It’s a tantalizing fantasy. And, indeed, futurists are full of grandiose predictions about metropolises turning into ghost towns as Americans ““travel’’ to HQ via the Information Superhighway. Roughly a decade of experimentation, however, has shown that leaving the office for good has some unpleasant drawbacks. In fact, our flirta- tions with telecommuting have served mostly to accentuate what’s useful about offices and illuminate how we may use them in the next millennium.
Advances in technology first made telecommuting widely feasible in the late ’80s. Today more than 7 million people are laboring from laptops or desktops outside the office, yielding fascinating insights into how people work once they’ve been cut adrift from the mother ship. According to Franklin Becker, director of the International Workplace Studies Program at Cornell University, people get anxious when working from home full time. For one thing, they miss their work friends, a group Becker says is a second family for many adults - not to mention their only hope for ginning up a decent softball game.
Telecommuters also resent having to maintain, or even to fix, complicated office equipment like computers and fax machines. Becker himself recently experienced ““Techno Hell,’’ a term he devised for what happens when you’ve got 30 students waiting for a tele-lecture and your state-of-the-art videoconferencing software decides to go south. Peter Friedman, CEO of a business that until a month ago was a ““virtual company’’ of connected home offices, found that although telecommuting solved many problems associated with starting a business, it didn’t give him more quality time with his two kids. Their delight at having Dad at home, he says, turned sour when they realized he was too busy for them.
Telecommuting, it seems, works best as an adjunct to the office, not a replacement for it. But the notion of working remotely is still a popular one. Becker predicts that demographic shifts - like the graying of America and the maturation of Gen-Xers - will force companies to devise more flexible work schemes. Older people, Becker says, will want to set their own hours, while younger folks, who seem to care more about where they live than whom they work for, will demand that companies use technology to make their far-flung living arrangements possible.
These changes promise to speed up what would have happened anyway. The imperatives of the do-more-with-less business climate are already prodding companies to adopt new technologies, says Joe Carter of Andersen Consulting. ““If [something] allows me to add another half hour to my workday as I’m driving to the airport, that’s just money falling to the bottom line,’’ he says. At Andersen’s San Francisco branch, the future may already have arrived: three months ago, the company completely eliminated private cubicles for its more than 1,500 staffers, including the highest-ranking executives. Workers now reserve space in advance, hotel style, from a menu of options that range from ““touch-down areas’’ the size of four phone booths to large meeting rooms. Personal effects, like a picture of your boat, are kept in ““tote carts’’ that a concierge called a ““service coordinator’’ will wheel over to your space. This central office is still the place where workers train, huddle, read body language and ink deals. But the rest of the time Andersen’s ““virtual workers’’ simply pack up and tackle their jobs on the fly - in airplanes, in Parisian cafes or wherever they happen to be. Sometimes that means home, too.
