Homework for adults--the telecommuting solution

Bill Blakemore discusses how modern technology can revolutionize conventional office-based methods of working

The latest advances in communications technology can be exploited to free office workers from the restrictions imposed by a central office site. A network of employees working from home represents savings in staff expenses and property overheads for the company and the elimi- nation of the strain of commuting for the worker. There are disadvantages too, however, such as complying with government regulations about the working environment, a possible sense of isolation and supervision difficulties. These factors are assessed, and examples are given of three companies who recognized the benefits, overcame the problems and made a success of homeworking.

Keywords: computer networking, electronic messaging, working conditions, organization and methods

The familiar pattern of office l i f e - a 9 to 5 routine, Monday to Friday - - is 'enjoyed' by perhaps 12 M people in the UK. To the majority it would be unthinkable to be told that they would shortly not be making their customary journey into the office each day but would instead be carrying out their employment tasks from home; that the normal tools of office life would be moved into their spare bedrooms, and all future work would in some form take place over telephone lines.

An unlikely scenario? For the majority of today's workers, one would be bound to agree, yet the technology to achieve such a dramatic solution in working life is with us now.

Take the example of a mythical sales manager Robert Thomson. When his alarm rings at 08.30, he knows he has another ten minutes before he needs to get up and get ready for work. The London office regime may have been a strict 9 to 5.30, but now that he does not have to catch

Bill Blakemore is Marketing Manager, Network Nine, 19 Stratford Place, London WIN 9AF, UK

the 06.57 to Paddington every moming and merely walks into the new office extension the company has recently built for him, the pace of life is not quite so hectic. Tewkesbury is so much more pleasant a place to work than the old office in Moorgate, he also gets much more done now that he does not have to listen to his colleagues on the other side of the partitions as they make telephone calls, dictate letters or use their computer printers. Nor does Robert any longer have to tolerate interruptions from others seeking advice or information from him, simply because he happened to be available.

At first, he may have feared that no longer being at the city office might damage his career, perhaps that he would be forgotten, or miss the undercurrent of office news, but in fact his production has increased.

On the stroke of nine o'clock he switches on his computer terminal, dials into his mailbox and scans for unread messages, printing out those from his superiors and autodeleting those from the 'boffins' in R & D. A couple of telexes may have come through ovemight to the city office, been switched into his mailbox and need a prompt answer. Although Robert cannot type, his two- finger efforts on the keyboard are quite up to dispatching three- or four-line replies. However, eight-page strategy reports lying handwritten in his tray will be more problematical. Fortunately, the new remote dictaction system which the company has set up for its home- working team means that he can phone in the text and it will be word processed and faxed back to him elec- tronically, later that day, for checking and amendment.

At five to two that aftemoon, Robert will be dialling the company audioconferencing number for the weekly sales meeting. He finds these sessions a good way to keep himself updated on the sales force's successes or failures; like himself, the team is also made up of homeworkers scattered around the country.

The company is saving about £6 000 in travel costs and gaining extra selling days by keeping its sales force near

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their markets. The sales team is now brought together more regularly by telephone meetings than by 'round the table' day-long sessions as had formerly been the way.

If Robert decides to review the individual performance of each salesman by analysing the sales he has logged onto the company mainframe, dialling up the database and retrieving that information is now a straightforward activity, as is downloading the statistics into his micro and turning them into bar graphs or pie charts to illustrate the monthly sales report. Although he might not recognize the term, Robert has become a telecommuter, one of the new breed of home-based but office-oriented executives.

Not that working from home is a new activity. Many jobs have been traditionally home-based - - child minding, dressmaking, Tupperware and mail-order sales, for example - - but have tended to be badly paid and poorly regarded. In many traditional examples, homeworking has been a wife's means of supplementing her husband's work in a factory or an office. Homeworking has almost always been carried out on a selfemployed basis, and the activities tended to be on a small scale, unsupported by corporate investment.

With the advent of the 'information technology revolution', the business of working is beginning to experience an evolution. Playing its part within that evolution is electronic communication: it brings instant text-based information handling at low cost within the reach of the office worker.

For a multitude of reasons many companies are experi- menting with homeworking as a means of reducing costs, increasing productivity or simply getting the best results out of their workforce.

CENTRAL SlTEWORKING: PROS AND CONS OF A TRADITIONAL OFFICE

Staffing

It is no secret that employing staff to run a business is one of the greatest expenses a company has to incur. Nor is it a simple matter of finding the money for salaries, benefits and National Insurance. Finding the dght people within travelling distance of the office may be a problem; specialist staff may have to relocated (with their families), possibly from abroad, if they are prepared to move at all. Even mundane but labour-intensive tasks may become prohibitively costly if there is no available manual or clerical workforce at hand to take on the job. Employees may have to be poached from competitors by offering higher wages.

Property

Having brought the staff together, they have to be accommodated. With property in some city centres costing nearly £60/sq ft (taking the costs of servicing the building into account), staff space is an expensive commodity. In addition, property may not be entirely suitable: the terms of leases can be onerous, the capital required at the start may be substantial; perhaps more floor space (with the inherent overheads) has to be taken than is needed. The property itself will require managing to keep the lifts and central heating working, to pay the cleaners, etc.

Supervision facilities

Traditionally, the corporate approach to office staff has been to pay by attendance rather then production. Supervision of staff on one site at their place of work is easier than monitoring them when they are away. But ensuring that one's staff is in the office is not itself a means of getting the best from them. If the office systems are poor, or the management disorganized, there is no benefit in simple attendance.

Central site working does, of course, have advantages to the company: meetings, particularly small informal ones, take place spontaneously. Decisionmaking can be instant, following ad hoc discussion. Corporate morale ought to be easier to monitor if the managing director can walk round the typing pool as well as into his managers' offices. Shared facilities and services- be it a photo- copier or aword processor, for example - - can be used by a number of people.

To the employee, attending a central office site offers corporate cameraderie; he can bounce ideas off a colleague, or chat with his secretary about his weekend. What is more, he can distance his work from other aspects of his life, switching off at the end of the business day. But the strain of commuting - - up to three hours a day spent in travel is not uncommon in L o n d o n - and its costs, which may be as high as £2 000/year, are not incon- siderable.

REMOTE WORKING

Many of the features of home-based work are the other side of the argument. If the company can reduce or abolish its central office, it can reduce the costs of prime site property and possibly use cheaper provincial (or foreign) labour. Morale will be harder to gauge and supervision, unless built into the system, more difficult to maintain.

The employee may feel isolated, or bored by his lack of personal contact with others. He may find that he cannot get away from his work and that people ring him at home at hours when previously he would have been unreachable. Furthermore, the practicalities of office work will require access in some way to typing, photocopying, telex and telephone facilities as well as meeting space. But he will have more free time to be with his family orfor sport or hobbies. How to overcome the disadvantages adsing from homework while capitalizing on its benefits is the problem a large number of companies, particularly in America, have faced up to.

The issues that have to be tackled are not only related to the internal organization of the company. If a workforce is to be dispersed, there may be health and safety factors to consider, will the new work environment comply with the regulations on office work, for example? There may be tax questions: will the workforce become selfemployed (with the implications on pension arrangements, Inland Revenue approval and so on)? What will be the reaction of the trade unions involved, if any? The American experience has demonstrated that the unions fear they may lose members and that there will be a return to the 'bad old days' of worker exploitation, low pay and poor conditions. Who will pay for the terminals, the modems and the telephone lines? And there may be planning questions to answer: will permission be required to change the use of a house to an office, for example?

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Some of these issues have been faced in three major electronic homeworking projects examined below.

TECHNOLOGY ORIENTATED HOMEWORKER EXAMPLES

Rank Xerox

Probably the most well known example of technology- supported homeworking is the Networking Scheme adopted by Rank Xerox. In IT year (1982), Xerox 'released' about 20, mostly managerial, employees as an alternative to making them redundant. In order to participate in this scheme, these individuals had to establish limited companies which then contracted with Rank Xerox to carry out specific tasks and produce results. The employ- ment link was cut, and with it disappeared the costs of staff pay, accommodation and many other overheads. Rank Xerox estimated that for every £7 000 paid to an employee, the actual total cost to the company was £30 000. As a result of starting the scheme, the company was able to reduce its requirements for central London property.

The arrangement with the company required each 'networker' to be independent; the contracts they held with the company were intended to bring in two days' worth of work per week only. Company support included the provision of RX 820 microcomputers (which were able to link into the company's Ethernet network) and training both in usingthe technology and runninga business. Rank Xerox also examined the environment for homeworking, having perceived that a home base did not necessarily provide the best situation for establishing a new enter- prise. Various experiments were attempted, including arrangements by which spare rooms were turned into offices, and the workers spent their work time away from family life; arrangements by which the microcomputer was centrally located within the home; and arrangements by which the home workers used the facilities of a 'neighbourhood office'. The latter concept was taken further by the self-help group called Xanadu, which was set-up by Xerox home workers. The neighbourhood office provided a secretarial service, telex facilities, a library and rooms for meetings.

Four years later, the networking scheme is no longer an experiment but a thriving alternative method of work for the company. Although still the exception rather than the rule, networking now involves about 50 people, many of whom employ staff of their own. Roger Walker of Chamberlains 85 Limited, a personnel and training consultancy, was one of the original networkers and now has a team of 47 working under him. To him, using high technology to keep in contact with other people on the net and with Rank Xerox (to a whom he and his fellow networkers still feel a close bond) is a way of life. He enjoys the bargaining process when dealing with his former employers and increasingly finds his work coming from outside Xerox.

F International

Long before Rank Xerox started its networking experi- ment, Steve Shirley, a former ICL senior programmer, appreciated that working from home could be the basis of a business. With an increasing number of computer-

literate women leaving conventional jobs in order to raise a family, she saw what skills were being lost. F Inter- national was founded in 1962 and is now one of the largest software and systems consultancies in the UK, with branches in Denmark and Netherlands and a workforce of 1 100.

One characteristic shared by F International and Rank Xerox networkers is the importance selfemployment plays in the arrangement; the scale, however, is very different: three-quarters of the F workforce are self- employed, the majority being programmers or analysts.

Unlike Rank Xerox, most workers are paid by time spent on a job, not by output or on completion of a contract. A similar negotiation takes place, however, when work is allocated: a project will be assessed as being of so many component parts, each of which will take an expected number of days. It is up to the individual to argue that each part may take longer, or that the rate of pay should be increased. Many of the workers are part time, spending no more than 20 hours a week on company work and deciding what hours they wish to operate.

Fewer than 200 of the workforce are salaried; these are involved in company administration either at Head Office or at one of the original centres. More than 90% of the total workforce and over 70% of the administration staff work either from home or at home.

One other difference from Rank Xerox should also be highlighted: four out of five F International staff are women.

In a company in which most of the workforce never see each other, systems of control and communication need to be developed and fixed if the business is not to founder from a lack of cohesion.

The management of F International recognizes the effort that is required in getting to know somebody who is 3 000 miles away on the other end of a telephone line. This is achieved not simply by making many calls - - and F's charges to its customers reflect the fact that one third of its expenses are in communica t ion- -bu t also by establishing geographical regions containing small re- serves of people, each of which is responsible for a project or part of a project, from which the project team is assembled. Electronic mail, however, is one method used to keep in t o u c h - - F International is currently in the process of setting up a network to allow all its UK homeworkers to keep in touch from their TV screens: the aim is to cut out all internal paper communications by the end of 1987. But in addition staff are brought together on a local basis to get to know each o t h e r - regional managers even have a 'party budget' to pay for these social functions.

Network Nine

Having seen the scope for future business growth among home-based office workers, British Telecom adopted a 'halfway-house' approach and established its first Network Nine centre in early 1985.

Offering a complete range of office support facilities of the kind normally found only within large companies, Network Nine markets its services directly to the small business office sector. The 'subscription-only' arrange- ment includes access to a package of facilities only some of which are likely to be of interest to any single customer.

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These facilities include the use of the business centre's address as their own work address, access to offices and meeting rooms, a telephone answering service to take messages, audio and video conferencing, telex, fax and word-processing facilities, and, of course, access and training on using electronic mail. One example of partial use is the ex-Shell employee who set up his own technology consultancy from home. His problem was keeping in touch with his customers without employing support staff. He found that the easiest way for people to contact him was for them to ringthe 24 h Business Centre Message Desk - - the receptionist then transcribed messages onto Telecom Gold where he collected them when he was next able to get to a terminal. As he linked his pager to the mailbox system, whenever a message came through he knew when he needed to dial into the mail service.

Of course, this system has its limitations: carrying a portable terminal around is not everyone's idea of convenience. What might be more satisfactory would be to use a voice message system, which would alert him to the presence of messages. BT's Voicebank service does this, again by linking to a pager. The recipient of the message still needs to ring up the Voicebank service and have the messages played back; and he needs either to use a special telephone or to carry a small unit in order to send the appropriate tones to hear and delete messages. The next technological stage will be to cut out the need to make that extra telephone call to hear the messages.

Another Network Nine client regularly finds less exotic uses for electronic mail: his messages to the Centre are usually requests for a room to be booked or telexes despatched on his behalf.

Several points are clear from the use of electronic mail by any Network Nine client. Firstly, it can become a popular tool, but when other techniques come along, its use may diminish if there are better ways of doing a particular task. Secondly, electronic mail needs to be demonstrated: communicating with a mainframe computer is not, to most people, the obvious communications solution, and the application of electronic mail needs to be explained. Thirdly, no matter how simple and 'friendly' the service, its use needs to be taught and the skill developed. Finally, in isolation electronic mail often has a substantially less useful role to play than when it is used in combination with other services.

What also becomes apparent to Network Nine is that the office disciplines in force and the business environment are more important than any of the technology taken on its own. If a client feels his work is being dealt with efficiently, he will give little thought to the medium used to handle it. Conversely, if he does not receive the support he requires (for example, if the voice at the other end of the line does not seem to know about his business) he will not be interested that the reason may be the operator's unfamiliarity with a new 'all-singing, all- dancing' call forwarding and logging system.

CONCLUSION

• With the increase in home-based working that is now developing, any facility that can improve a home worker's working environment affordably has a part to play.

• Modem technology can supplement the traditional methods of work and enable remote working at a more senior level than was formerly possible. However, technology is only a means to an end - - not the end i tse l f - -and in many cases lends itself better to technology-related jobs such as software development than to traditionally low-tech home working.

• Electronic mail, as one aspect of technology, is a relatively cheap medium, even using one of the commercial systems. With capital costs of about £I 500 for terminal, keyboard, printer and modem, and running costs of perhaps £30/month usage including telephone costs, it is 'affordable'.

• Linking in with a good office back-up service offers the 'office homeworker' many of the advantages built into a centralized system without the drawbacks. But for telecommuting to develop, substantially more people have to experience the technology. Furthermore, the technology available has some way to go in fields such as:

O interconnection of systems (both voice and data), o better interfaces than a keyboard (or better training

of the users), o automatic onward dispatch of mail messages, o the creation of more value-added systems which

match particular market needs.

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