Home run : Service provider telecommuters provide model for the work-at-home set

America's Network, Sept 1, 2001 by Suzanne Sanders

It's becoming a familiar -- and much sought-after -- scene. The happy worker getting much work done. At home. In pajamas.

Telecommuting and teleworking have become viable options for both employers and employees. By definition, service providers play a key role in telecommuting programs by providing enterprises and their employees with the technologies and transport they need. Logically, local and long-distance providers should have much to gain from the telecommuting boom. So how do they support their own telecommuters?

AT&T, Verizon and WorldCom are three providers that have active and successful telecommuting programs. Each carrier has its own ground rules for who can work away from the office and who can't. But a common thread is that the employee must have the means to remain in constant communication with the office.

"We encourage employees to go through a checklist of issues to make sure they're good candidates for telecommuting," says a Verizon spokesman (Figure 1). After that, it's basically up to the employee's supervisor if and when a worker can telecommute.

Figure 1: Go home!

Verizon provides employees with a checklist to determine eligibility for telecommuting. Issues include:

How will your schedule affect external customers, internal customers, co-workers and your manager?

How will your schedule be communicated?

How often do you plan to telecommute?

How will you handle staff meetings?

Detail a proposed monitoring, deliverable measurement and review process

Identify any network and communications equipment required

Source: Verizon

"Everybody first of all has a regular dial-up or ISDN connection," says Kevin Lee, LAN administrator for Verizon. "If a user really needs to get on and access a corporate LAN, we do what we have to do to get it."

High-speed access, such as DSL or cable modem, could be a requirement for certain employees, Lee says -- although employees sometimes get by with much less. "I have some users access the corporate network on the bus with a cell phone," he says.

AT&T has a similar attitude toward telecommuting. According to a testimony to Congress by Braden Allenby, vice president of environment, health and safety for AT&T, "We assume all employees are eligible to telework until proven otherwise. We believe that location is irrelevant, given the right technology."

Making good

Quite a claim, but seeing that these are the guys who are providing the access, it makes sense that a carrier would have this view.

"Our employee research," Allenby's testimony continues, "has shown that lack of broadband to the home is the top barrier to increased participation [in telecommuting]."

The majority of AT&T's telecommuters -- about 45,000 to 50,000 -- are dialing into analog, says Andy Daudelin, global network vice president for AT&T. However, if an AT&T employee has a time-sensitive job, AT&T will provide broadband access, even if it means getting it from a competitor.

"We look first at AT&T Broadband, and then we go down the line," Daudelin says.

WorldCom also relies mainly on dial-up access for telecommuting, says Tim Muilenburg, vice president for enterprise and data management systems for WorldCom. "High-speed access for certain job functions is at the discretion of supervisors." Not many WorldCom employees, however, use high-speed access at this point, he says.

Despite the paucity of high-speed telecommuting within their ranks, carriers still see themselves as viable models for telecommuting. Providers even use their own telecommuting programs as test beds for new technologies and service offerings.

For example, AT&T rolled out its Voice Post offering internally in June. The service provides voice access into the carrier's corporate directory and uses LDAP with an XML interface.

AT&T also provides an employee telework portal on its intranet, according to Allenby's testimony.

Unified messaging, voice recognition services, instant messaging, group calendar options and wireless offerings also are becoming increasingly important in the telecommuting realm, says Daudelin, who was on the beach at the time of AN's interview with him. AT&T is also testing a videoconferencing system that users are internally calling Hollywood Squares. Users can videoconference with up to nine users on a PC.

Safe at home

All these bells, whistles and positive words can give a pretty utopian vibe to the idea of telecommuting. But some mundane concerns still exist, such as technical support and security (Figure 2).

"We always use VPNs for security," Verizon's Lee says. "We don't even do split tunneling."

Verizon's technical support team is available 24/7, he continues. "We get calls at 10:00 or 11:00 at night, for instance, if a user has a quarterly report due." If a cable modem or DSL connection goes down or a switch fails, he says, Verizon telecommuters always have the back up of dial-up access or ISDN access.

AT&T also uses VPNs for security and has technical support that's always available, Daudelin says. In addition, the company offers employees a Web site for information, ordering and provisioning.