• Halfway House For Telecommuters
Posted by Tom Harnish on June 7th, 2008
A halfway house for telecommuters, a distributed workplace alternative, has been proposed by Michael Shear. The idea is shared satellite office space with full technology infrastructure and tech support for road-warriors, freelancers, and corporate telecommuters.
I don’t disagree with the usefulness of central facilities, after all, freelances and road-warriors are creating their own ad-hoc places to gather already in basements and coffee-shops. But it’s not clear to me why what he’s proposing is any better than any other satellite office, except that they’re a shared facility and they’re planning to put them outside the ring of fire. I’d be interested in what you think.
It seems to me the shortcomings of home-based offices can be overcome, and the advantages maintained, with creative approaches. Both employees and employers are embracing the idea. Eighty-four of the Fortune 100 Best Companies To Work For 2008 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%
And some companies have used the telecommuting model from their inception. The ±265 people who answer the phones for JetBlue Airlines work from home in locations all over the country, and they have from day one. Interestingly, they have the lowest turnover of any “call center” in the country. They did have a problem with one operator, and almost had to let her go because her cow lowing cracked up callers and slowed down the call handling rate. But they mooved the cow’s pen, and solved the problem.
And there’s mySQL, the venture-funded company that’s behind one of the world’s most popular open source databases. Six million users, and forty thousand downloads a day. The three founders were in Finland, UK, and US. First 10 employees were in 7 countries. Today, ten years later, they have employees in 26 countries and on every continent except Antarctica.
Tom Friedman hit the nail on the head, seems to me, when he wrote about a coming shift to a medieval guild-like relationship among workers. Problem is, people already are working without anything like the guild’s organizational support. More than tech support and bigger data pipes, they need the mentoring that master craftsman offered, the quality control and insurance and retirement and legal and collective bargaining power they provided.
Seems to me social developments always lag technology. That’s the catalyst for change that we need. Managers that cling to a sweatshop mentality need educational intervention. Employees that feel isolated need virtual groups to join, such as the companies that go to Second Life for concerts and webinars, and company teams that play World of Warcraft together.
Technology is the enabler, no doubt about it. And we’re woefully behind the curve when it comes to implementing broadband and public wifi. But that’s a social and political issue, too, not a technological,one.
Japan has gigabit consumer broadband—that’s 1000 megabits per seconds folks. How come we don’t? Aside from the fact that phone and cable4 companies seem to have the FCC in their pocket, that is.
June 9th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Tom,
Actually the proposal is for dedicated not shared use offices assigned to major employers hiring from specific geographic areas. The centers are multiple satellite offices networked with secure infrastructure. These are not drop in centers for the most part but enterprise solutions. The economies of scale are derived by having multiple dedicated office suites with each enterprise office supporting 15 to 50 local employees. The dedicated network is engineered to support virtual presence technologies among each tenant’s work groups. Each facility has on site technical support and establishes a high level of security. I hope this provides a better understanding and clarifies the difference.
Best regards,
Michael Shear
June 9th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Yup, that’s what I thought you meant, Michael. By shared I meant several companies under one roof, as you do.
I’m intrigued by the idea, but still puzzled why the same level of support and security, the same kind of infrastructure can’t be provided on a one-to-one basis instead of for groups.
And I don’t mean I’m puzzled in an argumentative way. I mean it in a purely technical sense. Why can’t, for example, a Citrix suite of appliances do the same thing?