>From today's Wall Street Journal
==============================
`Telework' Is on the Rise,
But It Isn't Just Done
From Home Anymore
01/23/2002
The Wall Street Journal
WHERE DOES Bob Long work? He draws his paycheck as a global field-sales
support manager
from Dow Chemical in Midland, Mich. But if you want to know in what place
he works -- well, Mr.
Long is about as easy to pin down as a tiger roaming Africa's Serengeti.
He spends 10% of his time at Dow headquarters, and divides the rest about
evenly among hotels,
airports, cars and his New Jersey home office, with brief stints elsewhere
-- eight miles offshore on
the Atlantic, for instance, on his 24-foot fishing boat, the Outcast. One
recent day, he even toyed
with the idea of working at a gas station. The sight of a fax machine and
picturephone, installed
near the station's ATM, sparked the idea, he says.
Work is becoming more widely dispersed, with big implications for people
concerned about their
quality of life. While the exodus from traditional offices was once
confined mostly to working from
home, millions of people are now working in places forecasters never
anticipated. Sept. 11 speeded
the trend, driving more people away from the trophy towers of central
cities.
"The whole telecommuting trend has morphed into a broader kind of
mobility," says Gil Gordon, a
Monmouth Junction, N.J., consultant and author.
THE TREND toward "telework" -- an umbrella term for all kinds of remote
work from home, satellite
offices and the road -- is stretching forecasters' definitions. "There are
modes of telework I never
thought of years ago," says Jack Nilles of Jala International, Los
Angeles, who invented the term
"telecommuting" in 1974. Some examples: Wireless e-mail from Starbucks,
videoconferencing from
Kinko's and home, and even telework centers in remote villages in India,
served by wireless
computer links.
A new study shows Sept. 11 sparked an increase in telecommuters, or
corporate employees
working regularly from their homes. After a recession-induced decline
early in the year,
telecommuting began rising at a 3% annual rate after September, says
Raymond Boggs of IDC,
Framingham, Mass. The telecommuter count ended the year up 1.1%, says the
IDC survey of 2,500
households.
Another new wrinkle: flux. While more than one million new telecommuters
appear each year, nearly
as large a number return to the office, Mr. Boggs says. "Telecommuting is
not a destination but a
stop along the way."
In Merrill Lynch's well-established telecommuting program, workers migrate
continually between
home and office, says Janice Miholics, the firm's head of global telework.
Telecommuters recently
declined to 2,500 from a 1999 high of 3,500, because of layoffs, internal
job changes and a feeling
among many managers that they needed to be back in the office, she says,
but she sees
participation rising again in the next year or two.
In the past two years, A.C. Ross moved from working as a home-based
business and strategy
consultant for Indigo Partners, a Silicon Valley firm, to a conventional
office as a vice president for
an Internet company, then back home again working for Indigo. "You don't
have to physically be in
any particular place any more" to work, Mr. Ross says.
THE DEVELOPMENT poses new challenges for researchers in defining the
workplace. Eight
telework studies I looked at employed eight different definitions of
telework, with wildly varying
results. "We're like blind men with our hands on different parts of the
elephant," a researcher says.
One forecast, by the Institute for the Study of Distributed Work, Windsor,
Calif., indicates
teleworkers -- defined as corporate employees working outside the office
at least two days a week
-- will rise to 13.7 million, or 9.2% of the work force, by 2005, up from
10.4 million now and 6.3 million
in 1995.
Employee demand is growing. Working from home, in particular, offers
well-documented benefits,
including increased job satisfaction, commitment and productivity. At IBM,
two-thirds of 25,000
employees surveyed say they expect to work from home in the next five
years.
The telework trend poses mental challenges for individual workers, as
suggested by Alan
Lightman's National Book Award-winning novel, "The Diagnosis." With a
satiric twist, Mr.
Lightman depicts a clock-driven, multitasking hero, a junior executive at
a company with the motto,
`The maximum information in the minimum time." The executive descends into
mental illness while
trying to get some work done before he gets to the office. Brooding over
his unretrieved messages,
he abruptly forgets who he is, rides to the end of the train line and
wanders, lost, until police find
him curled in a fetal position, clutching his cell phone.
For real-life workers able to keep their wits about them, though, the
potential work-life benefits of
telework are huge. "You create new ways to get things done by virtue of
the fact that you're not in
a cozy office," says Dow's Mr. Long. He, for instance, can live where he
wants, in New Jersey. He
uses his mobile-work skills and technology to integrate community service
into his schedule as a
school-board member and local Little League president -- all while keeping
up with work.
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