Home work gets easier - TeleCommute Solutions - Company Business and Marketing

Communications News, Oct, 1999 by Ripley Hotch

Steve Schilling's TeleCommute Solutions will handle your telecommuters.

Atlanta is a city in the throes of severe traffic-induced pollution problems. Its highway funds are frozen until it brings down smog levels. One of the solutions for such cities is telecommuting, and it seems appropriate that TeleCommute Solutions (TCS) is located there.

TCS somewhat uncomfortably calls itself a network service provider, but what it offers goes beyond the technology of delivering services over a network. Its stock in trade is a complete telecommuting package for large enterprises that takes care of every aspect of dealing with off-site workers, from access to training to support.

You'd think that city, state, and national efforts to encourage telecommuting as a solution to traffic and pollution, and as a way of saving on real estate costs, would be driving the current interest, but, in fact, that's not the principal reason, says Steve Schilling, president of TCS.

"The reality is people are doing this now for the job market," he says. "Because the market's gotten so tight, they need to retain and attract people. They need to expand the pool of people they get access to. And, companies are looking at telecommuting as an employee benefit, a retention tool."

Telecommuting can be a slippery term; it generally refers to workers who spend at least part of the work week at home--but the time can range from one day a week to full-time with only occasional visits to the main office. Link Resources, which has studied telecommuting for years, says the number of telecommuters is approaching 20 million. The Gartner Group projects that a quarter of the workforce will be doing some telecommuting by 2003.

This presents enormous challenges to the corporate network, as well as to the skills of management. In fact, says Don O'Hagan, vice president of telecommunications for the Pearson Technology Center, it's not even clear that telecommuters are the responsibility of IT departments. Pearson Education, with 11,000 employees, is aiming to be the largest education publisher in the world, and the technology center supports the entire operation all over the world. Right now, O'Hagan supports 4,000 remote workers.

"I run the telecommunications enterprise, and so they think I do the telecommute stuff, and I really don't," says O'Hagan. When his boss asked him to take on the telecommuters, he tried to avoid it. His boss told him he had to because, who else would? O'Hagan is working with TCS more on the nontechnical issues and what to do about the equipment of employees working at home. He figures that with the consolidation his company is going through now, it will be good to be able to offer employees the chance to work where they are without moving.

Since employees want to work at home, they find ways to do it, using equipment that is unknown to the home office and that simply can't be supported by the help desk. Not to mention access methods from ISDN to DSL and all the security problems that go along with remote access. Add to that the difficulties of supporting equipment in scattered locations and various legal requirements involving off-site workers, and telecommuting can quickly become the communications manager's worst nightmare.

Real telecommuting is not just access to the LAN," Schilling says. "You have to have telephony capability and, in a call-center type of environment, that includes ACD, call routing, and all that advanced stuff. You take all those things together to get the technology piece done, but the real challenge is the support. Eighty percent of the support issues are Bell-related--ISDN specifically. You can go find companies to do PC maintenance, you can get Shiva-type companies to do remote access, but who does the support? Your options are very limited today--internal or the telecommuter."

Up to now, the telecommuter has been willing to do that support because he or she wants the advantages of working at home. But, says Schilling, "That isn't going to work if we're really talking about a quarter of the U.S. working population."

Nevertheless, companies are going to have to deal with it. "It goes without question that telecommuting's happening, so how are you going to address it?" says Schilling. For those who accept it as an opportunity, telecommuting can give some real advantages. Schilling cites the case of a competitor of American Express, one of TCS' earliest clients.

"They didn't have any of the issues that ordinarily lead to a formal program," says Schilling. "So I go, `OK, we don't get it. Why do you want to do telecommuting?' And they go, `Because American Express is doing telecommuting. We are after the same people it is, and we're starting to get an increased number of people coming through the door,' and they ask us `Do you offer work-at-home programs?' When we say `No,' they say, `Thank you very much.' So we have all this space, we have all these great things, we're rural, and the cost of telecom and network is under control, but we've got to offer this because those guys offer it.'"