If you see telecommuting as just an excuse for workers to sit at home watching soaps on TV, think again. Employers, who once turned a deaf ear to employees' request to telecommute, are now driving the work-at-home trend. They have discovered that telecommuting can reduce operating costs and the need for office space and parking, while increasing productivity.

When the city of Los Angeles commissioned a telecommuting study, researchers found that the average financial benefit from telecommuting was between $8,000 and $12,000 annually per employee. The San Luis Obispo, Calif., Council of Governments conducted a feasibility study on telecommuting and estimated that if all county government employees were telecommuting at the statewide average rate of 15 percent, the county would save an estimated $9,168,000 annually.

Minnesota, in its Telecommuting Strategic Plan, points out that the "reduced need for office space may translate to reduced capital bonding and operating costs including rent, utilities, insurance, furnishings, security, cleaning and maintenance. Traffic congestion and the need for parking facilities may also be reduced."

In the private sector, telecommuting plans often call for reducing office space by one-half. Working cubicles may have two credenzas for workers to secure personal belongings, but only one desk, computer and phone. Most firms keep a few extra offices in case of overflow, but the idea is that the primary workplace is at the home.

Telecommuting can also boost productivity by 20 percent, with some studies showing improvements ranging from 40 to 100 percent. "Employers are discovering that workers can do some of their most productive work at home," said Mel Beckman, a network engineering consultant. Employers are dropping the notion that productivity can only come from visual supervision. "With telecommuting your output is based on something other than your attendance," he pointed out.

TELECOMMUTING TOOLS
Not everyone can telecommute. Job characteristics suited for telecommuting are those that contain a substantial amount of individual production with a minimal amount of face-to-face interaction. Beckman said telecommuters typically fall into the category of knowledge worker: someone who manipulates information and is self-motivated.

Tools needed to telecommute from home can range from the most basic -- pencil and paper -- to a full-fledged local area network with remote access to the file server or host computer back at the office. Tom Herron, a transportation planner with the San Luis Obispo Council of Governments, and a strong advocate for telecommuting, emphasized that while technology isn't the key to making every telecommuting job a success, there are some basic tools needed for assimilating information and for communication. "A phone with call-forwarding and voice mail can reduce unnecessary interruptions," he said. "Also a modem, which links the worker's home PC with the office. The modem is one of the most useful tools that has come along, and they are cheap."

How the home PC and modem should be linked to the main office depends on what kind of information the worker accesses and how frequently the information is accessed. Most major urban areas offer a wide range of communication links in terms of speed and cost, from the basic analog phone line to Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN), frame relay and even Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). Telecommuters should start by examining the type of access they need, the volume of data transferred, how far they are located from the office and how long they will need a link to the office each day.

For example, the Smart Valley Telecommuting Information Guide, published by a public-private partnership based in Silicon Valley, Calif., points out that telecommuters who need terminal access to a mainframe, live more than 30 miles from the office and expect to use their link more than three hours a day, should consider using a dedicated line. Instead of paying charges based on minutes or hours of use, they incur a fixed charge per month