Telecommuting Centers Bring Jobs Closer to Home : Employment: County officials consider a facility in the Antelope Valley. Such offices usually need government subsidies to survive.

During the 50 minutes telephone company worker Morna Nelander used to spend wending her way through morning freeway traffic, she now exercises in a gym. She uses the hour it took her to get home to polish important projects so she never has to work on weekends.

Instead of commuting from her Upland home to GTE’s Monrovia office, Nelander--an employee transportation coordinator--now drives just a few miles to a modern office building off the San Bernardino Freeway. There, her office mates on any given day might include a Southern California Edison analyst or a district manager for Xerox.

That’s because Nelander works at a telecommuting center, an experiment aimed at bringing jobs closer to people’s homes.

Born of strict air quality regulations and high urban housing costs, a handful of these satellite work centers have popped up around the country, usually financed through public-private partnerships. Most of them are simply offices in the suburbs furnished with communications equipment such as computers, modems, voice mail and facsimile machines. Some employees use them just a day or two a week; others are stationed there full time.

The idea has piqued the interest of Los Angeles County officials, who are studying the feasibility of setting up a similar center in the Antelope Valley for use by employees of the county and of private businesses.

Supervisor Mike Antonovich asked that the Antelope Valley be the first location studied because so many of the area’s residents commute into the Los Angeles basin, causing intense traffic congestion on all routes leading to the metropolitan area. A study this month by Commuter Transportation Services Inc. found that nearly 68% of the Antelope Valley commuters surveyed drove more than 52 miles a day round trip.

Supervisors of those already using telecommuting centers say they actually get more work out of the employees, who are never further than a phone call or computer message away. In telecommuting surveys, which include satellite centers and home-based programs, supervisors have consistently estimated that employee productivity increased at least 10%.

Rita Smith, supervisor of the commuter program for GTE, said allowing employees to telecommute forces bosses to be better managers.

“I don’t know that it’s more difficult. . . . To be successful in any working environment, you need to trust your people,” said Smith, who is based in Mentone but oversees Nelander’s work 30 miles away in Ontario. “There’s nothing sacred about you being in front of me that means you’re working.”

Users say the centers are ideal--more structured than working at home, yet more convenient than driving to their normal work sites.

“This makes me feel more responsible for my work,” said David Mannion, a fuel analyst for Southern California Edison in South El Monte who spends one day a week at the Ontario center, six miles from his Chino home.

“I computed it one day, and it’s incredible: This saves me two hours and 15 minutes.” Mannion uses the extra time to study for night classes.

Sometimes the results are even more tangible: A woman at the Ontario center was able to attend one of her son’s soccer games for the first time. A full-time participant in the Hawaii Telework Center outside Oahu lost 40 pounds because she had time to exercise and cook low-calorie meals instead of picking up fast food on her long drive home.

A demonstration telework center funded by the state of Washington in north Seattle closed Jan. 31, when it fell victim to statewide budget cuts. But project manager Michael Farley reported that the 24 participants were so concerned about resuming their commutes that they all found ways to continue telecommuting either from their homes or from closer government offices.

Overall, there appears to be only one major obstacle to the centers’ proliferation: cost, which runs upward of $70,000 a year per center even with donated office equipment. There is evidence that such centers cannot survive--at least not yet--without hefty government subsidies.

The only privately run center in the country, set up in the fall of 1990 in another Seattle suburb, tried to market individual workstations at the rate of $800 a month. Companies balked, and the only taker was the mayor’s wife.

“I’m not saying it wouldn’t work elsewhere, but we didn’t find it an easy sell,” said John Niles, director of the Ballard Neighborhood Telework Center. “My advice to people around the country is, ‘If you want to do this, first get a big grant.’ ”

Those centers that are subsidized by government grants, all of which have also received substantial corporate donations of office equipment, tend to charge $100 a month or less.

State legislation approved in 1990 provided $100,000 each for Riverside and San Bernardino counties to set up centers. Three Telebusiness Workcenters opened in November in Ontario, Apple Valley and Riverside. They received matching grants from local governmental agencies and private employers, some of whom have placed employees in the centers.

The Ontario site is typical. It is on the second floor of a new eight-story office building a block from the San Bernardino Freeway. The only thing that sets it apart from any other corporate office is a lack of clutter--because most of the users work there only a day or two a week, they carry their files with them or store them in locked cabinets.

Each of the 24 work cubicles can be set up with personal computer, modem, printer and software of the user’s choice, said director Sid Ward. He believes telecommute centers may be the wave of the future because they provide fewer distractions than working at home, the base of most telecommuters, or at the main office.

“You don’t have those people coming to your door selling Bibles or chocolates, and you don’t have your friends calling you at home just because they know you’re there,” he said. “Yet, you also don’t have the social interruptions of the office.”

Another incentive for companies, Ward said, is Regulation XV of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which requires companies to get one employee car out of every three off the road. Telecommuting, whether from home or from a satellite center, can help them meet that goal and avoid fines of up to $25,000 a day, as can car pools, van pools and shorter work weeks.

In the future, Ward and other center directors believe telecommuting centers could be a recruitment tool for companies, allowing them to tell prospective employees they may live in the distant suburbs, where housing is cheaper, and still not face a long commute.

The concept of telecommuting is not new, with an estimated 3.5 million workers involved in the United States this year. But most work at home or at branch offices of their company that are closer to where they live. In Los Angeles County, more than 2,000 county employees can telecommute from their homes.

But the centers are relatively recent outgrowths, with the first one being set up in a Honolulu suburb by the Hawaii Department of Transportation in July, 1989. The success of that center, where 80% of the users said their stress had dropped and their productivity had risen, is fueling a state proposal to set up several more centers for government employees on Oahu.

Supporters of the telecommuting center concept point out that they provide access to better office equipment at less cost to employers than equipping individual homes. The centers also soothe managers’ apprehensions about letting employees out of their sight.

“People are in an office where managers can check in and see they’re there . . . which significantly reduces the . . . terror about who’s keeping track of these people,” said Jack Nilles, a Los Angeles-based business consultant who is considered the father of telecommuting.

Nilles came up with the notion of telecommuting in the mid-1970s when he worked for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He was among those charged with finding earthly applications for space technology. The capacity of communications satellites to bounce signals back to Earth provided the perfect opportunity, he thought, for telecommuting.

“I’d been talking to urban planners and I said, ‘Let’s rethink this. If you have suitable telecommunications equipment, people don’t have to be moving around the countryside to go to work.’ ”

Based on 20 years experience setting up telecommuting programs for businesses, Nilles predicted that working at home will remain the mainstay of telecommuting programs in the United States. He said centers will probably catch on faster in other countries.