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
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 based on distance.
Less active users living closer to their office can use a 14.4Kbps or 28.8Kbps modem. They represent the cheapest and most basic link between home and office. However, modems can be slow, taking as long as three minutes to transfer a 100K file. One alternative is to bring the files home on floppy disks. But stuffing files onto disks before heading home to spend the evening or next day telecommuting can be laborious. Another solution is to use a file transfer package.
Mike Grubbs, a senior civil engineer for San Bernardino, Calif.'s, Department of Public Works, used to spend the last hour of every day compressing CAD and other files onto multiple floppy disks to take home for work in the evening. He then spent an equal amount of time at home expanding the files.
Tired of the process, Grubbs turned to a file transfer software program from Symantec called pcANYWHERE32. The software gives Grubbs dial-up access to his office and transfers files far more effectively than using floppy disks. In the past, file transfer packages have been faulted for not coping very well with transmission problems. But according to Grubbs, the latest version of pcANYWHERE, which runs on Windows 95, "is very stable. I've had pretty much flawless operation," he said.
In some telecommuting cases, file transfer is not enough. At-home workers may need their home computer to act as a node on the office network, where they can have full access to all the file servers and applications that reside there, such as an SQL database used in client/server computing. Symantec's pcANYWHERE allows telecommuters to connect their home PC with their office computer. They can use pcANYWHERE to launch applications, open files and access network resources.
Other solutions include remote LAN access software, such as Microsoft's Remote Access Service (RAS) and Novell's Connect 2.0. Or telecommuters can purchase turnkey solutions that integrate the necessary hardware and software into one package. An example is LanRover E Plus from Shiva Corp. Be forewarned, however, that remote access solutions, such as RAS and Connect 2.0, require dedicated server hardware and special boards, not to mention modems and communication lines, making them expensive.
WIDE AREA TELECOMMUTING
Modems, which are the most common method of linking telecommuters to their office information systems, are also the most troublesome part of the communications link, according to Beckman. "They are unreliable and have so many configuration problems," he said, adding that a full-time staff person is needed to support a group of 50 telecommuters who use modems. "In contrast," Beckman continued, "if they use ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network), the support work is one-tenth that needed for modems. ISDN is extremely reliable once it's up and running."
ISDN maximizes the transmission capability of existing copper wires, allowing for the simultaneous transmission of voice and data over a single twisted pair connection. That means telecommuters can transfer files and remotely access data starting at 64Kbps. Maximum throughput for ISDN is 1.55Mbps. According to Beckman, ISDN is rapidly replacing point-to-point lines because of its flexibility and low cost. In California, Pacific Bell offers ISDN at rates that run under $30 per month. ISDN phone line installation costs approximately $240 in San Luis Obispo, while the necessary hardware (called a terminal adapter) costs $350 and up.
Unfortunately, ISDN is not universally available. While Pacific Bell offers more than 90 percent coverage, other regional Bell companies cover 75 percent or less of their territory. As an alternative, telecommuters with advanced needs may want to try frame relay, a fast packet- switching technology that can transmit data at rates from 56Kbps to 1.5Mbps. Unlike dedicated lines, frame relay providers charge only for usage, making it economical. Frame relay is used by most state and local governments primarily to interconnect LANs. But it could serve the telecommuting community in a number of ways, including a link between remote work centers and departments or agencies located in cities.
Remote work centers, or telecenters, are basically intermediary telecommuting offices located between an urban or downtown area and outlying suburbs. Rather than commute all the way to work five days a week, workers commute to the telecenter, which is equipped with phones, faxes, PCs and modems.
COSTLY COMMUTES
When San Luis Obispo surveyed 13 county government departments and three state agencies employing a total of 3,639 people in 1995, they found 24 employees telecommuting on an occasional basis and only two people telecommuting on a scheduled basis. At that level of activity, the issues of using technology to support telecommuting are minimal. Yet this is precisely the time when governments should formalize a strategy, before the numbers -- and costs -- begin to escalate. "A big problem with remote access," said Beckman, is overlooking the cost of expanding a telecommuting program from a handful of workers to 50 or 100. You need to spend a lot of time up front, formalizing an installation process."
An easy way to hold down telecommuting costs, that's often overlooked, is to set standards in terms of hardware and software. "One of the really bizarre things I've seen happen many times," recalled Beckman, "is companies that start a telecommuting program and give the employees the choice of equipment they want to use." That kind of laissez-faire approach can quickly lead to a host of compatibility problems later on when telecommuting grows. The goal is to reduce support costs as much as possible.
At the same time, telecommuters need some kind of help desk service once they are up and running. A telecommuter with broken equipment is out of production, a situation that's more serious than a broken copying machine at the office. At a minimum, Beckman recommends setting up an answering machine so that employees can call, leave a message about their problem, and get a response during the day.
Network protocols can also affect the cost of telecommuting. Since they dictate the way in which remote access users connect to an office LAN or host computer, using the wrong ones can waste bandwidth and drive up phone bills.
Security is another cost element for telecommuting. Virtually all remote access products provide some form of password security, but governments still need to set policies and strategies for user identification, communications privacy and access control. Beckman warns that trying to launch a security policy after telecommuting is already established can be a serious -- and sometimes costly -- mistake.
TELECOMMUTING ATTITUDES
While telecommuting can deliver real financial benefits, the use of technology can eat into those returns if not implemented properly. According to Infoworld magazine, providing full remote access can cost over $6,000 annually per user, with 35 percent of the cost going to hidden expenses: time spent installing, configuring and troubleshooting the telecommuters' systems.
Plan ahead, say the experts, and those hidden costs can be reduced. Unfortunately in government, even the best laid plans for using technology and telecommuting can go nowhere when they run into attitudes of indifference. After funding its feasibility study on telecommuting, the San Luis Obispo Council of Governments decided that telecommuting was an issue best left to the private sector to solve. According to Herron, the council has decided not to spend any more money to advance telecommuting.
*
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Telecommuting Resources
* The Smart Valley Telecommuting Guide, a full-length book on the subject. Available on the Internet:
Smart Valley's home page on the Web also has numerous links to other telecommuting resources:
* San Luis Obispo Telecommuting Feasibility Study. Detailed look at the impact and potential benefits of telecommuting in San Luis Obispo. For hard copies, contact: Dan Herron at SLOCOG, 805/781-5711.
* State of Minnesota Telecommuting Policy and Guidelines. Available on the Internet:
* Telecommute America! Site on the World Wide Web with links to other sites that deal with telecommuting:
