A perfect storm of employee preferences and business realities has spurred the growth of telecommuting to almost 10 million workers in the United States. The quest for a better work-life balance, the increased use of part-time workers like retirees, high real-estate overhead and the need to prepare for natural and man-made disasters contributed last year to an additional two million people working from home, according to WorldatWork, a telework industry consortium. The Society for Human Resource Management estimates that nearly 40 percent of corporations nationwide offer some form of virtual work program.

Face-to-Face Interaction Is Less and Less of a Job Requirement.
Not surprisingly, many of those corporations are technology companies whose products make telework, or telecommuting, possible. At Sun Microsystems, nearly 50 percent of employees can choose from a variety of on-site and off-site locations. Of IBM´s 300,000 worldwide employees, 40 percent have no office at the company. IBM equips the home offices of all employees, whether they telecommute part- or full-time, a small price to pay for $100 million savings in on-site office costs.

With employees abandoning their cubes since IBM introduced telecommuting as an option in 1995, telecommuting has become an integral part of IBM´s culture. Coworkers rely on IBM technology, including IBM Lotus Sametime Instant Messaging and Web conferencing, to stay connected.

"We´re getting accustomed to working with people you don´t see. When I sit at my computer, I´m connected with 300,000 other people. We don´t manage by whether you´re sitting at your desk, we manage by whether you´ve produced the deliverables," says Jacci Moss, IBM Human Resources Director, Lotus software. Employees are more productive when they can spend their commuting time working, and they work hard because they want the benefit to continue, she adds.

Attracting the best talent is another key benefit. "It´s all about finding the right employees. With location not a barrier, it allows us to excel," says Penny Scharfman, program director, Lotus Notes and Domino products, who has managed a staff of remote employees for five years from her office in Cambridge, Mass, where she spends 80 percent of her time. "You really do learn to let go of the need for face-to-face contact," she says

From an employee perspective, "the biggest benefit is a better shot at managing work-life balance," says Ed Brill, a Lotus Notes and Domino sales executive based in Chicago. "Sometimes I miss having a family feel to the workplace, but I don´t think that´s the future of work anyway."

Telecommuting Has Broad Appeal.
It isn´t just corporations that are embracing telecommuting. At Washington, D.C.-based Health Care Without Harm (HCWH), a global coalition of 443 organizations dedicated to environmentally responsible health care, most employees work remotely from locations scattered across the United States.

Executive Director Anna Gilmore Hall manages 12 employees through conference calls, phone meetings and e-mail. A sophisticated conference call system is essential to making this arrangement work, she points out. HCWH employees can access the system 24 hours a day, so meetings can be scheduled on short notice.

Hall also has a lengthy conversation with each of her staff members once a month and tries to bring people together for in-person meetings twice a year.

Still, she sometimes misses the face-to-face contact she enjoyed in previous jobs. "It takes longer to get to know people and find out their strengths and how I can help mentor them. If there´s a problem with performance or attention to detail, I can´t recognize it as quickly. But I haven´t found that people aren´t doing their jobs. Actually, the opposite is true - I get e-mails at 4 a.m. When people are telecommuting, they can spend all their time working."

The organization originally hired remote employees, because it needed specialized experience that was hard to find in a limited geographic area. Over time, it discovered other benefits, such as reduced overhead and better support to client hospitals around the country.

The Next Phase: Calling on Home-Based Workers.
Order a bouquet from 1-800-FLOWERS or blue jeans from J. Crew, and the customer representative could be talking from a high-rise in Chicago or a split-level in Miami. Location doesn´t matter. That´s because those reps work for Alpine Access of Golden, Colorado, a leading provider of home-based call-center services, a rapidly growing industry that is capitalizing on the appeal of remote work and the need to reduce the costs of call centers to compete with offshoring. The number of home-based customer-service agents increased 20 percent last year to 112,000 and is expected to reach 330,000 in 2010, according to the technology market research firm IDC.

Founded in 1998, Alpine Access employs 7,500 agents in 42 states who generally fall into three categories: stay-at-home moms, retirees and disabled people. Most are women and are older and better educated than the typical 20-something entry-level workers at brick-and-mortar call centers.

"Without a doubt, the flexibility we offer enables us to recruit higher-caliber people," says Allanna Kelsall, vice president of human resources for Alpine Access. "We have higher retention and less burnout. In the call-center industry, taking customer calls is not where people want to stay too long. Working with our agents around their particular needs builds a much higher degree of loyalty."

Applicants are interviewed and trained exclusively by phone and e-mail with no in-person contact. "All of our processes are designed to get the right people for work that relies entirely on phone and Internet communication. By the time they are answering the phone, they have been screened for their ability to work at home," says Kelsall.

This arrangement helps Alpine meet client needs, such as sudden call spikes. In one instance, a retail company had "an unscheduled call volume on a weekend when a marketing piece hit and we were able to get 30 additional people on the phone in half a hour," says Kelsall.

The lack of a centralized office has other benefits. When a major snowstorm hit the Denver metro area in 2003, a leading airline´s customer service operations suffered when only three out of one hundred agents were able to get to the airport while calls were answered as usual by Alpine agents in the area and nationwide.

Telecommuting Prevents Disruptions - Planned and Otherwise.
At a time when disruptions have become an everyday fact of life, telecommuting may be essential to a company´s survival strategy. Some of the employees who trudged to work during the recent New York City transit strike could have been spared the hassle if they´d been equipped to work at home. And their employers would have enjoyed higher productivity.

"Companies can maintain their economic viability when people are able to work in emergencies," says Chuck Wilsker, president of The Telework Coalition, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group.

When the Democratic National Convention was in Boston in 2004, and many roads, bridges and public transit options were shut down, IBM´s Cambridge office was minimally affected, despite its close proximity to the convention site. "It didn´t have as big an impact because people have laptops and can plug them in anywhere," says Moss.

After 9/11, many companies recognized the danger of having all their brainpower in one place. "They started looking at a distributed workforce as very valuable in times of catastrophe," Wilsker says.

"Telecommuting is definitely a critical component of being prepared for a range of things from natural disasters to terrorist attacks," says security consultant W. David Stephenson, president of Stephenson Strategies, based in Medfield, Mass. "The great thing is that it can have a significant payoff even if none of those things actually materialize. Empowering individuals is part of homeland security and good business planning."

Elaine Gottlieb is a freelance writer based in Cambridge, MA who writes for Workforce Insights, an online resource about emerging labor trends and issues produced by Veritude (www.veritude.com).Veritude provides strategic human resources and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Fidelity Investments.  Veritude serves clients throughout the United States and Canada.To review other articles, research and expert analysis relevant to HR professionals seeking to stay informed, please visit www.veritude.com.  For more information, contact: inquiry@veritude.com or call:1-800-597-5537. 

^©2006 Veritude,LLC.  Reprinted with permission.