COLUMN ONE : A New Order of Business : By fracturing rigid workplace traditions, the quake offers a rare chance to reshape how, where and when Angelenos do their jobs. Telecommuting, flexible hours could gain acceptance.
After freeways tumbled in Monday’s pre-dawn shaker, Baskin-Robbins faced havoc in getting people to work on time--or at all. So the ice cream chain is letting many of the 150 staffers at its headquarters in Glendale set their own hours to make it easier to get in.
Gary Saenger, a management consultant who has always called on his clients in person, reluctantly plans to try working from his rustic Canyon Country home a few days a month. “That’s the reality now,” Saenger said. “It’s going to have to be done.”
With several major freeways disrupted and many offices severely damaged, Southern Californians and their employers are changing the way they work. More employees are working 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.
Wise quake-triggered 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 immediate 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 longer term.
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 similar changes, experts say.
Companies Respond
For now, local and state officials are working with Pacific Bell, GTE California, telecommunications experts and big employers to craft a major telecommuting initiative and related workplace changes. They want to encourage more workers to telecommute from home or from “telecenters”--offices equipped with computers, faxes and phones--close to their homes. Officials said plans still are being drafted, but some details are scheduled to be announced today.
Already, though, calls from employers interested in office space for telecommuters are pouring into the Antelope Valley Telebusiness Center, a year-old, county-run facility that is considered one of the most successful facilities of its type. That’s quite a change from the initial response: Until this week, only about 15 of the 20 workstations available to telecommuters were being used.
Now, however, things are changing. “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: “This 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.”
Habits Die Hard
But before those shifts come about, workers can expect plenty of tension between new realities and long-entrenched traditions dictating how--and where--employees do their work. While bosses still want face-to-face contact with their employees, they’ll have to adjust to the changes brought on by new 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 new 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 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 even their jobs, he said.
Yet he predicted that, even after the freeways are repaired, workers who found unexpected benefits in telecommuting or staggered work hours will stick with them.
Higher Productivity
Like other workplace specialists, he said productivity normally 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 time off because of illness.
Some major employers, including several big Hollywood studios, began talking 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.
Still, there is no guarantee that the changes will last. “It’s a little too soon to know the future,” said Rita Duarte, the HMO’s executive vice president.
Initially, experts say, it’s 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’s 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 quake’s aftermath, government officials have called for measures such as compressed workweeks to ease traffic problems. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, for example, passed a motion Tuesday calling for county department heads to encourage workers, when possible, to telecommute from homes or outlying offices.
Yet many workers in recession-weakened Southern California, fearful of the possibility of layoffs, are worried about trying telecommuting.
“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 that offers a car-pooling service and advises employers on traffic-reduction programs. “They tell themselves, ‘I know I can produce the work I’ve been assigned if they let me work at home, but in this economy I want to be in the office at all times. When you’re not in the office, anything can happen, you can even be fired.’ ”
Matter of Survival
When the 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 rock slides on a winding stretch of mountain road from Santa Cruz into Silicon Valley. The region’s crisscross commuting patterns were thoroughly disrupted.
Many big employers--notably Hewlett-Packard, Bechtel, Pacific Bell, Chevron, Pacific Gas & Electric and Bank of America--instituted transit subsidies, moved to more flexible scheduling or encouraged telecommuting.
Transit agencies leaped into action, adding ferry service from Oakland and Alameda to San Francisco, beefing up service on BART, starting a bus route over the Santa Cruz Mountains and expanding 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 changes.
Bechtel Inc., a San Francisco engineering firm with traditional 8-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 outcry from employees prompted a rethinking.
“We realized it seemed to be working,” said Tim Green, manager of employee relations in San Francisco. “It helped people with child care and commuting.” Staggered scheduling became policy.
Other 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 who says he coined 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 like an earthquake, what generally motivates businesses to try telecommuting is the profit motive. 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 city’s streets remained unclogged even though car-pooling and other efforts reduced traffic by just 3%.
Executive recruiter Gary Kaplan, who owns a Pasadena firm with eight employees, said he is open to having his employees do more telephone 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.”
