The 24-Hour Workplace Is at Hand : Telecommuting: With employees working at home, laptops in van pools, faxes on buses, post-quake L.A. could revolutionize the business world.
At 4:31 a.m. on Jan. 17, transportation in Los Angeles went from a commuting aggravation to a community nightmare. But for those entrepreneurs who always see the glass as half full, not half empty, myriad opportunities have sprung up from the rubble of this disaster. Not least among them is the overnight metamorphosis of “virtual enterprise” from an interesting business concept into a practical reality.
In business parlance, virtuality refers to clusters of people and entities that come together to sell, manufacture, design or distribute a product or service, and when the job is done, move apart or stay together, depending on customer need.
Now as never before, Angelenos have to think in terms of virtuality. We can no longer all be tied to a specific location, office building, job description and supervisory/reporting relationship. We must telecommute, teleservice, telecommunicate. Our skills and services have to be mobile, employed when and where needed, which will mean working at hours formerly used for leisure, staggered so that the work week becomes seven 24-hour periods. And the long-term effect of what we do in California will change the way America does business.
The earthquake has caused some businesses to act in a humane way toward dislocated workers, allowing flexible shifts, arranging for close-in housing and providing networks of support systems. Others have not behaved as well, demanding that their employees maintain pre-quake schedules and workloads or face dismissal.
After recoiling at such heartlessness, one has to marvel at the inflexibility and corporate sclerosis of organizations that would rather terminate an employee who is a valuable, loyal and trained resource than rethink the way they do business.
One of the almost universally available alternatives that technology now offers is management by modem. Satellite offices provide places for telecommuters to gather physically around the water cooler while they telegather on bulletin boards at the low-cost end of the spectrum and teleconference at video centers at the high end.
The strength of the employee force in many of the companies that are wholly service (banks, insurance, law, software, telemarketing, communications) or partially service, (such as the design, sales and service components of manufacturers) is in their brain power, not their physical presence. We employers have to restructure with intelligence, not by rote and habit but in novel ways that deploy our employees differently and use the power of the telephone, computer and human initiative.
People prefer to work well. This emergency gives us the opportunity to energize, incentivize and free our employees to find innovative ways to serve the company and customer, ways that don’t require them to be under the nose of a manager every minute of the traditional workday. See if they don’t come up with ways to achieve the same or better results through imaginative use of fax, phone, modem and satellite.
If we have to physically commute, let’s do it differently. The earth has moved us with absolute certainty into the next millennium. We have the opportunity to rise out of the ashes as a model, flexible, responsive and constantly changeable city-state of the future.
Mass transit is with us in its infancy. There is so much more that need not wait for the technology to catch up, only the politicians to keep up. Transportation technology such as magnetic levitation trains traveling at 300 m.p.h. is available now. Even low-speed trains are suddenly not only appealing but often the only solution. Metrolink has come to the rescue and is rightfully taking every opportunity to bring riders into the fold and keep them there after the emergency is over. Car-pooling services will spring up, the clever among them outfitted for the use of battery-operated computers and cellular phones.
And with mobility and technology, many more businesses can extend the usual work shift far before dawn or after sunset to take advantage of opportunities across the globe’s time zones.
Are these dreams a result of post-traumatic stress denial of the enormous problems that await us as we go from the microissue of cleaning up to the mega-task of rebuilding? Maybe. But they look toward a brighter, more prepared future, where infrastructure and community can flex and bend together to survive the natural, demographic and economic challenges that surely await us tomorrow.
