COLUMN ONE : Shaking Up the Way We Work : By fracturing rigid traditions, the quake offers a rare chance to rethink how we do business.

After freeways tumbled in Monday’s quake, the Baskin-Robbins ice cream chain began letting many of its Glendale headquarters employees set their own hours. Meanwhile, people such as consultant Gary Saenger of Canyon Country grudgingly decided to give telecommuting a try.

With traffic disrupted and many offices damaged, Angelenos are changing the way they work. More are operating out of their homes, paving electronic highways with personal computers, modems and fax machines. Others, with their bosses’ blessings, are juggling work schedules and chucking rigid workplace policies.

In post-quake Los Angeles, it is definitely not business as usual. And, some workplace experts and government officials say, surprise benefits might emerge from all the disruption. As destructive and terrifying as it was, the earthquake has provided sprawling, vehicle-fixated Southern California with a rare opportunity to reshape how, where and when its residents do their jobs.

The key ingredients for change have converged: Traffic nightmares, technological advances and stringent new air emission laws.

Wise fixes now could ease smog, traffic snarls and the general stresses of life for years to come, experts say, even after roads and offices have been rebuilt.

But will Los Angeles seize this opportunity? Will the jolting Northridge temblor shake up work habits forever, or simply result in Band-Aid measures that will fade once the crisis has passed?

If the Bay Area, still suffering disruptions four years after the 7.1-magnitude Loma Prieta temblor, can be a guide, chances are good that there will be dramatic shifts now and subtle, yet profound, changes in the long term.

Companies Respond

In the aftermath of the Loma Prieta quake, some companies expanded programs to encourage telecommuting, flexible hours and car-pooling. Given the even greater destruction here, Southern Californians can look forward to more extensive changes, experts say.

“We obviously have a year to several years ahead of us in dealing with the earthquake, and we’ve got to come up with creative and non-traditional solutions,” said Susan Herman, top telecommunications official for the city of Los Angeles.

Bruce de Terra, a state transportation planner, said: “(The quake) will allow people and their employers, who are skeptical, to sample the changes. Eventually, what you will see are permanent changes in the way people conduct business.”

For the time being, city, county and state officials are working with Pacific Bell, GTE California, telecommunications experts and big employers to craft a major telecommuting initiative.

Many details remain sketchy, but officials will try to encourage more workers to telecommute from home or from “telecenters”--offices equipped with computers, faxes and phones--close to their homes.

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan is planning to announce today an effort modeled on the successful traffic reduction program used during the 1984 Olympics that calls for telecommuting, four-day workweeks and staggered hours.

Already, though, calls from employers interested in office space for telecommuters are pouring into the Antelope Valley Telebusiness Center, a year-old, county-run office center for employees who want to work close to home.

That is quite a change from the initial response: Until this week, only about 15 of the 20 workstations available to telecommuters were being used.

Habits Die Hard

Before any changes are made, workers can expect plenty of tension between new realities and long-entrenched traditions dictating how--and where--employees do their work. Although many bosses still want face-to-face contact with their staff, they will have to adjust to the changes brought on by the traffic problems.

“It’s a fascinating test case of the whole notion of flexibility,” said workplace consultant Charles Rodgers, with Work/Family Directions in Boston.

Although some experts say Angelenos will return to their old driving habits once the freeways are repaired, others contend that the roadways will be out of commission long enough for many to learn to love such options as telecommuting.

“The trend is toward telecommuting, and an earthquake can’t help but move that along,” said Joanne H. Pratt, a Dallas-based management consultant who focuses on using technology to enhance productivity.

For some employees, telecommuting can be as simple as having a pad of paper and a telephone. Others require sophisticated workstations, with PCs, modems, faxes and phones. Cellular phones and hand-held devices that can send and receive information make desks obsolete and have given rise to a new term--virtual office--to describe the mobile workplace of those on the run.

Though many experts lobby for telecommuting and flexible work schedules, few employees have tried them when given the chance. That is true even among working parents who say they need flexible schedules to handle family demands. A survey released last year by Work/Family Directions, focusing on 80 big U.S. companies that offer such options, found that fewer than 2% of employees used the programs.

Part of the reason is economic, Rodgers said.

People fear that if they adopt a flexible work schedule, “they’ll be written off” by their bosses, losing out on raises, promotions or maybe their jobs, he said.

“Some employees fear the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ phenomenon,” said Paula Ramsey, a regional manager for Commuter Transportation Services, a Los Angeles nonprofit group.

Saenger, the management consultant, had resisted telecommuting because for competitive reasons he has always wanted to dart over to his clients as soon as they called him--something far easier to do from his main office in Pasadena than from his rustic home in Canyon Country.

But now that his drive time to work has more than tripled, Saenger has decided to give working from home a shot. “That’s the reality now,” Saenger said. “It’s going to have to be done.”

Yet many experts predict that, even after the freeways are repaired, workers who found unexpected benefits in telecommuting or staggered work hours will stick with them.

Higher Productivity

Workplace specialists say productivity usually skyrockets when workers try telecommuting or so-called compressed workweeks, working 40 hours over four days or 80 hours over nine days. Telecommuters often find there are fewer distractions at home, and workers taking advantage of flexible work situations are less likely to quit or take sick time.

Some major employers, including Hollywood studios Sony, Disney and MCA/Universal, talked to government agencies this week about making greater use of telecommuting. Woodland Hills-based Health Net, the state’s second-biggest health maintenance organization, is lining up telecenters for employees in Valencia and Palmdale.

Initially, it is difficult to promote such services to corporate and government employers. “We can’t seem to get middle managers to understand that you are going to benefit from these programs,” said Nancy Apeles Eiser, transportation program manager for Los Angeles County.

“But once you get over that hump, there is no stopping them,” she added. “They see all the reasons why it makes good business sense and that they should have been doing it all along.”

Eiser figures it is a matter of time. “Now that the need is really there, given the earthquake situation, it seems like the natural thing to do.”

In the Northridge quake’s aftermath, government officials have called for measures such as compressed workweeks to ease traffic problems. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors passed a motion Tuesday calling for county department heads to encourage workers to telecommute.

Matter of Survival

When the Loma Prieta earthquake struck south of San Francisco on Oct. 17, 1989, flexibility became a matter of survival for businesses.

The temblor knocked out a section of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, destroyed or damaged freeways feeding into downtown San Francisco, collapsed a double-decker viaduct in Oakland and caused massive rockslides on a winding stretch of mountain road from Santa Cruz into Silicon Valley. The region’s crisscross commuting patterns were thoroughly tangled.

Many big employers--notably Hewlett-Packard, Bechtel, Pacific Bell, Chevron, Pacific Gas & Electric and Bank of America--started employee transit subsidies, moved to more flexible scheduling or encouraged telecommuting.

Transit agencies added ferry service from Oakland and Alameda to San Francisco, beefed up service on BART, started a bus route over the Santa Cruz Mountains and expanded car-pooling services. Overnight, there was a dramatic shift to public transit, and ride-sharing programs nearly doubled.

Even though highway traffic is nearly back to pre-quake levels, BART has shown an impressive gain of more than 20% in ridership over pre-quake levels, and some companies did make fundamental workplace changes.

Bechtel Inc., a San Francisco engineering firm with traditional 9-to-5 values, allowed employees to stagger their start and stop times immediately after the quake. When key bridges and roads returned to service and the company tried to go back to its old ways, an employee outcry prompted rethinking.

“We realized it seemed to be working,” said Tim Green, manager of employee relations. “It helped people with child care and commuting.” Staggered scheduling became policy.

Some companies said the quake had no long-term effect. A spokesman at Bank of America, which had developed a flextime policy before the 1989 quake, said the earthquake did not cause a “permanent uptick” in people taking advantage of the option.

Jack M. Nilles, a Brentwood-based consultant credited with coining the term “telecommute” in 1973 while he was stuck in freeway gridlock, views working from home or satellite offices as a business imperative in post-quake Southern California.

However, he noted that at some companies it might take years to adopt permanent changes “because it requires cultural change and, unlike an earthquake, that doesn’t happen instantaneously.”

Absent a disaster such as an earthquake, businesses usually try telecommuting because it reduces the need for costly office space and increases productivity. By Nilles’ calculation, employers save an average of $8,000 a year for each mid-level employee who telecommutes regularly.

Easing Traffic

Nilles estimates that easily half the work force in Los Angeles could telecommute at least twice a month, easing traffic congestion dramatically. During the 1984 Olympics, which brought an estimated 2 million visitors to Los Angeles, the streets remained unclogged even though car-pooling and other efforts reduced traffic just 3%.

Executive recruiter Gary Kaplan, who owns a Pasadena firm with eight employees, said he is open to having employees do more phone work from home, although he admits to having reservations about how productive people are if they “aren’t under your thumb.”

He also is looking into renting a furnished apartment near the office and letting employees take turns using it during the workweek.

“We’ve come upon a time where we have to stay loose,” Kaplan said. “It might not be possible to continue operating the way we’ve been operating.”