August 17, 1997

For Stay-Home Workers, Speed Bumps on the Telecommute

By SUSAN J. WELLS

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company

After telecommuting for years for two publishing companies in New Jersey and California, Ms. Rossbach thought twice when Sage Publishing, based in Los Angeles, wanted to hire her as acquisitions editor on the East Coast -- a post that required telecommuting from her home in Mamaroneck, N.Y.

"I hated it thoroughly," Ms. Rossbach said of her previous experience. "I'd do my grocery shopping in the middle of the day when there were no crowds, and then I'd end up working until 2 a.m. I had no structure to my workday and felt totally isolated. I couldn't win."

Her solution? She persuaded Sage to lease her an office in a building in nearby Rye, N.Y., as a condition of accepting the job. "I like getting up and going to 'the office' every day," she said. "It's a separate, professional environment that gives me the discipline and structure I need to get my work done."

Ms. Rossbach isn't alone in her rejection of telecommuting, the work-at-home trend that has grown along with the Internet, personal-computer ownership and flex time. Those who study telecommuting say it is still growing, but they acknowledge that it may have hit a turning point -- some say a coming of age -- for some of the same reasons Ms. Rossbach and others have discovered.

"There's kind of a fork in the road occurring right now," said Gil Gordon, who has operated a telecommuting consulting firm in Monmouth Junction, N.J., for 15 years. "There was a lot of naivete surrounding telecommuting -- it sounded great to lots of people and everyone thought it'd be easy. But it's really not that easy. And a lot of workers and their companies are just now realizing this."

Forty-two percent of companies of various sizes have telecommuting arrangements, according to a 1996 study of 305 North American business executives by the Olsten Corp., a Melville, N.Y., staffing services company. That figure is up from 33 percent in the 1995 study. But the companies surveyed said that only 7 percent of their employees ever telecommute -- a number that has held steady for four consecutive annual surveys.

What is happening? One of every five telecommuting arrangements fails, estimated Christena Nippert-Eng, assistant professor of sociology at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the author of "Transition to Telecommuting," to be published by the University of Chicago Press.

Dr. Nippert-Eng says there are two reasons: Employees have unrealistic expectations, and employers are afraid of losing control.

"You need significant individual skills to manage yourself and your work from home," Dr. Nippert-Eng said. "People think telecommuting may be the ultimate way to balance work and family, but for a lot of them, working at home is just another stress-producer."

One former telecommuter found that he could not concentrate on his work because his dog barked too much, Dr. Nippert-Eng said. If the master was home, the dog figured, it was play time. Another telecommuter, Dr. Nippert-Eng said, found that because she was the only work-at-home professional on her block, her house became the drop-off point for U.P.S. packages and other deliveries; neighborhood children even gathered there after school.

From the employer's perspective, "the workplace is still designed to value and reward commitment to the office and being there to prove your worth," Dr. Nippert-Eng said. "The authoritarian, surveillance-type concept of management really hasn't changed that much yet."

Peg Mauer, a technical writer who lives in Piercefield, N.Y., experienced that attitude first hand. She worked for a big company in Rochester for 21 years before asking to telecommute full-time.

Her managers, she said, thought about the request for two years, then said no. "Telecommuting is a power and control issue, not a money issue," she said. "Management still perceives it as a risk -- a risk they're scared to take." She ultimately left the company as a result.

Although many companies see benefits in telecommuting -- lower real estate costs, lower turnover and increased productivity -- the list of growing pains is also expanding.

And both the benefits and disadvantages are difficult to measure.

"I liken telecommuting to a Rorschach test," said Tom Miller, vice president of the emerging-technologies research group of Find/SVP Inc., a consulting and research firm based in New York. "Everyone tends to see what they want to in it. It's really a slippery term, and therefore that makes it difficult to research."

Estimates of the number of American telecommuters range from 9 million to 42 million. In its latest study, a phone survey of 2,000 households conducted in April, Find/SVP said there were 11.1 million telecommuters nationwide.

IDC/Link, a New York-based technology research company, uses an extremely broad definition of home workers. It includes self-employed contractors, part-timers and even people who simply bring work home from the office at night. The company estimates that there were 32.7 million work-at-home households and it projects annual growth of 8.2 percent through 2001.

"Whether you are or are not a telecommuter is not cut and dried," said Gordon, the telecommuting consultant. "There's a mix of work going on."

But one thing is sure: telecommuting is on the rise. "If the economy is doing well, there are more jobs, and companies feel safe about their future," Miller said. "Then employees and their managers tend to be more agreeable to flexible work arrangements that can benefit both of them."

Some advocates of telecommuting agree with the estimates and heavily promote them; others do not. Robert Moskowitz, president of the 100,000-member American Telecommuting Association in Washington, said his group generally considered the numbers overstated. Gail Martin, executive director of TAC/the International Telework Association, also in Washington, tends to believe the numbers are reliable and possibly understated.

Dr. Charles Grantham, president of the Institute for the Study of Distributed Work in Walnut Creek, Calif., said: "The lack of uniformity is rampant. In my opinion, a real problem is that no one has done a complete and large-enough random sample of U.S. residences to really find out what's going on out there."

Grantham bases his research on independent studies coupled with market data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He breaks the numbers down this way:

-- Some 9 million to 14 million American workers are telecommuters, defined as those who work from their homes on a regular basis (at least two days a week) for an outside company.

-- From 10 million to 12 million are home-based workers, or those who run businesses from their homes.

-- Some 12 million to 16 million are independent contractors who work for multiple companies.

Grantham predicts that the number of independent contractors will explode over the next five years, far outpacing the number of telecommuters. Such contractors tend to be well-educated professionals who can -- and do -- demand a better quality of life. "And being out of sight, out of mind with the boss is a justifiable concern with telecommuters," he said -- one that individuals working for themselves don't have.

The trend is somewhat self-regulating in that employees who dislike telecommuting stop -- or the employer calls them back into the office. On average, workers give up telecommuting after 6 to 18 months, Gordon estimated.

"Something happens at that point -- maybe the job changes, or there's a reason for the employer to call a professional-level worker back in, or the employee's personal situation changes," he said. "It's not always a forever deal."

Legislation may also play a part in encouraging -- or discouraging -- telecommuting.

A provision in the federal budget and tax bills that would have widened the definition of independent contractors -- making it easier for businesses to categorize telecommuting employees as outside contractors and thus save on benefit costs -- did not make it to the final version signed by President Clinton on Aug. 5. Unions fought the measure, but business lobbyists said they planned to push the issue again next year.

Under the new tax law, rules that take effect in 1999 will enable more people to deduct the costs of a home office. Reversing a 1993 Supreme Court decision, the measure lets home-office workers deduct expenses if they do not conduct a substantial amount of administrative business elsewhere.

Other legislation under consideration would qualify employers' telecommuting costs -- for an extra phone line, for example, -- as tax-free transportation costs. This break would be similar to the transit subsidies for employers that pay workers' subway fares.

Despite their differences, researchers agree on one thing: Telecommuting tends to work best in companies that have clear, formal and tested policies -- instead of having it start casually from the ground up, as one worker persuades one manager to try it.

"Formal arrangements are almost always better for both parties," said Robert Straus, an analyst at IDC/Link. "The set-up itself is extremely important."

Many companies have just recently latched onto the formal approach.

Consider Merrill Lynch. Since putting a formal telecommuting plan in place in early 1996, the firm, which had studied telecommuting since 1992, has had just one dropout out of 400 throughout the nation. That woman missed the interaction with co-workers, a spokeswoman said.

"We didn't just wake up one morning and say, 'We're going to do this, O.K., let's go with it.' " said Camille Manfredonia, vice president and director of alternative work arrangements at Merrill Lynch. "It was a well-thought-out structure."

The company, which has 21 pages of guidelines, developed a four-step preparation process. Much like a family counseling session, it includes a workshop in which the employee and the manager discuss issues that could poison the relationship.

They consider how to measure productivity, work flow and time management; how the telecommuter will communicate with co-workers, and how to quell fears of career sabotage from being out of the office.

The final step is two weeks of practice in a telecommuting "lab," said Howie Sorgen, senior vice president and chief technology officer for Merrill Lynch's private client technology division, where 170 of 1,700 systems professionals telecommute.

In the lab, employees work alone. Even though they are in the same building, they communicate with managers only by phone and E-mail -- just as they would from home. They also learn how to troubleshoot problems with their personal computers, software and other equipment they will take home. Sorgen's goal for the division is 450 telecommuters by the end of 1998.

Like Merrill Lynch, AT&T asks managers and potential telecommuters to attend a series of training courses offered through the company's School of Business and Technology in Somerset, N.J.

The company now counts 36,000 employees, or 55 percent of its United States-based managers, as telecommuters, said Susan Sears, AT&T's telework project director. The average telecommuter at AT&T spends about six days a month out of the office.

Jenny Nelson, a fire protection engineering team leader for AT&T, has telecommuted for eight years. She started after having her first child, working from home part-time. She continued the arrangement informally until AT&T wrote a formal telecommuting policy in 1992.

She has an agreement with the company that outlines her telecommuting in detail -- from her daily routine to keeping in touch with the office to how her work and productivity are evaluated.

"It gets very specific," she said. She now telecommutes two to three days a week and keeps in touch with the office by E-mail -- she estimates that she answers 40 to 60 messages a day -- pager and voice mail.

"I love it. It's easier for me to meet my personal needs, too," said Ms. Nelson, who now has three children, ages 3, 6 and 8. "If someone needs to come fix something at my house, for instance, I can be there." As part of her agreement, she also participates in what some AT&T employees call "the virtual water cooler," by meeting co-workers for lunch once a week.

"I'm actually in closer contact with more people now than ever before," she said.

Each telecommuter is expected to find ways to interact with co-workers on a regular basis, Ms. Sears said. The goal is to keep telecommuters in the loop.

"Telecommuters and their managers have to get concerns out in the open and address them up front," Ms. Nelson advised. "If you don't have a good match, it won't work well."

The best telecommuters, experts suggest, are self-directed, self-motivated, independent, focused, well-organized, dependable and have been in their jobs long enough to have developed solid, successful relationships with bosses and co-workers.

What about the boss? "It's tough for managers to let go," said Dr. Nippert-Eng, the sociologist. The best managers of telecommuters are more likely to be good communicators who put a lot of trust in employees and value their suggestions. They also tend to be more hands-off than hands-on, and reward results, not appearances.

The decision to telecommute, said Gordon, the consultant, comes down to three simple factors: the suitability of the job, the suitability of the worker and the manager, and the suitability of the home environment. "You can have the first two," he said, "but if you're tapping into the PC on the kitchen table surrounded by three noisy toddlers, it just isn't going to work.