Working from home, why not?

By Maya Kartika

JAKARTA (JP): It's 6 a.m. in Depok, a growing suburb 25 kilometers south of Jakarta.

Pipit, an employee in the busy central business district of the capital, begins her routine: driving to her office in the heavy morning traffic.

She has to face the same tiring, but unavoidable episode later in the afternoon on her way back home, together with the thousands of commuters and people working in the capital.

On average, Pipit spends three and a half hours on the road to reach her office every day.

She usually arrives home at 9 p.m. And, she is already too tired to play with her one-and-a-half-year-old son. Worst still, at this time, her husband is still not back from work yet.

For many IT savvy, Pipit's rather bleak episode shouldn't occur if her company had embraced the concept of telecommuting.

Traditionally, work links us to a physical location.

But rapid advances in information technology and telecommunications now enable work to be independent of location.

The concept of a single assigned place to work is, for the majority of office workers, obsolete. It is costly, ineffective, and no longer matches the needs and desires of today's workforce.

The office becomes so central to people's lives that most of us are ready to dedicate all our quality time to it. In light of the increasing awareness of a balanced lifestyle, is it really necessary for workers to spend so much time commuting to and being in the office?

It is in this context that the telecommuting concept has emerged as an alternative working arrangement.

In this regard, telecommuting has become an important part of the way 21st century employers get their work done, meet customer demands, and attract and retain top-quality workers.

Is it a panacea that works for everyone, everywhere? Of course not.

It's a work option that is being used by savvy employers who want to take advantage of today's technology to bring out the best in today's workforce, and who want to escape the costs and burdens of yesterday's office infrastructure.

Telecommuting has also gained popularity because it better meets both business and employee needs, attracts and retains a diverse and talented workforce, improves productivity for certain jobs or persons, and reduces real estate cost.

But don't be bought into this idea blindly, because while telecommuting offers broad benefits, not all employers will have the kind of business problems for which telecommuting is an appropriate solution.

Here, we should remember that telecommuting isn't appropriate for every job. Some job activities don't lend themselves to telecommuting.

Organizations need to analyze the job activity, not the job title to determine suitability to telecommuting.

The key is to find jobs with at least a portion of the work that can be done away from the office -- taking advantage of technology to get away from the distractions and interruptions in the typical office.

Even hands-on jobs such as firefighting can benefit from telecommuting.

For example, a fire chief in Fairfax County, Virginia, identified report writing as one of his main activities, clearly a task that doesn't have to be done at the firehouse. When he began telecommuting from his home to office, he could increase his productivity by more than 20 percent and produce more accurate reports.

To start the telecommuting program, a company needs to at least take these two key steps.

First, conducting a telecommuting pilot, and second, selecting the right telecommuters. There are two schools of thought on a telecommuting pilot. One, is to prove or disprove that telecommuting is a viable work option. The other, to do a trial run to see if the current telecommuting policy and guidelines are adequate to support a rollout to a larger number of telecommuters.

Telecommuting may not be a viable work option for some employees. A pilot telecommuting program should facilitate two- way, ongoing communication about policy and guidelines.

It should also learn from the small-scale implementation what to avoid in a large-scale telecommuting roll-out. Some individual telecommuters may not be the right employees for the program. This learning should then be incorporated into the large-scale rollout strategy.

The second step is to choose the right telecommuters.

Here, many organizations struggle with, "Who is the right candidate for telecommuting?"

It is usually at this point that an elaborate set of criteria is developed and the flexibility of telecommuting is immediately in danger. Gathering a task force to brainstorm on critical questions potential telecommuters need to answer may be a more flexible approach.

The telecommuters should have a list of questions to answer, to justify why he/she is the candidate of choice. The employee will come up with the answers as a base and then managers can begin negotiations with the telecommuting candidates of choice.

Everyone can answer the questions, but only the best candidates get the telecommuting positions, based on the questions answered.

For some companies in Indonesia, telecommuting might be a novel concept but one that is still very distant to be applied.

Yet, advancement in technology may propel the rapid adoption of telecommuting. More importantly, telecommuting has proven to be a potential factor in improving productivity, reducing real estate costs and diminishing transportation burdens.

The last reason is particularly compelling as the adoption of telecommuting by a great number of employers may significantly reduce transportation problems, thereby minimizing traffic jams and contributing to the effort of creating blue skies for Jakarta .

And yes, Pipit does not need to be stuck in the middle of a traffic jam again and again.

The writer is a manager at Arthur Andersen.