Companies Turning Cool to Telecommuting Trend

By BONNIE HARRIS

Dec. 28, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Telecommuting, the hot trend of the 1990s that promised to give relief to commuters and working parents, has lost its luster in the workplace.

After years of investment, a growing number of companies have scaled back work-from-home programs, convinced that the practice isn’t as valuable as employers had believed.

Some managers now say that telecommuting breeds resentment among co-workers and that teleworkers are harder to monitor. And perhaps most significantly, many managers have come to question a central tenet of telecommuting--that it raises productivity.

Although no one tracks the precise number of telecommuters, most personnel managers and experts in the field say that the ranks of telecommuters nationally are declining and that a majority of companies are planning to allow fewer people to work from home in the future.

“Telecommuting doesn’t put anybody ahead,” said Larry Prusak, director of IBM’s Institute for Knowledge Management, a think tank in Boston that has researched telecommuting trends. “Workers lose because they aren’t in the office enough to be taken seriously for promotions,” he said. “Bosses lose because nobody’s around to keep ideas alive and work through projects together.”

AT&T; typified the telecommuting boomlet in the mid-1990s. The corporation launched a host of ambitious work-from-home programs. Telecommuting so enthused then-Chairman Robert E. Allen that he made a point of letting everybody know he was doing it himself one day in 1994, and within a year the number of teleworkers tripled.

But in the last couple of years, the number of telecommuters at AT&T; hasn’t budged and may even have dropped slightly, a company spokesman said. Although about 5% of AT&T;’s employees now work from home full time, that’s far fewer than officials expected to see after several years.

Idea Resisted by Supervisors

“The hype was all there and everybody was waiting for this big telecommuting explosion,” said spokesman Burke Stinson. But it “never really got off the launching pad,” he said, adding that the idea drew resistance from supervisors. “Let’s face it, part of the joy of being a boss is walking around the office and seeing people work for you.”

Certainly telecommuting still has appeal to a lot of workers and employers. Companies such as Merrill Lynch, Cisco Systems and Toshiba continue to regard telecommuting as a positive benefit and actively promote it. Merrill Lynch, for one, began a “telecommuting school” at its New York headquarters to better train its employees and managers about the practice.

Many workers view the perk, more than any other, as a flexible way to balance work and personal time. They also regard it as the ultimate sign of trust from their bosses. But even in this exceedingly tight labor market, workers are finding a surprisingly small number of employers offering it.

After searching for several months, Tara Robinson of Northridge said she found only one promising job lead in her field of publishing and public relations. But when she asked about that company’s telecommuting policy, which had been touted in a posting on a working mothers Web site, Robinson said “they backpedaled right out the door.”

“They didn’t really want people to telecommute,” said Robinson, 38, who has been unable to find telework since her husband’s transfer to Southern California in August. “They didn’t even have a program set up. You’d think in this kind of market, [employers] would have some kind of clue about letting people work from home.”

The International Telework Assn. and Council estimates that 24 million now work occasionally from home and that millions more want to but doubt their bosses would go for it. Executive Director Gail Martin said any negative feedback on telecommuting probably comes from employers who are not committed to it, who have tried it “on a whim” and failed or who haven’t carefully thought the whole process through.

“The truth is, telecommuting does work and continues to be successfully practiced in the workplace,” Martin said. “But it’s like anything that makes a big splash in business . . . everybody gets so excited about it and then you get to a point where everybody wants to start tearing it down.”

Some Experts See Fewer Teleworkers

But other experts say that full-time telecommuters represent less than 5% of the U.S. work force--and are on the decline. In a recent survey by the Web-based consultancy CareerEngine.com, 62% of the 648 employers polled said they expect to hire fewer teleworkers in the years to come.

“Telecommuting is an employee-driven concept that managers are getting tired of,” said Sam Shaw, a top manager involved with hiring and development at a Los Angeles-based technology consulting firm.

Some supporters of telecommuting blame the traditional mind-set of many current managers who, given the choice, would prefer not to offer the benefit at all. One example: A third of the 352 executives recently surveyed by the American Management Assn. said they “would just rather not deal with the whole issue” of telecommuting.

Jim Miller, a workplace consultant in Colorado who has been dubbed “Dr. Telework” for helping hundreds of companies develop telecommuting programs, thinks it may be 15 years before the trend really takes off. That’s when today’s younger workers will begin landing management positions, and Miller predicts they will be far more receptive to telecommuting and other flexible work schedules than current bosses.

“Today’s employers wouldn’t proactively encourage telework if they didn’t have to,” Miller said. “It requires an incredible amount of trust, and I just don’t see many managers out there right now who would do it if the market didn’t demand they do it.”

Shaw agreed, saying “there’d be no way I could get the people I want” if he didn’t offer candidates an opportunity to work from home. Yet in reality, he said, less than 2% of his company’s employees are allowed to telecommute.

Robbie Sherman was an upper manager with Grubb & Ellis for four years before the long hours she piled up each week in her Detroit office began to take a toll on her family. She considered working at least a couple days a week from home, where she figured she could still keep up with her duties as director of marketing and spend extra time with her two young children.

But such an arrangement was not embraced by her managers, who said Sherman’s supervisory role required her full-time presence in the office.

“I suppose I can see their point in some ways,” Sherman, 34, said. “But balancing work and family was more important to me than keeping an executive job. So I left.” She now works from home as the marketing director for Virtual Concepts International, which provides office assistants over the Web.

Vince Ristucci, human resource manager for the Los Angeles-based commercial brokerage, said that “a tiny fraction” of Grubb & Ellis’ 3,600 employees work from home on a regular basis.

“We don’t have a telecommuting program in place,” he said. “Nor have we ever sought to. It’s extremely difficult to manage, and it takes a very special situation for us to even consider it.”

Some employers also have grown aware of other gaps that teleworkers leave in the workplace, experts say. Fewer bosses are convinced these days that employees who work from home are actually more productive, and those with the “command and control” mentality are less willing to loosen the reins as a result.

Despite a host of studies over the last decade that show that employees who work from home are more productive than their in-office colleagues, many bosses believe that personal interaction in the workplace is imperative for a healthy exchange of ideas. In the American Management Assn. survey, nearly one-third of supervisors cited concern about productivity as a factor in not offering telecommuting.

“How do you know when someone’s finished a project if they’re working from home?” said Mitchell York, chief executive of Epromos.com, an online provider of logo merchandise based in Manhattan. “They could be finished three days ago. We just need people’s heads here, in the office. To me, telecommuting just isn’t an option.”

Working at Home Can Be Distracting

Others, particularly managers, say companies are less eager to invest in the necessary technology to keep teleworkers productive at home, especially with the cost of fitting regular offices with ever-changing high-speed connections and software.

Then, there are those who believe telecommuting simply has run its course and is no longer viewed as a “must-have” perk.

For some workers, that’s just fine. When she moved to Temecula earlier this year and tried telecommuting as the marketing manager for a Santa Ana-based computer printer supplier, Denise Ovalle quickly realized it wasn’t going to work.

“I was too distracted all the time,” said Ovalle, 28. “Suddenly, doing laundry sounded really exciting, or my dog wanted to play, or I was inspired to do some gardening. I knew I had to get back in the office, and I did.

“I’m way more productive here, even with an 80-mile commute.”

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Telecommuting Losing Favor

The American Management Assn. surveyed 352 supervisors in September whose companies do not support telework programs and have no plans to do so in the future. Their reasons:

72%: Work can’t be done from home

62%: No employee demand

35%: Legal, risk management concerns

34%: Supervisory concerns

34%: Rather not deal with issue

31%: Productivity concerns

26%: Doubts about cost benefits

23%: Hefty technology investment

21%: Too few workers to worry about issue

19%: Insufficient information about programs

A CareerEngine.com survey of 648 employers found what plans they have regarding telecommuting:

62%: Hire fewer teleworkers