December 3, 2002
Hate To Commute?... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes".
I remember when I first telecommuted. It was exactly 20 years ago, I was pregnant, and I would do just about anything to avoid the drive down to Silicon Valley. I had a flexible hourly contract, but fighting traffic for 60 miles was way beyond what I was prepared to do.
Of course, this was back in the Brontosaurus Age of Telecommuting. No one had a PC. No one had email. Voicemail was only as good as your last power outage, and the odds were you couldn't check it remotely. And you ask about cell phones? Are you kidding? No one working from home even had a fax machine.
Still, with a DecWriter terminal, fed by a continuous stream of printer paper, I could make long distance calls down the Peninsula, using a modem I literally pushed the handset of my telephone into.
Even today, I can't bring myself to tell you how much I paid in telephone charges each month, but I could stay home more days than not - it was just the ticket.
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It's hard to imagine that this was a time when the first bright promise of telecommuting had already come and gone.
The general consensus was that telecommuting just didn't work very well. People had to interact face-to-face. Costs were prohibitively high. Management couldn't tell if people were actually working. The problems seemed endless and unsolvable.
But that was then, and this is now.
The International Telework Association and Council reports that nearly 30 million Americans telecommute several days each week. By 2005, it predicts that 50 million Americans will be working - at least part-time - from home. And that's adds up to one-third of the American workforce.
So, what has turned the tide?
There are many factors, of course, but telecommuting became more than just logging into the office computer system from home. We could recreate a person's entire workplace just about anywhere.
We've got cell phones, 24-hour voicemail, email for short messages and entire documents, easy Internet access, printers and fax machines. Mobile laptop computers mean your office is now wherever you are, and whatever you don't have with you, you can expect to find at a neighbor's, a business center, or at the neighborhood copy shop or cyber-café.
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We also take for granted the ability to make local phone calls for network access, and cheap national long distance rates. In times past, this could only be created economically in a corporate environment.
At the same time, you can bet it wouldn't happen if it didn't work for corporations, but it does. IBM's virtual workplace program has been so effective they estimate a savings of $700,000 in real estate costs alone. And for any business, that's begins to sound compelling.
Telecommuting continues to present challenges for sure, especially in managing our time and balancing our personal lives, but we're fast learning how to do that.
My experience with the evolution of telecommuting reminds me about dealing with the promise of new technologies, about not expecting too much, too soon.
You see, we seldom have the promise wrong; it's the time line we have trouble with. To quote Paul Saffo, "In Silicon Valley, it frequently takes 25 years to be an overnight success."
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
