When technology lets you work from home

Rod Snodgrass used a wireless broadband connection and tablet PC when injury kept him on the couch.

It can be the deal-breaker in employment contract negotiations - the slippery issue of working from home a couple of days a week.

Sure, you'll avoid the rush hour madness, have a better work-life balance, gossip less with colleagues and be a more productive employee.

Just try convincing the boss of that.

As New Zealand faces a record low level of unemployment, a need to boost productivity, and high fuel costs, the concept of having employees using internet and phone technology to work from home seems to make more sense than ever.

There's enough evidence of the benefits of teleworking: lower absenteeism costs, fewer managers needed, reduced greenhouse gas emissions from less traffic on the roads, and lower real estate costs for businesses.

So why aren't more companies sending their staff home?

"In New Zealand there's a little bit of a 'suck and see' attitude," says Bevis England, the managing director of Telework New Zealand, one of the few dedicated teleworking consultancies in Australasia.

"There hasn't been the great growth that would be expected."

Teleworking programmes were, by and large, being implemented on an ad hoc basis without formal policies being put in place to manage teleworking employees.

"The number of people working from home has been steadily growing for many years," says England.

In New Zealand, high-speed internet technologies have brought teleworking to people's attention.

New Zealand statistics for teleworking are thin on the ground, though the numbers are believed to be in the thousands.

The movement has caught hold in the US, where large corporations see considerable bottom-line savings in sending their staff home.

England points to the figures: four million teleworkers in the US in 1994, rising to 24 million last year.

While teleworking was gradually being eyed up by most companies as a cost-cutting measure, more progress was being made here in the area of remote-access, where employees were given the means to access their work files and applications from home outside of work hours.

For web developer Helen Baxter, teleworking became a way of life when she returned to New Zealand after years working in Britain.

She kept up a job as editor for the European Commission-funded website www.knowledgeboard.com.

"Initially we were based in Maramarua, which was problematic for broadband. I went from using T1 and T3 [high-speed] connections in the UK to a modem connection that couldn't run at full speed."

Satellite internet didn't work when it rained, says Baxter, who now runs the independent music label Tmet from home.

She moved to Glen Eden where broadband was available, and kept in contact with 60 contributors via email, online chat and virtual auditorium meetings where electronic documents could be displayed for all to see.

"You have less breaks, you're much more head down and working," says Baxter. "In three days I was doing a week's worth of work."

While she met her employers before leaving England, and took a trip back to catch up with them, most of the contact was adequately handled online. However, the lack of direct contact with colleagues had its downside.

"My confidence was slipping slightly, I didn't have that affirmation you get in the office," she says.

Still, Baxter is a devout advocate of teleworking. In an article she wrote for Knowledgeboard.com on the subject she signed off with a apt quote from sociologist Alvin Toffler: "The single most anti-productive thing we do is to ship millions of workers back and forth across the landscape every morning."

England says ad hoc teleworking arrangements often lead to workplace jealousies forming and workers skiving off. Formal arrangements give employers a legal framework, especially for occupational safety and health and performance management issues.

The central Auckland power blackouts of 1999 set the scene for an interesting experiment in teleworking, says England.

"Everyone discovered how much they could do out of the office, but also how chaotic it could be if it wasn't managed properly."

England's first major client was a bank, for which he was tasked with setting up remote access policies for disabled employees.

Many large corporations he had worked with still pursued teleworking programmes, while others had reverted to keeping office staff at arms length.

"One insurance company implemented it and then reversed it under new management. They felt people had to be visible and ordered them back to the office."

Oft-quoted overseas examples of teleworking point to productivity increases and cost savings.

American Express says it has 23 per cent more calls handled by call centre staff working from home, and 40 per cent more business processed.

IBM claims to have reduced its real estate costs by at least 40 per cent through teleworking.

"These types of productivity enhancements are possible," says England, who believes the security issues around teleworking are over-stated.

"Many workers are in [thin-client network] Citrix environments and not going on the internet as such. A lot of people assume the risks are worse than they are."

Teleworking was increasingly being seen as a staff-retention tool, a sweetener for workers eyeing up better conditions in other firms.

"International research shows that 20 to 35 per cent of workers are likely to leave their job to pursue better working conditions, regardless of salary," says England. "That costs a company a lot to replace them and in training them.

"With the evolution of management practices and business metrics, anything that can be measured in the workplace can also be used to measure the productivity of workers you can't see."

Rod Snodgrass, general manager of Telecom's wired division, has more than a passing interest in teleworking and remote access.

Not only does he want more customers to engage in more flexible work practices and use more internet and phone services in doing so, but he uses a range of technologies for remote access himself.

After snapping his achilles tendon in a game of indoor netball last year, Snodgrass was forced into a sustained period of remote working.

"I was on the couch while I was recuperating using a wireless connection and broadband to work."

While many remote workers dial into their company's virtual private network, which offers remote access to the files and applications on your work computer, Snodgrass says the internet web browser is becoming the gateway into the company.

"I don't think I've logged into the VPN in the last two months. And I don't cart my tablet PC around much any more. So much of your work is through email, contacts and scheduler."

Snodgrass uses a Palm operating system-based Treo 600 to collect his email on the move.

Even cheap mobile phone handsets are being configured by companies to allow staff to pick up email on the move.

Telecom provided a webmail application that allows full access through a web browser to Microsoft Exchange, at the heart of Telecom employees' computer work tools.

The technology able to make teleworking for most of the country seamless is already in place and will get more sophisticated.

Telecom is undertaking a massive capital expenditure programme to replace its ageing network infrastructure with a so-called IP (internet protocol) core.

The upgrade allows voice and data services to be hosted by Telecom on its network and deliver them to workers wherever they are, provided they have a high-speed internet connection.

A worker needs only to set the computer to away mode for all emails, calls and files to be sent home or to a mobile device.

TelstraClear is in the process of implementing a similar service with its Broadsoft telephony suite, while Vodafone is determined to make the mobile handset the business tool of choice, having it replace fixed line phone connections with mobiles and flat-rate calling plans.

As the technology to make teleworking possible becomes more established, the focus will shift towards implementing teleworking policies among companies and developing Government and council initiatives to support the practice.