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I think one of the major reasons people don't object more strongly to the commuting culture is that they simply don't realize how much it costs.  After all, it's only driving to work in the morning, how much of your salary does it really take up?  Well, for me:

• 31 gallons of gasoline per month = $79/mo., $953/yr.
• 672 miles driven per month; assuming a 100,000 mile vehicle lifespan, this depreciates my vehicle by $168/mo., $2,016/yr.
  
• Parking a few blocks from my building = $100/mo, $1,200/yr.
• Bumping my driving miles per year above 8,000 raises my insurance rates slightly.
• I waste a substantial period of time every day sitting in traffic.  Assuming I value my time by about what I'm compensated for it at work, this costs me $1,127/mo., $13,524/yr.

Good lord, that's a lot.  My commute costs me $4,169/yr. in actual costs, or $17,693 if you count lost time!  (On one hand, counting lost time is cheating a bit since I wouldn't really spend all that commuting time working, and I'm not paid by the hour anyway.  But since if I were offered the option to take a $13,524 pay cut to drop a day off my workweek, I'd take it in a heartbeat, I don't think it's an entirely unfair valuation of my time, either.)

And in many ways I'm getting off easy -- my car gets 22 mpg average (though honestly it may well be lower during Seattle's rush hour), it's a Honda that didn't cost all that much (keeping the depreciation cost down and meaning it really will last for at least 100,000 miles), and $4.75/day for downtown parking is cheap as hell.  With a Mercedes and a better parking spot, I could easily have $7,500 in actual monetary cost from the daily commute.

Think about that -- your company's requirement that you sit in a cubicle at work every day, even when it's not actually necessary for what you accomplish, is costing you $4,000 or more per year.  And that's cost, not wages, which means that not commuting would be the equivalent of a $5,700 raise in terms of how much money you would actually end up with in your pocket.

Of course, your company doesn't care overmuch, since you are paying that cost, and they are not.  However, I think if more people were aware of the true cost, they'd be more inclined to view telecommuting as the benefit it is, and making use of remote workers would be a more accepted cost-saving measure for corporations.  A $4,000 pay cut to work from home would actually increase my take-home pay, and that would be saving my employer money.

Posted by Grant at 07:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Apparently I'm not the only one wondering why companies don't make greater use of telecommuting... Will Femia at Clicked has the same question, linking to a PC Magazine post by John Dvorak.

What he finds odd is that this is one area where, of all things, the government is ahead of private industry.  It turns out that Public Law 106-346 "requires each Executive agency to establish a policy under which eligible employees may participate in telecommuting to the maximum extent possible without diminished employee performance."  There's a very interesting report on the GSA Telework site that has a lot of data in it about how telework has worked out for the Federal government:

• 85% of executive agencies have telework policies.   65% of them even have telework coupled with alternative work schedules.
  
• 46% of agencies reported that over 25% of their employees participated in telework at least once during the year.
• 50% of teleworkers in executive agencies are "core" teleworkers -- that is, "Telework that occurs on a routine, regular, and recurring basis away from an employee's principal place of duty (e.g., at home, at a telework center, at an alternate location) one or more days per week."
• For agencies with a low percentage of teleworkers, the barriers cited were:
• Office coverage challenges, 54.6% (I'm not even sure what this means.)
• Nature of agency work, 51.1%
• Data security, 44.1%
• Management resistance, 38.3%
• IT issues, 31.4%
• Funding for equipment/IT support, 25.5%
• Employee resistance, 15.1%
• None, just not doing it, 10.4%
• Training, 6.9%

Take a look at those barriers.  Some are quite legitimate -- "nature of agency work" could easily make telecommuting impossible for large numbers of employees (it's hard to work from home if you're, say, the clerk at the DMV or otherwise in a customer-facing, in-person job), and "employee resistance" reflects the fact that some people just aren't able to be productive at home due to distractions.  For that matter, some people see going to the office as a form of socializing and would be lonely without it.

But the fact that Data Security and IT Issues are on there is kind of sad, as those issues are quite resolvable.  On the bright side, they're actually a good bit easier to solve than, say, management resistance.  We have technologies like VPNs and laptop encryption that can take care of the data security needs, though to implement them securely requires there be some company-provided equipment (it doesn't do much good if I make a perfectly secure connection to someone's spyware-ridden home machine that hasn't had a virus scan in four years.)

The conclusion of the report, though, is something the private sector really needs to hear: "The positive impact telework can have on an employee's reduced commuting time, effort, and costs; increased productivity; and increased control over the delicate act of balancing work and personal responsibilities is tremendous. Benefits to the organization, including the increased ability to recruit and retain valuable employees, gain higher productivity, and experience boosted morale, are clearly documented. Reduced commuting serves to benefit the environment by fewer pollutants being dispersed into the air, and less wear and tear to roads and vehicles."

Despite the numbers given in the report, Dvorak concludes that the primary barrier to telework is simple irrational management resistance -- as he puts it, "the current management model is hovering around 1921."  I've certainly run into this, when my current manager was hired into this IT group, his first actions were to establish more fixed working hours, get a schedule drawn up for people, and spout manager aphorisms like "Everyone is valued in the office."  I wonder, however, if this is the case everywhere or if Dvorak and I are just drawing conclusions from our own anecdotal bad experiences.  Somehow, I doubt that federal government agencies are hotbeds of enlightened, forward-looking management -- if anything, I'd expect the bureaucratic culture to encourage even more order-for-order's-sake.

Posted by Grant at 09:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

With the recent furor over bird flu, many companies -- including my employer -- have been revisiting their disaster recovery plans to consider what they would do to maintain business continuity during a pandemic situation.

The general consensus is that in a pandemic situation, there would likely be a state of emergency declared and "nonessential" workers would be asked by the government to stay home (where "asked," as is customary for government, means "forced.") So what does a company do to continue operating when all of its workers have been declared "nonessential" and can't come to work?  Why, they just have everyone telecommute, of course!

Or so they believe.  There's nothing like a disaster recovery exercise to show how technically unprepared companies are for a large number of remote workers.  The technology is available, but companies don't have the infrastructure to handle everyone using it at once, and for the most part, they've never considered this.

Here's an example: a company has 3,200 people set up to work remotely.  A VPN infrastructure is in place, and these people routinely connect via a secure tunnel, using a secure authentication method, and work from home or other locations.  Sounds like they're well-prepared for a pandemic situation at corporate headquarters.

But... how many of those people can connect at one time?  Supporting 3,200 total users is very different from supporting 3,200 concurrent users -- a userbase that size may require a VPN concentrator that supports only 100-500 people at a time.  In addition to the concentrator, though, there are a lot of other parts of a remote-access infrastructure that need to be considered.  Is the network backbone able to handle the full number of remote users connected at once using relatively high-bandwidth technologies like Remote Desktop?  Are terminal servers used for remote access, and if so, can they handle that many simultaneous users?  How many sessions are licensed for these terminal servers?  Often, companies have only paid Microsoft for so many terminal server users, even if they have the technological capability to handle more.  Can the help desk support all the calls that would come in from people who haven't used remote access in two years and are suddenly expected to do all their work that way?  Can help desk support them when the help desk employees are also stuck at home for the same pandemic situation?

Part of being prepared for a situation like this for a company involves not just verifying the infrastructure, but also verifying that everyone who in theory can remote in has actually tried it.  When the help desk is closed and people can't come in to work is not the time to discover that half the support staff has no idea how to use the VPN client, and another 15% of them have expired passwords or smart cards or tokens.

Any large increase in telecommuting could require upgrades and preparation work of this type, but a pandemic could force companies to do so in a rather sudden manner -- and pandemic preparation may cause companies to do such work in advance (indeed, as a secuirity architect involvement in such preparation is part of my job.)

While I certainly hope that a disease pandemic doesn't actually come to pass, I can't help but be curious as to what the effect it would have on the work environment would be.  I can see two likely outcomes (both of which would likely happen to varying degrees):

• Some employees, after telecommuting for a week or two, would discover that they are every bit as capable of performing their jobs from home as at work.  This could greatly increase the demand for alternative working arrangements, as some people discover that they like such an arrangement.  Of course, it wouldn't be for everyone -- many people would be eager to get back to the office, foreign as that concept is to me.
• Managers faced with the sudden absence of many of their employees might find out that far from needing all of them at the office, they don't need all of them at all.  I wouldn't be surprised to see several employees being quietly let go in the months after a disaster scenario as the company discovered that they can do without them.  (This, by the way, is one reason why some people advise against taking any vacation longer than a week.)

Posted by Grant at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

For decades now, city planners have been decrying "urban sprawl" and the decreasing density of our cities.  This brings with it a host of problems, such as increased commuting times, pollution, loss of undeveloped wilderness area, etc.  But primarily, I think these city planners just hate suburbs -- they find them unsightly and not in keeping with their preferred aesthetics, the dense urban city and the unpopulated outdoors.

Of course, the problem they always run into is that people love to live in suburbs, and Americans by and large still want a house with a yard.  This Newsweek article shows that people are starting to accept this.  City planners have been fighting a losing battle -- instead of trying to get people to live in dense areas they don't want to, perhaps they should instead embrace the medium-density cities people want (i.e. suburbs) and make that environment better.  The article comments thatEuropeans  -- whose cities are held out by these "smart-growth" anti-sprawl city planners as the ideal -- who come to America are delighted by suburbs, and often aspire to own their own home, which is impossible back home.  (By way of comparison, more than half the apartments in Paris are under 46 square meters -- about 550 square feet for we Americans -- and sell for over 6,000 Euro per square meter.  Here, college students have more space than that.)  Of course, in a sense, much of Europe is low-density suburb, they just explain it away by not considering it part of the small, dense cities at all.

The article considers accepting suburbs to mean bringing the arts and businesses to those suburbs, thus making more of what people want available without coming into the city.  However, there's one thing missing from this calculus -- most of the jobs are still in the city, and suburban living involves increasingly long commutes.

This other article -- from the same issue of Newsweek, no less --  is a great example of the fact that accepting suburbs has only come so far.  The "fastest-growing group of commuters" (whatever that means) is now those who commute more than 90 minutes each way.  Americans order a quarter of their restaurant meals from their cars, and eat 32 meals a year while driving.  McDonald's is selling food that fits in your cupholder now, and car manufacturers are giving you more of them (three for the driver alone in some vehicles.)  The Dodge Caliber includes a refrigerator in the glove box and a passenger seat that folds down into a dining table.

On one hand, this may seem like accepting people's preferred living arrangements by making the commute less painful.  But it's not really --  truly accepting where people want to live would mean not making everyone drive into the city.  It's strange that at the same time as people are talking about "work/life balance" and rebeling against 60+ hour workweeks, they're adding 15 hours to their workweek by spending it in their cars.  Consider how much unproductive time is wasted.

Telecommuting is one way to eliminate this, but it's not the only way.  Another would be reducing the emphasis on downtown prestige offices.  Why does a company need to put all its employees in a monolithic office in a skyscraper?  How often to they need to communicate to each other in person, rather than by email and phone?  The answer of course varies by company and type of employee.  However, at my current employer, all the IT people are in four floors of one building, with a very small support staff (two HR folks, a couple receptionists, and some purchasing reps), while other corporate functions are in entirely different buildings.  There's no reason that any of those buildings need to be located downtown.  There's the occasional meeting from those of us in one building with those of us in another... but they're only occasional.

Many companies are like that, having semi-isolated "silos" that are located together either because "they always have been" or just to give the company a desirable downtown address.  My question is, what's so desirable about a downtown address?

Living in the suburbs of Seattle, I've seen what a livable suburb can be.  When I didn't work downtown, I could go for months without making the 25-minute drive into the city -- there are enough businesses and employers in the suburbs as to make it unnecessary.  Despite this, the Seattle area truly lives up to its name as the "Emerald City" when you get out of the city proper -- there are so many trees and green spaces as to make a beautiful living environment.  Of course, just as the cities try to "fight sprawl" and make themselves more dense and urban, the suburbs have their own form of inanity -- regulations to limit the height of buildings and to drive out businesses so as to retain their "rural character."  Still, a balanced, medium-density community can work, and seems to be what most people want to live in.  Anything that reduces how many people have to spend 90 minutes on a highway every morning is a step in the right direction.

Posted by Grant at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Gas prices at the local pump have exceeded $3.00/gallon for the first time in my life.  Though a lot of this is inflation, we're actually approaching 1981 gas prices in real terms at this point.  There are the usual calls for investigation of "price gouging," "windfall profits," etc., as well as for cutting gas taxes.

This is all irrelevant.  The problem is one of simple supply and demand.  The supply of oil has not increased much, because OPEC controls most of the cheap (relatively speaking) oil, and oil prices are still too low to warrant the use of the world's largest oil reserve, Canada's tar sands.  (Canada contains more oil than the Middle East, but it's not profitable to extract it unless you know oil prices are going to reach levels like today's, and -- here's the kicker -- stay there.)  Demand, on the other hand, has skyrocketed outside the United States.  Fifteen years ago, China's streets were choked with bicycles -- now they're choked with cars, and China is really big.

People don't realize how much China is growing.  Take a look at this.   How much construction does it take for a country to need that much cement?  Think about that -- ten times the construction as is going on in the United States.  A lot of that cement goes to laying roads for cars, too.

There's no "price gouging" -- prices are high because supply and demand makes this current high price the profit-maximizing point.  And if we tax "windfall profits" when things go well for the oil companies, are we going to give them "downturn subsidies" and hand them billions of dollars when things go badly for them?  Why punish them when profits are "too high" but not pay them when profits are "too low"?  It's the profit from the upswings that enables companies to endure the downswings.  Business isn't always a smooth line going up and to the right.

Supply will go up on its own eventually, but it won't help prices -- because it's the high prices, per se, that cause the supply to go up.  Higher energy prices are here to stay.  Environmentalists should be cheering -- this is the one thing that can actually get people to conserve energy.  Of course, most of them aren't cheering, because they have to put gas in their cars, too.

There are two ways to lower how much gasoline you need.  (Note that doing so does not necessarily reduce demand for oil -- after all, oil is needed for other things, like making plastic, and different uses require different compounds from the oil.  In other words, we might need just as much oil to make the plastic we use even if we just threw away all the compounds that make gasoline.  But I'm not talking about "energy dependence" and money flowing to the Middle East -- I'm talking about the expense we as individuals incur to pay for gas.)  One is to use alternative fuels, and the other is to require less energy.

Alternative fuels sound like a great idea, but they're just not ready.  And by "not ready," I mean "still more expensive than gasoline."  As the price of gasoline increases, of course, "alternative" fuels will become mainstream.  But until then...

Ethanol: it comes from corn, so it's "renewable."  But... it burns cooler, so you get only about half as many miles per gallon.  This means that you need to refill the tank twice as often.  And while $2.41/gal ethanol is cheaper than $3.00/gal gasoline, it's not when you need twice as much of it.  Also, it's corrosive, so you need a new car that's designed so that the ethanol doesn't eat the fuel lines.

Methanol: it comes from natural gas, which is also a limited resource.  And it takes a lot of it -- the fuel economy is even worse than ethanol's.  $2.89/gal looks decent until you notice you're getting 14 MPG in a subcompact.  And it's just as corrosive as ethanol.  Also, though it burns quite cleanly, the process of producing it releases carbon dioxide, so environmentalists only like methanol if we can somehow conjure it ex nihilo instead of actually producing it.

Compressed Natural Gas (CNG): this is actually a reasonably viable fuel.  You get decent fuel economy, and it only costs about $1.20 for an amount with equivalent energy to gasoline.  The problems here are relatively simple: you need a car designed for it (that has a huge fuel tank that can contain 50 gallons of 3,600 PSI vapor) and an infrastructure where you can refuel.  Currently these are lacking (though Honda does make a mass-produced CNG Civic, and there are a few CNG refueling station.)  The problem is that natural gas is just as limited as oil (in principle; we have more of it right now) and is also in demand for other purposes.  If everyone used CNG as fuel, it might well stop being so cheap.  Also, the government would probably slap a big tax on it like they do on gasoline and double the price.

Biodiesel: burning vegetable oil in a diesel engine.  You can get cars that do this today (mainly from Volkswagen), and they get 45 MPG.  The fuel's not cheap ($3.40/gal), but if gas prices go up much more, it'll start being cheap by comparison.  Also, the fuel is primarily a waste product from other processes, so there's not much demand for it.  Problems?  Well, at freezing temperatures it has the consistency of wax -- and thus is only suitable for warm climates unless you want to leave your car plugged into an electric heating system all the time when it's not running. Still, like CNG, this at least is a viable fuel, even if it's not for everyone.

Electric: this looks great on paper.  Electric cars have good acceleration, and can go 200 miles on the amount of energy in a gallon of gasoline.  Coal-fired electricity is so cheap you could drive from New York to Los Angeles on $60 of it.  What's the catch?  Umm... you have to stop and recharge for at least an hour every 80 miles.  Ouch.  Batteries are extremely heavy, so putting in bigger batteries doesn't help much (what you gain in available power you lose in weight, so the range still doesn't go over 100 miles total -- or 50 miles round-trip.)

Hydrogen: It has promise.  Hydrogen fuel cells are like superior batteries; they produce no emissions.  And hydrogen can be produced from seawater.  It takes about $11 worth of coal-fired electricity to make enough hydrogen to have the energy of a gallon of gasoline, but you can go 41 miles on that.  This really is a case of technological immaturity -- the theoretical capacity is much greater.  Of course, you still have to figure out how to store tens of thousands of cubic feet of hydrogen in your car.  Someday this may actually be useful (unlike ethanol and methanol, which will never be), but that day is a long way off.

So alternative fuels are, for now, out.  What's the other option?  Reduce demand for gasoline by driving less.  The environmentalists tell us, "Fight urban sprawl!  Live in the city where you can walk to work!  Ride a bike!  Carpool!  Use public transportation!"  And we, consistently, respond with, "No, I don't want to."

When it comes to getting to work, driving individually seems to be the national preference.  Despite the expense, people still prefer it over these alternatives.  We don't want to live in the city, we want to live in the suburbs.  If we're going to be in a car for an hour, we want to be there by ourselves, not with some yahoo from work.  And if we wanted to walk or ride a bike, America wouldn't have the health problems it does.

The problem here is that we're thinking in overly limited parameters.  The way to reduce the energy cost of the commute is not to provide new, less-pleasant ways to commute -- it's to reduce the need for commuting.  Corporate America's attachment to the centralized, monolithic office, where people can be watched, produces this need.  Support for alternative working arrangements could be championed as a way to reduce the need for energy.  If everyone (obviously an unreasonable goal) telecommuted only one day a week, we'd reduce gasoline requirements by 15%.  While we won't reach that in the near term (so far progress seems slow, and more importantly, a substantial number -- probably a substantial majority, actually -- of jobs are unsuitable for remote work), even a few percentage points could make a big difference in U.S. demand for gasoline.

It's one thing to try to get people to change their habits to something less appealing (e.g. riding a train or a bicycle) in order to serve some greater good.  It's quite another to encourage people to do what they wanted to do anyway.  People are much more receptive in such a case.

How much good would this do, from an environmental, world-peace, global warming perspective?  Oh, not much, probably.  But who cares?  If I can enlist the awesome lobbying and cheerleading power of the environmentalist, world-peace, hippie folks to achieve my objectives, it sounds good to me.  They're much better than I at getting corporations and politicians to kneel to their will.

Posted by Grant at 09:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm somewhat amazed by this Newsweek article (via MSNBC) about "Extreme Commuting" -- people who commute over two hours, both ways, to work.  There are apparently 3.4 million of 'em.

That's a really long time.  Specifically, it's 11.9% of the entire week spent commuting to work, or 17.8% of waking hours, assuming you sleep 8 hours per night, which I'm guessing these people don't.  After you take out work and sleep, it's 22.7% of all uncommitted time, and an even higher fraction when you consider that a lot of "uncommitted" time is committed, to things like eating, showering, brushing your teeth, etc.  And that's all for a two-hour commute -- some people in this article have commutes of 3 hours or more (186 miles into LA, for instance) they make every day.

Robert Putnam, author of "Bowling Alone," found that every 10 minutes added to your commute decreases by 10 percent the time you dedicate to your family and community. [...] And Georgia Tech researchers found that every 30 minutes spent driving increases your risk of becoming obese by 3 percent.

And what's their solution to this?  Why, doing more during your commute, of course!  Eating, applying makeup, talking on cell phones, checking email, and otherwise increasing your risk of dying in a car accident.  Indeed, some even seem to want it:

One in five said they like their "alone time." Just don't try selling that to their spouses. "My wife hates my commute," says Sam Wyant, 27, who drives 60 miles to his job, "but I value that Zen time."

"Zen time"?  Two hours sitting in traffic?  This is incomprehensible to me.  Doesn't he have anything to do?  I can't help but think he must be one of the people who, when he does get home, watches TV for four hours.  I can't imagine wanting to waste any time commuting.  If I wanted to go for a drive, I'd go for a drive, and my destination wouldn't be work. I also can't imagine wanting that much time away from my wife every day, but that's because my wife is wonderful.

The number of big cities with more than a fifth of their households living 20 miles or more from the urban center has tripled since 1970, according to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies. And even as jobs move to the suburbs, commuters continue to drive away from them. "It's a game of leapfrog," says commuting expert Alan Pisarski. "Jobs are moving out to the suburbs to be near skilled workers, which enables people to move even farther out."

The most common response to all this tends to be decrying "urban sprawl" and advocating "smart growth" measures (i.e. zoning regulations that essentially take people's property without compensation.) 

But herein lies the problem -- people want the sprawl.  Well, not precisely -- but they want to live in low-population-density areas.  Every "smart growth" measure is an attempt to create higher population density -- this won't do any good if what people want is the lower density that the suburbs offer. 

For $400,000 last year, he moved his family of five into a 3,000-square-foot home, twice the size of the place they used to have closer to the city. The trade-off: he now spends three to six hours a day on the road. "I love being out in the middle of nowhere," he says, "and seeing no people around."

"Smart growth" won't let him be out in the middle of nowhere.

So are we stuck with ever-lengthening commutes, rising gas prices, pollution, and gridlock, as people's irreconcilable desires to work in the city and live in the country clash?  Well, we don't have to be -- but breaking out of it requires a cultural shift, not a government intervention.

Ten years ago, at the beginning of the .com boom (damn, that sentence makes me feel old), we kept seeing breathless prophecies (e.g. Free Agent Nation) that soon we'd all be self-employed businesspeople and telecommuters and web entrepreneurs.

It didn't happen.  And there are a variety of reasons it didn't.  For one, the technology wasn't ready.  Videoconferencing over the Internet -- for that matter, audio conferencing -- was unreliable and cumbersome.  VPN (remote access) was unheard-of.  Security had not moved past the M&M stage (when an enterprise's security is entirely based on the perimeter firewall -- like an M&M, it's crunchy outside, but soft on the inside.)  Opening up such an environment to any significant number of telecommuters would simply not work, from both a functionality and security/risk perspective.  Second, people (managers) weren't ready for the idea of employees they couldn't check up on every day.  And third, people were still attached to "organization culture" -- the idea of working at one company for years, even decades, and building your entire career in a single organization.  Steady, predictable income was the order of the day.

However, I think it can happen now, and that we can see the elements that are capable of leading to it, at least in some limited spheres (however, they're the spheres I care most about.)

First of all, the technology is ready now.  Audioconferencing is seamless -- VoIP services like Skype and Vonage are now nearly as reliable as the landline telephone system, and cheaper, too.  Videoconferencing is not quite so seamless, but it's a stable enough technology that it gets used for porn -- and the software they use for porn is years behind the more advanced business videoconferencing software.  Group collaboration tools (e.g. annotations in Word and Excel) are available, though most people haven't bothered to learn to use them.  And Internet bandwidth has reached the point where widespread use of these tools will not choke the entire network with traffic.  Businesses don't use dialup anymore.

Second, even if the "free agent nation" didn't happen, it did put itself into the national consciousness, especially among young people in the tech industry.  Sure, not everyone can be a .com millionaire, but everyone knows it's possible, enough that people saying they operate a website as their occupation are taken seriously without a second thought.  And the organization culture has been obliterated -- a generation that's spent the last ten years doing contract work with known termination dates, getting laid off during the .com bust, and changing jobs for personal advantage (the average time spent at a single job in the tech industry is only 18 months) has no concept of company loyalty.  We are not loyal to our employers, nor do we expect them to be loyal to us.  Now, that's not to say that we want to harm or betray them -- only that we're not all that  attached to them if something better comes along.  We don't feel that our employer "takes care of us" -- we feel that it gives us a check every two weeks, and each one buys our loyalty... for two more weeks.

The other major cultural shift is outsourcing.  Managers have now gotten used to having some employees -- generally low-paid contractors -- working for them in entirely different countries, often time-shifted 8 hours or more, and sometimes with a language barrier.  By comparison to that, an American working across town is outright convenient.  At least the local telecommuter is in the same time zone, has a high-bandwidth connection, and if absolutely necessary can come to a meeting.

So why doesn't everyone telecommute?  Well, some jobs are of course outright impossible to telecommute to (e.g. auto mechanic, hairdresser, retail sales.)  And some people would never want to do such a thing anyway (either because they want the social environment of the workplace, or because they know that they are unable to be productive at home due to distractions.)  But the stated reason managers don't want knowledge workers to telecommute is generally meetings -- they need you to be present for meetings.

There are some other problems that need to be solved.  One is cost-sharing.  When an employee has to commute to work, he pays the costs -- $5 or more of gas every day, $5-10 for parking, and $0.20/mile of wear on his car -- entirely by himself.  Employers will sometimes chip in for parking, at best.  A commuter is costing himself up to $300 a month in commuting cost, plus 10 or 20 or more hours per week, but all of this costs employers nothing (except unhappy employees.)  Telecommuting, on the other hand, often does cost employers money -- while they generally pay nothing toward employees who do incidental telecommuting (i.e. working 8 hours and then signing in after work to do more work -- not that I can really comprehend doing this, but people do it), full-time telecommuters are often supplied with a PC and broadband connection.  This seems more expensive to employers, even though it's cheaper overall, because they're paying a share of the cost.

The biggest problem, though, is that presence is easier to measure than performance.  Managers have an easier time determining if an employee is "working hard" (i.e. has his butt in a chair for over 8 hours) than working well.  In an office environment, often things are a team effort -- one person slacking is not obvious unless they do it a lot, and even then it's obvious to the coworkers picking up the slack, not the manager.  The coworkers generally don't go to their manager and say "Bob's a lazy bum," because it looks like passing the buck, and Bob will just deny it anyway.  This is the same (stupid) reason why college professors take attendance.  I always thought that any college professor that took attendance was admitting failure -- they were showing that their class was so easy or so useless that the only way to get people to show up was to grade them on it.  Managers who measure presence are doing the same thing.  The problem is that they generally don't realize they're doing it -- they don't mean to measure performance by presence, but people working late sticks in their mind in a way that people producing good output does not.

It's getting better, but we're still not to where people thought we'd be by 1995.

Posted by Grant at 07:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)