Look at transportation funding as one of the dots with many connections. We can hardly afford to adequately maintain and preserve the existing infrastructure, much less expand it to meet the demands from ever increasing urban sprawl, population growth and economic expansion. Think about what dependable transportation means to our ability to attract high caibre employees needed to compete in the global marketplace, and to sustain our economic vitality and personal quality of life. What happens when it deteriorates? If 50% of the “eligible (key criteria)” workforce would telework one or two days a week, how many tax dollars and personal discretionary dollars would that save in the cost of congestion — i.e., highway maintenance, incident management, police enforcement, capacity increases, etc. that could be reinvested in maintaining the infrastructure. How much of your health care cost can be attributed to the increased incidence of diseases aggravated by emissions from vehicle trips, driving and traffic accidents? What is the cost of lost productivity as a result? Whether it is business expense or government expense, it ultimately comes out of a taxpayer’s pocket. There are probably a dozen other examples that can be connected to the pain and drain in your wallet.

Our early evaluation of using an incentive to encourage businesses to establish a formal, pilot telework program shows a significant ipercentage increase in the number of teleworkers within the company after two years, and we anticipate that will continue to grow in those companies where teleworking can be effective. No matter how I look at it, any well planned, tested, implemented and evaluated telework incentive program can pay off in the long run — especially one that eliminates the trip entirely. If the ROI proves positive, invest in it; if not, kill it.

And yes, teleworking is not viable for every company.

And there’s mySQL, the venture-funded company that’s behind one of the world’s most popular open source databases. 6,000,000 users, and 40,000 downloads a day. The three founders were in Finland, UK, and US. First 10 employees were in 7 countries. Today they have employees on every continent except Antarctica and in 26 countries. They get together quarterly (virtually, of course) for a sports day. Everyone gets a paid day off, each photographs the sport the play, and share the pictures online.

All the companies you mention established their reputations in office environments. They had well-defined corporate cultures BEFORE they adopted telecommuting. It makes sense that their employees would be just as productive if they were allowed to telecommute, because they’re essentially extending their pre-existing corporate culture to their homes. Plus, they have to measure up against their colleagues, the majority of whom are located in the office.

What happens, however, in the case of a new business without a well-defined corporate culture that decides to adopt telecommuting as its operating model from day one (perhaps because of government incentives)? I’d be interested to know how successful such a business would be.

Do you have any examples of new businesses (let’s say 100+ employees) that adopted telecommuting from the very beginning and were successful?

This is a fascinating topic. Thanks for your comments.

I was doing some more research for a book we’re writing and came across the fact that 84 of the Fortune 100 Best Companies To Work For 2008 (those that allow employees to telecommute or work at home at least 20% of the time), these 10 have the highest percentage of telecommuters.

Cisco Systems 70%
eBay 48%
Booz Allen Hamilton 34%
S.C. Johnson & Son 32%
American Fidelity Assurance 30%
Shared Technologies 26%
Principal Financial Group 23%
Goldman Sachs 22%
Yahoo 20%
Qualcomm 18%

McKinsey, Goldman Sacks, and Skadden Arps all have telecommuting policies. One of the Skadden Arps people writes: “The telecommuting technology helps to make the [crushing] hours much easier to deal with because it enables attorneys to control how/where assignments are completed.”

This article is my official about-face on telecommuting and flexible work arrangements. A variety of factors have changed my opinion on the best way to get work done.”

This is the introduction by [obvious underachiever] John D. Halamka, MD, MS, is Chief Information Officer of the CareGroup Health System, Chief Information Officer and Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School, Chairman of the New England Health Electronic Data Interchange Network (NEHEN), CEO of MA-SHARE (the Regional Health Information Organization), Chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP), and a practicing Emergency Physician.

The rest of the article is at http://tinyurl.com/6a3656. Doesn’t address the gummint involvement issue, but makes a good case for telecommuting.

That said, I sure can identify with your cable company experience. And telephone companies are just the same—maybe worse. Verizon actually told us they couldn’t handle an accounting problem for us over the phone, we had to come into a store. A phone company hasn’t figured out how to do business over the phone?!

And since I’m ranting here, the BBB is one of my favorite companies to hate. Their strong arm tactics, threatening damnation if you don’t join, really rubs me the wrong way. Hell, I’d have turned the San Diego office into the Better Business Bureau if that wasn’t recursive in an odd way. Actually, the telecommunication commission and FTC—or even just the threat of going to them—often gets instant results.

I agree that management by walking around isn’t a good model - or even management for that matter - but what about the scenario where you receive poor customer service?

I’ll give you an example - when I had cable hooked up, I had a huge customer service issue - basically they stood me up, and when I called to complain, the customer service rep hung up on me. (In DC our cable companies are abysmal.)

The next day I called a number I found on the Better Business Bureau website, and the manager I spoke to got real results - I had my cable hooked up promptly that evening and soeone called with an apology.

Now, if those people had been working from home, don’t you lose that ability to directly intervene - by that I mean go to someones desk, and “fix” the problem immediately before a problem spirals out of control?

I see some merit to your points, but I don’t know that I’m completely convinced that management shouldn’t be able to reach out and touch someone if they need to.

But doesn’t the government bearing some of the risk for getting it off the ground distort whether it is truly desirable?

Once it does get up and running, what happens when the government pulls the plug, does it fall apart?

If not, why not let them get it up and running on their own? If so, why fund it?

Every call to Jet Blue goes to someone at home, they don’t even have a call center. Even McDonald’s is experimenting with using happy people at home to take orders from the drive-through box—they key it in, and the register around the corner (and across the country) displays it for the surly minority at the window.

Only about 4% of the people who could telecommute do, however, so you’re right. There’s a long way to go to reach the estimated 40% of workers who could.

We think this new way of doing business been slow to arrive largely because the so many people are still caught in a sweat shop mentality and think that management by walking around is a good idea. It’s not, all you’ve done is interrupt and by-passed layers of management who’s job is to synthesize for you what’s going on so you don’t have to.

Besides management inertia there have been other reasons companies have moved slowly—security and privacy issues, for example. Over 70% of medical transcriptionists work at home (some even overseas), and protecting patient’s medical information, of course, is crucial. (Not that that prevented a local hospital from sending us a bill recently for a named someone else’s breast augmentation surgery.)

But big companies like IBM and Cisco and Avaya are adopting telecommuting in a major way. IBM reported $40 million in savings way back in 1994 from their FlexiWork program. Today 80,000 (26%) of IBM’s employees telecommute at least once a week.

Anway, I think you missed my point about why government is involved. They’re not meddling in a free market, they’re trying to solve some serious problems. Some that may actually have reached the tipping point. Highways and related infrastructure, for one. There are those that make a well reasoned argument that we can’t even maintain what we have, much less catch up with demand for capacity and never will. Government is encouraging telecommuting because the only solution, if you can’t add capacity, is to reduce demand.