Out of the Office: It’s Working
They used to call it “working at home.” Now it’s “telecommuting,” the idea of people putting in at least part of their work week at home or at some convenient work center closer to home than their regular office. The concept still is in the pilot-project stage for many companies and government agencies, but most such experiments are demonstrating that the advantages of telecommuting outweigh the drawbacks.
Telecommuting is a natural in Southern California, where so much of commerce and government deals with information services. The merits of keeping commuters off the freeways at rush hours are obvious both for traffic management and air- pollution control. Employees and managers are finding that there are plenty of other benefits, too.
President Bush boosted telecommuting in a recent address in Los Angeles, noting that if only 5% of the workers in Los Angeles County telecommuted one day a week, they would save 205 million miles of travel in a year. Telecommuting saves energy and improves air quality and quality of life, Bush said: “Not a bad deal.”
Both the city and county of Los Angeles, and the state of California, have launched telecommuting programs. Pacific Bell has been a pioneer, with managers working out of a satellite office in Woodland Hills part of the week. And the Southern California Assn. of Governments has a group under the leadership of Rialto Mayor John Longville to assist local governments in the region in replicating successful telecommuting efforts.
Skeptical managers have feared that they would not get a full day’s effort out of employees working away from their watchful eyes. But bosses have discovered almost universally that productivity actually increases. Employees are happier and less likely to change jobs. Telecommuting reduces the demand for more office space--an incentive for Los Angeles County agencies that were running out of room. New technology such as facsimile transmission machines give telecommuters all the tools they need to do the job.
Telecommuting is only emerging from the experimental phase and must be encouraged at every level. Regional air-pollution control and mobility plans call for a 30% reduction in rush- hour trips through flexible work schedules and telecommuting by the year 2010. That’s an admittedly ambitious goal. But if telecommuting works as well as its proponents believe, it will pay significant areawide dividends.
