Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Home is where the office is: technology improvements have made the home office an effective workplace alternative - Small Business Computing

Technology improvements have made the home office an effective workplace alternative.

Two years ago, James Wilcoxon, owner and CEO of Paddock Swimming Pool Co., in Rockville, Md., began working occasionally in his new home office. Now, he says, "a large percentage of my work gets done at home."

Wilcoxon is one of the growing number of small-business owners who are finding that offices at home for themselves as well as for selected employees can increase productivity while improving their quality of life at little or no cost to their companies. They have learned through experimentation that home offices can be backups or even replacements for offices in traditional business seatings. The home office is gaining wider acceptance largely because the tools that make such arrangements effective-- personal computers and peripherals such as modems, office equipment such as fax machines, and telecommunications devices--are falling in price while posting great gains in speed and efficiency.

Wilcoxon spends one or two workdays a week at his Rockville home running his firm, which specializes in building pools for commercial water parks. "I have no distractions once I close the door," he says.

He planned his home office--a room complete with refrigerator and adjoining bathroom--when he built a new home in 1993. Though he's away from the distractions and interruptions common in a main office, Wilcoxon remains abreast of the latest company order data and can exchange electronic mail with employees as if he were down the hall. He uses an IBM PC/90 desktop computer connected to the firm's computer network via a modem and a standard phone line.

The arrangement has worked so well for him that he has offered the home-office option to key employees at his firm's 50-person main site. At Paddock, as in most companies, white-collar jobs--especially those involving PCs--lend themselves most readily to telecommuting.

More than half of the company's 16 office workers now work at home part of each week. And the dear gains in efficiency and morale have prompted Wilcoxon to lend personal computers to aspiring home-office workers who don't own one.

Avoiding rush-hour commuting one or two days a week can be a major incentive for telecommuters. At Paddock, that commuting benefit, says Wilcoxon, enabled him "to hold on to an employee I didn't want to lose" the woman who designs our pools.

She's recently married, and it's an hour and a half commute from her new home. She had just bought a computer for home, so we agreed that she could work from her home office two days a week. The cost to keep a valued employee? "A capital investment of $150 for a high-speed modem to connect her new home PC to the phone line," says Wilcoxon.

According to Find/SVP, a technology research firm in Ithaca, N.Y., the number of U.S. business people regularly working from home or other remote telecommuting locations will nearly double, to 11 million, by the year 2000. And an increasing proportion of these workers will be employed in small and midsize firms, says Find/SVP.

In some instances, necessity drives the move to telecommuting. For example, when the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake heavily damaged some transportation arteries, many area companies embraced telecommuting just to keep their operations going. And some metropolitan governments encourage telecommuting as a pollution-reduction measure to help meet Clean Air Act requirements.

Until recently, much of the voluntary growth in satellite home offices has stemmed from initiatives in large, high-tech companies. AT&T, for instance, has allowed more than 35,000 of its 250,000 employees to telecommute one or more days a week. But now, motivated by the convenience, flexibility, and efficiency of working at home, owners and managers of smaller businesses are adopting this workplace alternative.

"By the year 2000, companies will be offering telecommuting from home as a standard work option for many job functions," says Judy Rapp Guadagnoli, manager of the telecommuting program for the city and county of Denver--one of the metro areas that use telecommuting as a way to cut pollution.

For small and growing businesses, establishing home offices where some managers or other employees can work a day or two a week--linked to clients and the main office by computers and communications tools--is just one of several alternate-workplace arrangements made practical by today's office technology.

Others include:

* Remote customer-service centers, where employees can handle customer calls at home-based computers, seldom if ever reporting in person to a central office.

* Telework centers and satellite offices, in company locations close to employees' homes, to reduce commuting distances.

* Virtual or mobile offices, which depend on portable computers and communications devices to enable on-the-go personnel to work wherever they might be.

Among these options, the telecommuter's home office is proving to be the least expensive to set up. It usually requires only a small amount of hardware and software and the adoption of office practices in place at the company headquarters, such as working hours and days off, standard forms, and communication procedures.


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