Managing from a distance - telecommuting - includes related articles

Nation's Business, Feb, 1993 by Ripley Hotch

Lynne Stockstad had been happily employed for two years by Great

Plains Software in Fargo, N.D. when her husband decided to pursue a longtime dream and go to chiropractic college, in Davenport, Iowa. That meant Stockstad had to resign. "I assumed there was nothing else I could do," she says.

Not only was Stockstad leaving a job she liked, but also Great Plains, the largest publisher of accounting software, was going to lose the services of a fine "competitive analyst"-one of the specialists who research competitors' products and advise Great Plains about them.

It's a common story for businesses big and small. Family circumstances often mean the loss of a good and productive employee. The employee doesn't want to go, and yet the family decision requires it.

Great Plains President Doug Burgum thought there might be a way to avoid such losses of key employees. To Stockstad's surprise, he told her not to resign. "He said, 'Challenge yourself to do the job from Iowa,' and he had me prepare a proposal," she says.

Stockstad realized that she spent a lot of time talking by phone to outside contacts. Those calls could be made anywhere. But Great Plains is largely organized in teams, so she also had to consider how to keep in touch with her co-workers in Fargo, how to take part in meetings, and how to remain a productive member of the team. And she had to figure out how to economize on telephone, travel, and equipment costs. In the end, she came up with a plan, and she became a pioneer for telecommuting at Great Plains. She was even promoted while telecommuting. Other telecommuters have followed. Janet Lampert is head of sales for the Denver region and moved there when her husband had to take over the family farm.

Sue Schneider's husband was transferred to Phoenix, and she remains a technical analyst working from there.

Joel and Kim Block have different assignments: He manages the relationship between Microsoft and Great Plains on a mutual product; she is the product manager for the next generation of Great Plains' accounting software. Joel Block wanted to get an advanced degree from the University of Montana, so the couple worked out a telecommuting arrangement that allows them to live there.

None of it would have happened without Burgum's support. "I guess the basic driving force behind making the challenge to Lynne was my belief that the employee's knowledge is the most valuable thing for a company like ours--and probably for most businesses," he says.

Although very few companies have the technical expertise and kind of work that lend themselves to as much telecommuting as Great Plains, Doug Burgum and Great Plains are at the cutting edge of telecommuting for smaller companies.

Link Resources, a New York-based research firm that focuses on the impact of emerging technologies on business, has been surveying the field since 1985. It estimates the current number of telecommuters to be 6.6 million, about 5.3 percent of the work force. It projects that to increase to 6.6 percent by 1995.

"Smaller companies have always led in telecommuting adoption," says Thomas E. Miller, a vice president of Link who telecommutes from upstate New York. "Companies under 100 employees comprise 81 percent of telecommuters. Small businesses are flexible and results-oriented, and those are the two linchpins of telework. In a small company, if you don't produce results, the company folds." There are fewer layers of management to go through to set up a telecommuting arrangement, Miller says.

Fred Pilot, an editor for the three-person Smart's Publishing Group, in San Mateo, Calif., found that to be true. "I started at Smart a year ago, then they relocated to San Mateo," south of San Francisco, he says. Pilot lives north of the Golden Gate Bridge. "I started telecommuting one, then two days [a week]. It was my proposal. We're a very small company, and I didn't have to go through a lot of people to get it approved."

The problems of physical commuting and the changing family and work force have now brought greater pressure from employees to substitute phone lines for traffic lanes.

Although salespeople and other field forces have always engaged in a kind of long-distance employment, they were often in effect independent operaters, reporting in occasionally but generally going their own way. Modern telecommuting introduces the computer, modem, and phone line as a substitute for being in the office.

Most telecommuters work at home or a nearby satellite office two or three days a week (although it is growing more common to do so five days a week). The worker reports to a manager just as any employee would, which calls for innovative approaches to management.

Employees like telecommuting, and companies are realizing some major benefits. Gil Gordon, president of Gil Gordon Associates, in Monmouth Junction, N.J., says: "Done right, it offers as many benefits to the employer: First, strategic staffing--the ability to find and keep top-notch people you wouldn't otherwise get. Second, small companies often are shoehorned into small quarters, and telecommuting allows them to stretch their space. A third benefit is greater productivity. Telecommuters do more and better work, with better on-time performance."