The quiet revolution: telecommuting

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

Victor Cousins has a pretty good gig working for the human resources department at Sun Microsystems, but he doesn’t have an office, just a locker.

Don’t feel sorry for him. He’s not one of those types who measure his career success by the size of his office. In fact, he's proud to be office-less, and he’s the quintessential telecommuter. He works anywhere he wants – his home in Oakland, the local coffee shop, and at any Sun location throughout the country. When his mother had knee surgery in May he was able to spend time with her, working out of a Sun office in St. Louis.

Welcome to the workplace of the future. Cousins is an example of the mobile worker that will become much more pervasive in the next 10 years.

Finally, telecommuting will become a mainstay in Corporate America but that doesn’t mean everyone will be working at home all the time, a prediction made by many workforce observers just a decade ago. The U.S. worker will be a mélange of office inhabitant and work-anywhere warrior.

Take Cousins. Even though he doesn’t have an office, he reserves office space at Sun’s San Francisco location when he needs to be in house and interact with coworkers and managers. Right now, he splits his time 50-50 between home and in the office, but envisions spending more time away from the mother ship in the months ahead.

“I like having the balance,” he says about the flexibility and freedom to work from anywhere. He has a desktop computer; a laptop and a high speed Internet connection at his home. Sun paid more than $3,000 toward the equipment he needed to go mobile.

Today, upwards of 12 million employees telework more than 8 hours per week, up from about 6 million in 2000, according to Gartner Dataquest. The number will hit nearly 14 million by 2009. Caroline Jones, an analyst for Gartner who expects the number to continue to grow, says the rate of increase has been steady for a number of years even though telecommuting hasn’t been getting a lot of publicity in recent years.

She calls it “the quiet revolution” and sees it slowly becoming a standard flexible work option Corporate America offers workers; like job sharing or maternity leave.

Many factors have converged to create the perfect storm for telecommuting. Advances in technology, including PDAs that allow people to surf anywhere and the growing number of broadband connections in homes and retail locations, have buoyed the trend. Not to mention, the increasing concern for the environment, and high gas and real estate prices. And management by and large is becoming more open to the fact that workers get work done even if they can’t see them.

Also beating the telecommuting drum will be Generation X and Y who aren’t desk or cubicle sitters, explains Elham Shirazi with The Clean Air Campaign. And the good ol’ Baby Boomers, who are growing older, will want the flexibility telecommuting offers if they are to stay on the job.

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