Mobile teleworkers are phoning it in from all over

Allison Baker, a senior program manager at Sun Microsystems, works at a desk as uncluttered as the wide-open prairie. There's nothing on top but two folders with a few papers each. No photos, no knickknacks.

"I'm over that," Baker said. "All the stuff I used to have on my desk: the toys and pictures, the piles of paper I thought I needed."

In fact, Baker -- like about 13,900 of her colleagues at Sun -- doesn't have her own desk anymore. Instead, she participates in Sun's iWork mobile-work program. She works a couple of days a week in Sun's San Francisco office, the rest of the time in its Menlo Park, Santa Clara or Newark offices, depending on where she has meetings.

At each location, she is assigned a temporary workstation and desk. "I'm very location-neutral," she said. She could work at home part-time, but likes to get out of the house.

Sun is on the leading edge when it comes to "telework" -- a coinage that nowadays replaces the term "telecommuting" because it encompasses not just working from home but also working from anywhere: a client's office, a coffee shop, an airport lounge, a commuter train. With cell phones, broadband at home, WiFi, virtual private networks and instant messaging becoming ubiquitous, telework has become easier than ever.

Sun says telework has saved it millions because the company needs less office space and fewer system administrators, but most companies adopt telework for other reasons: increasing employee satisfaction and productivity and planning for disaster recovery.

While Sun and other big tech players such as IBM and Cisco are cited as shining examples of telework, overall, the work-from-anywhere phenomenon hasn't swept through corporate America the way pundits predicted it would a decade ago.

The barriers are social rather than technological. Managers worry that unsupervised employees might goof off. Workers worry that losing face time might hurt their chances for advancement.

Telework statistics vary. The research organization IDC said 8.9 million Americans worked at home for a corporate job at least three days a month in 2004. That's only a minute increase from the 8.7 million people IDC reported as teleworkers in 1999.

ITAC, an organization that promotes telework, said 24.1 million people worked at home during business hours at least one day a month in 2004, up 2.6 percent from 2003. But 16.5 million of those workers were self-employed, meaning that only 7.6 million were telecommuting for a corporate job.

HR consulting firm Hewitt Associates said its survey of 936 large companies (62 percent of them in the Fortune 500) showed that 32 percent of them offered work-at-home or telecommuting arrangements in 2004. That was up slightly from 31 percent in 2003 and 29 percent in 2001.

On the corporate side, less than half of private- and public-sector organizations surveyed by ITAC said that telework was part of their plans for business continuity in the event of a disaster.

Still, many organizations are beginning to see the value of telecommuting.

About 43 percent of Sun's work force participates in iWork, working part-time from home and using Sun's various flexible work centers when they need an office. The company has 115 flexible office locations worldwide. Employees' identity cards have Java encoding. Inserting the card in a workstation instantly sets up a user's personal preferences.

Sun says telework has saved it $255 million over four years -- $68.9 million alone in fiscal year 2005 -- by downsizing its office real estate, eliminating 7,700 seats. It saves an additional $24 million a year by cutting back on system administrators, paying less for electricity and not having to upgrade computers.

Obviously, telework isn't suitable for all types of jobs. Sun, like many companies with well-developed telework programs, has a comprehensive survey for employees to determine whether working from different locations is suitable for them and how often telework would be appropriate.

Proponents consistently say people get more work done at home, contrary to some managers' fears. Besides having fewer interruptions, telecommuters produce more because they appreciate the perk and want to keep it.

"Individuals who've been allowed to work from home are typically as productive if not more so than they were in the office," said Carol Sladek, a work-life consultant with Hewitt Associates.

That belies the image some middle managers have.

"There is some concern (that employees are) sitting at home with their feet up in front of the television when they should be working," said Merle Sandler, senior research analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass. To combat that, companies with formal telework programs find ways to measure productivity.

"Good organizations put into place performance requirements. They have a process in which managers can set performance goals and properly evaluate whether those goals are met," said Robert Smith, director of ITAC, the telework advisory group. "If you have that in place, you'll have a more effective organization, whether an employee is 10 feet or 10 miles away."

The reality at many companies is that telecommuting happens unofficially.

"I call them guerrilla distributed workers," said Charles Grantham, executive producer of Work Design Collaborative, a think tank that studies management of technology, human resources and physical facilities. "Human-resource policies and programs have not caught up with the realities of today's workplace."

Sun, which first tried out its iWork program 10 years ago, said one initial motivation was to spur the mobile Sun employees to spend more time in the field with customers and partners. Besides the cost savings, another benefit turned out to be that employees liked the flexibility of choosing when, where and how they work.

"It gives Sun an advantage in attracting the people we want to work here," said David Rush, a spokesman for the iWork division.

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