No commute
State pushes teleworking to reduce costs and clear traffic congestion

by Christina Couch
for Virginia Business
April 2007

Pam Brant hops out of bed, gets her kids ready for school and throws in a load of laundry. By 8 a.m., she hasn’t showered and is still in her pajamas.

That’s because she doesn’t have to get on the road, fight traffic and make it to the office. She’s already there.

Brant, a security analyst for the high-tech solutions firm Telos Corp. of Ashburn, teleworks from home once a week — a welcome reprieve from her 40-minute commute the other four days of the workweek. “I have a 22-month-old and teleworking has helped me keep her at home,” says Brant. “Working from home is a hard day, but I know for my family, it has been beneficial for us as far as daycare.”

Brant is part of a statewide initiative to get employees off the road and into home-based offices. Designed to reduce costs for the government, businesses and employees in one fell swoop, teleworking policies are springing up on both the state and local levels across Virginia, as well as being pushed on a federal level nationwide.

“The telecommuting initiatives emerged as a key strategy in our overall [traffic] congestion management plan,” says Aneesh Chopra, Virginia’s secretary of technology, who oversees the new Office of Telework Promotion and Broadband Assistance created by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine. “Our goal is to get 20 percent of the eligible federal work force to telecommute at least one day per week by the end of the Kaine administration.”

The benefits of having a statewide teleworking policy extend far beyond Virginia’s highways, says Chopra. If implemented effectively, teleworking programs can help reduce the state’s unemployment rate (particularly in rural areas where place-based positions are limited), lower pollution levels and keep Virginia businesses operational in case of disaster at the firm’s central location. On a fiscal level, a well-run teleworking program boils down to one thing — savings — both in terms of office space rental and reduced recruitment costs.

“[Our teleworking policies] help us bring in good-quality employees and for our existing staff, we’re finding that we’re getting better productivity,” says Janie E. Bowen, tax commissioner for Virginia.

The Virginia Department of Taxation is itself a testament to how much the state can save. With nearly 25 percent of all eligible employees teleworking on a full-time basis, the tax department has been able to shut down eight district offices.

“We calculated it over the long term. It was less expensive to provide our home-based auditors with broadband access than to keep our district offices open,” says Bowen, who hopes to expand the teleworking program by at least 100 more employees by spring. “It’s a benefit for us, and it’s a benefit for employees, so it just seems like a no-brainer to just keep forging ahead.”
The key to moving forward with an effec­t­ive teleworking policy is planning, says Rita Mace Walston, executive director of the Telework Consortium, a Leesburg-based nonprofit agency that helps organizations implement remote working programs. Businesses must first examine their departments’ operations and whether employees require access to office-bound information or equipment five days a week. Once determining which positions and departments make a good fit for teleworking, company managers must assess how ready a firm is to send workers home for the day, and then implement a pilot teleworking program.

“The four stakeholders that we look at are HR, management, IT and the workers themselves,” says Walston. “HR should have telework policies in place, [policies] that address how this is going to work from an HR point of view. IT needs to have network security in place. For example, are there laptops available? Do teleworkers have access to broadband? Managers need to be ready to manage by performance rather than ‘I see you; therefore you’re working.’ And on the workers’ side, you need to make sure that there are plans in place to maintain team camaraderie.”

Because an accurate telework assessment is so multi-layered, Walston recommends businesses bring in an outside organization to objectively examine their preparedness for teleworking. Business owners can expect to pay anywhere from $10,000 to $15,000 for the assessment alone, in addition to other potential telework startup costs including computer or security upgrades, collaborative software additions, broadband reimbursement fees for employees and training for telework managers.

Loudoun County — one of the few local governments in Virginia set to reach Kaine’s 20 percent goal by the end of this year — paid an estimated $73,000 for its remote work program, according to Diane O’Grady, the county’s telework coordinator. The bright side, says O’Grady, is that these initial costs are slowly being offset by savings in other areas, specifically in reduced rental costs, fewer absences, lower turnover rates and improved productivity.

We’re starting to see the savings in pockets,” notes O’Grady. “We now have 18 positions that are sharing eight desk spots. It’s allowed us to have growth in employees but not have to rent additional space.”

Cost isn’t the only concern among telework critics. Working away from a manager’s watchful eye presents a test for both employee and employer. “Staying focused is a challenge,” admits Brant at Telework. “You have to be diligent. For me, I want to make sure that I’m getting what I have to get done, so it’s never a problem. I am thankful for this opportunity.”

Decreased productivity can be a threat, warns Chopra, making it essential to choose employees who have both jobs and work ethics conducive to home-based work. Managers also need to be trained to look for measurable performance, rather than hours logged in. “You can’t just uniformly announce that everyone will be telecommuting tomorrow,” he says. “You need an approach that runs agency by agency to drive this initiative forward.”

Chopra points out that an effective teleworking policy can actually increase productivity. The Telework Coalition reports that since introducing telework policies, The Dow Chemical Co., a Midland, Mich.-based chemical supplier, has increased productivity by 32.5 percent overall. Among teleworking employees at the Maryland Department of Transportation, productivity increased by 27 percent.

John Wood, CEO of Telos Corp., reports that since investing more than $100,000 in his telework program (which allows more than one-fifth of the company to work from home once a week and provides BlackBerrys for those who take the off-site option), he’s seen dramatic changes, not only in how much is getting done, but also in how well it’s getting done. “We’ve invested money, but we have seen significant results on our responsiveness whether they’re internal or external issues and that means improved customer satisfaction,” says Wood. “The bottom line is, our people are more effective.”