Telework media 12

Donna Phillips regularly makes a weekly commute of more than 860 km to and from work without leaving home.

Although she lives in Camrose, Phillips works for a management consulting firm in St. Albert, a 108-km road trip, one way.

Instead of fighting rush-hour traffic twice a day, Phillips fires up her computer, phone and modem four days a week and works up a storm from the confines a main-floor office in her home.

Phillips is a recent recruit in the growing army of teleworkers - folks substituting the traditional office setting for the familiar surroundings of their own home.

"It gives me the opportunity to work in my field without having to commute,'' says Phillips, 50, who has teleworked almost two years for Bradley Wells Consulting. "It's certainly far more desirable for me.''

Instead of driving to work, burning fuel and fouling the air, teleworking brings the job to the worker.

With no local job prospects, Phillips, who holds a master's degree in communications studies, was searching for a job without needing to commute.

"I sort of stumbled into this job. The only practical way for me to do this was to work from home so we negotiated those conditions.''

It was a marriage made in heaven, according to Phillips's boss at Bradley Wells.

"It's been very beneficial,'' says company owner Susan Bradley.

"First because I was able to get Donna. She lives in Camrose and she wouldn't have been willing to move to Edmonton. So I have a great employee who happens to live outside the city.''

Avoiding the headache of cross-town traffic is big plus for Phillips, but it's not the only reason she teleworks.

"There's a fair amount of flexibility as to hours,'' explains Phillips, who, depending on work-load and deadlines, works a compressed, four-day week.

"I make every effort to work from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., but if something comes up and I need the time, I'm free to take it as long as the work gets done.''

Like most teleworkers, Phillips, 50, is not anchored to her home office. Because the work involves a lot of research - surveys, interviews, focus groups - she does travel off the information highway, albeit irregularly.

That might mean spending a week on the road or the occasional drive to Edmonton to meet clients.

Being home most of the time has also boosted the quality of family life with her husband and their teenage son.

About the only things Phillips misses about working in a glass tower are office colleagues to mingle with.

"I'm still struggling with that,'' admits Phillips. "I moved to a new community at the same time I started teleworking so I didn't have a network of acquaintances or co-workers.

But with e-mail and a toll-free line to the capital region, Phillips is never far from her supervisor.

For Bradley, hiring Phillips as a teleworker saved her small company the expense of providing an office and equipment for a new employee.

"It's worked out excellently,'' says Bradley, 43, who started her own business six years ago after stints with management consultant giants KPMG and Pricewaterhouse.

"Teleworking is the wave of the future for a lot of people,'' boldly predicts Bradley, whose firm is currently researching the advent and progress of teleworking.

She'll get no argument from Bob Fortier, founder and president of the two-year-old Canadian Telework Association. He sees unlimited potential in the scheme, and it's all because of the personal computer.

"You can run a multimillion-dollar corporation in a closet and, in fact, there are people doing that,'' says Fortier, who operates the association from his Nepean, Ont., home. His office features a large window overlooking a park.

"I'm in heaven,'' he intones during an interview from - no surprise - his home.

The 52-year-old former federal government worker is also on the board of the Washington, D.C.-based International Telework Association and Council and is the Canadian representative for Telework America. He is also president of InnoVisions Canada, a telework and flexible work consulting firm.

Fortier developed and implemented the federal government's telework program while working with the Treasury Board.

According Statistics Canada figures released in 1997, there are one million teleworkers in Canada. And another 500,000 people will be working online by 2001.

But those numbers don't include teleworkers who've worked out informal deals with their employer.

While the feds, British Columbia and Alberta have formal agreements for teleworking, many other public- and private-sector organizations do not.

For example, Fortier says Edmonton has a "huge number'' of teleworkers, but they don't show up in surveys because their employer has no formal telework arrangement.

Most teleworkers work from home fewer than three days a week.

"The majority of telework that goes on corporately is informal,'' where the boss, for example, allows an employee to work from home twice a week without a formal policy.

"Bit by bit these organizations are starting to look at going formal, adopting a telework policy, protecting themselves from the security angle to make sure they're covered from injury-on-duty risks,'' says Fortier.

With fewer distractions, the teleworking boosts production by an average of 15 %, absenteeism is cut by about 20%, overhead costs are reduced and employees are less likely to leave the job, says Fortier. Those figures translate into big cost savings for employers.

The Alberta government has set out its telework guideline in a booklet, but statistics on the province's telework exposure.

Clint Dunford, Alberta's minister of human resources and employment, backs teleworking.

"In Alberta, teleworking allows our knowledgeable workforce to compete in the global marketplace without geographical or time barriers," says Dunford.

"It provides new opportunities to innovate and explore alternative ways to balance work and family responsibilities. It offers people with disabilities a new way to take an active part in the world of work, and it helps us reap increasingly greater benefits from our human resources," says Dunford.

While savings from telework increase in relation to the size of the organization, the notion can work for any size of company - from home businesses to industry titans.

Teleworking appears easier to swallow for information technology companies:

- About 2,000 IBM Canada employees telework. The company reported productivity hikes of up to 50%.

- Nortel, which has almost 4,000 teleworkers, saves about $8 million a year in real estate costs.

- The Bank of Canada expects to double its staff of 100 teleworkers after a March 1998 glowing evaluation of the program by participants.

And an EKOS Research survey found that 30% of Canadians would rather telework than get a pay hike, and almost 40% would quit their jobs if another employer offered them the same job, but allowed them to telework.

"What you need for telework to work properly is the right employee, the right boss, the right job and the right company,'' says Fortier.

Workers who need constant supervision or the social climate only a standard workplace provides are not good candidates.

"And the wrong boss can quickly derail even the best teleworker,'' says Fortier.

"Some companies are very pro-telework. But you may have a boss who's from Jurassic Park or from the military, who has always managed by the clock and managed by presence.

"If they can see them, they know they're working, but when they can't they think they could very well be goofing off.''

For managers who trust their employees enough to telework "chances are they'll get back rewards in spades.''

So what happens to all the downtown office space left vacant because of telework?

Fortier foresees a time when more people will opt to live and telework in quieter communities outside major urban centres, where property costs less.

"However, we'll also see a reverse migration of people coming in to the office buildings downtown to live,'' he says.

Some public-sector unions initially feared telework would be used to exploit their members.

Although still guarded in their support for telework, organized labour generally understands that the concept doesn't erode worker rights or threaten contracts.

"All it does is change the location of work,'' he says.

Telework is also a tool for disabled people struggling with working in an able-bodied world.

As computers get cheaper and the Internet's market penetration increases, teleworking will explode.

"We will have a huge percentage of our population being able to telework at least some of the time and they will,'' suggests Fortier.

He also considers Edmonton, because of its status as provincial capital and the seat of the Alberta government, is well positioned to take advantage of the telework trend.

With a good supply of so-called knowledge workers with an aptitude for telework, "I think Edmonton is a hotbed for this.''

Fortier, like others of his e-everything ilk, has the passion of a religious zealot when it comes to proselytizing for the cause.

"People in my industry tend to get all tele-evangelistic about it,'' he quips.

But the future is clearly written on the e-mail file.

"It's like air-conditioning in a car,'' says Fortier. "If you're a modern-day organization and you do not have this, it's going to be hard to sell your company to your existing staff let alone to people you want to recruit.''