leave after 6 p.m. and had to be at work between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m.