Workers’ Compensation : Trends: Without ugly treks to the office after the Northridge quake, telecommuting employees are happier and more relaxed. And bosses are winning, too.
The moment he clicked on the TV news the morning of the Northridge earthquake, Tony Davies knew he was in trouble. The Antelope Valley Freeway--the lifeline from his Palmdale home to his job 42 miles away in Mission Hills--was a wreck.
“I thought, ‘Uh-oh, this is going to be incredibly terrible.’ And it was. It took three hours to get in the first day.”
Davies, a data-input clerk for GTE, resigned himself to life in his 1987 Toyota Corolla for the foreseeable future.
But it didn’t work out that way. Davies--who requires only a computer, modem and telephone line to do his job--has become a part of the much heralded telecommuting generation. Futurists have been promising it for years: Millions of Americans would “commute” by walking into a spare bedroom equipped with a computer or by driving a short distance to a telecommuting center.
But until Jan. 17, this widely touted revolution appeared to be more of a blip on the workplace radar, growing at a rather leisurely pace.
The 6.8 quake has hastened the pace of change.
GTE, for example, has converted a switching center in Lancaster to a satellite work center for almost 150 employees who live in the Santa Clarita Valley. Working around the clock, the company installed office furniture, computers and lighting, and added a room for employee breaks, a microwave oven and parking facilities.
As if a wand had been waved, post-quake commutes suddenly melted from three hours to 30 minutes or less. Says Davies: “When they asked us if we wanted to work in a satellite center closer to home, everybody sort of screamed, ‘Oh, yes. Absolutely.’ And they had it up and running in less than a week. I was stunned.”
“It was like the reprieve from a death sentence,” says Terry Morgan, a customer care supervisor. With his wife, Norene, also a GTE supervisor, he was spending six to seven hours a day “just going back and forth” and wondering how much longer they could handle the stress.
“Now everybody is a lot happier--very relaxed and attitudes are great,” he says. “I get a lot more productivity out of my people. I believe it’s an excellent model.”
Although the concept of telecommuting has been around for a long time, it has generally been identified with working at home alone--usually a day or two a week, says Steve Wright, the GTE program manager who oversaw the project to establish the new center. “Management has traditionally resisted letting too many people out of sight at one time,” he adds.
Now, he says, GTE is hearing from a lot of companies curious about satellite centers. “The earthquake forced us to acknowledge that there is something not right in the way we go to work in Southern California. Everybody is re-evaluating this.”
There are essentially three ways businesses can let their employees telecommute, says Jack Robertson, marketing manager for Pacific Bell. They can have people work at home by dialing into a database, lease work space in corporate telecommuting centers for multiple customers or set up company satellite operations.
There is a post-quake surge of interest in all three, Pacific Bell and GTE representatives say. Both companies are advertising their telecommuting services--such as voice mail and additional lines for modems and faxes--in newspapers and on radio, and they offer information hot lines and incentives, such as waivers of some equipment installation charges.
Reaction from workers and businesses has been so favorable (“We’d taken over 2,500 phone calls last time I looked,” Robertson says) that both companies have extended their earthquake-relief telecommuting packages through March.
“I’ve been beating the drums for 21 years and now I am an overnight success,” says Jack Nilles, whose JALA International consulting firm specializes in telecommunications. His daily incoming phone calls have jumped from 10 to 40 since Jan. 17, he says.
Nilles, who coined the word telecommute 20 years ago, says the fundamental reason telecommuting hasn’t caught on is, “It scares the hell out of management. It’s the loss-of-control problem: ‘How do I know they’re working if I can’t see them?’ ”
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But the realization that people cannot work as well when they spend six hours a day in their cars has shifted managerial priorities.
The Antelope Valley Telebusiness Center, which opened a year ago in Lancaster as a county-funded pilot project, shot from 60% occupancy to 100% after the earthquake. “We were inundated with calls,” says Suzette Cecchini, director of the center, which leases offices and individual work spaces stocked with computers, modems, business software, phone lines and fax machines.
“I’m sorry it took an earthquake to generate this interest. We think it’s the wave of the future,” she says.
The quake also provided a big boost for the Valencia Corporate Telecommuting Center. Owned by the Newhall Land & Farming Co., the center was the brainchild of Steve Valenziano, now the center’s marketing director, who lives in Valencia and “knew from experience that the whole community got into their cars every day and schlepped south on the 5 Freeway to work in major corporations throughout the Los Angeles Basin.”
The Newhall company converted an empty warehouse to a center equipped with computer stations, private offices and teleconferencing rooms linked to the outside world by a fiber optic network and all available by lease to corporate clients.
It opened in December with one business occupant, CareAmerica Health Plans. But after the quake, Valenziano says, everybody started returning his calls. Clients that moved in in February with long-term leases included Pacific Bell, Great Western Bank of Chatsworth, and Cigna Property and Casualty. The company is planning a second center.
“We expected it would take nine months to fill all the spaces,” Valenziano says. “We did it in two weeks after the earthquake.
“Corporations are realizing it costs lots of money to move people across the landscape every day,” he says.
“The earthquake caused us to think about being productive in creative and non-conventional ways,” says Susan Herman, general manager of the Los Angeles City Department of Telecommunications. The department, created in 1985, oversees and regulates all video and data communications in city government and encourages private-sector participation in new information-age technologies.
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The findings from a two-year pilot project that the department conducted--comparing 500 city teleworkers with 500 commuting workers--were so favorable in terms of productivity, morale and money saved that the City Council recently voted to enlarge the project, Herman says.
“And it involved a myriad of jobs--clerk typists, city attorneys, police detectives, architects and engineers,” she says. “People have worried that telecommuting might be a new high-tech sweat shop for data-entry work, but it’s not that at all.”
Most telework boosters agree with GTE’s Dan Smith that “once people get a taste of telecommuting, they aren’t going to want to go back to the old ways of working.”
Sitting at his workstation in GTE’s Lancaster satellite office, Tony Davies declares his satisfaction.
“I have my own desk, everything’s personal here and everyone is relaxed. I’m eight miles from home and not spending money on gas. It’s almost like getting a raise.”
