Seeing the Forest for the Trees: A Rare (But Necessary) Personal Post

This is not an article I had slated to write or post today, but I feel that something I just experienced is powerful in its own right and worth sharing. It should be shared because all of us--no matter what line of work we’re in, what causes we choose to align ourselves with, or how we feel connected and disconnected with different communities of thinkers—all of us require a sense of community and commonality.

Technology makes these things possible in a way that, even with its commonplace, routine function in our daily lives, is nonetheless glorious, awe-inspiring, unifying.

Granted, these same kinds of communal experiences can happen face-to-face, but not on the dramatic scale and certainly not across the same distances. Whether it’s through brief, intermittent tweets or long, drawn-out emails over the course of successive days, we can connect with communities or create our own spontaneously—almost instantly, in some cases. Sometimes I am overwhelmed with an unspeakably complex, abstract realization of where and how I live in the context of vast, humming, constant networks of electricity and human response—of the sense that where I am in history is remarkable beyond words.

These are big thoughts I am thinking today as I write. But I should backtrack. Otherwise you’ll start thinking I’m the type to light some incense and bathe in the glow of my laptop screen while I sing kum-ba-yah.

Today I was rather caught off guard following a phone call from another advocate of remote work—this time, one who has been involved in information and communications technologies before ICT was even a recognizable acronym. And, for that matter, someone who was already a telecommunications expert by the time I was born in 1977. I had been expecting to have a chat with him today but certainly did not expect him, being busy with his own numerous projects, to take much time to talk with me or to be willing to diverge off the scheduled set of circumstances that precipitated the call in the first place.

Before our conversation, I sat in front the computer and typed out a loose set of questions I planned on asking and also had some notes about relatively small matters that I wanted to discuss. As our nearly 45-minute discussion came to a close, however, I realized I had not even touched on one-quarter of what I’d been planning to because instead of the specifics, much of the conversation revolved around the bigger picture, the way forward, the sharing of information through remote and local collaboration. The forest for the trees.

Our conversation lasted for close to an hour and afterwards, I found myself staring blankly ahead as the realization of the power of inspiration through shared mission hit.

Because of that one conversation, I come back now to RemoteRevolution with a better sense of where I am going with this project. I know that my mission is to discuss, in an informed and objective way, the potential benefits of what I consider to be an inevitable shift toward alternative and the associated new ways of working and living that will organically rise.

A problem I’ve been having thus far is presenting all of the information I have and want to share. I want to do it all right away but, you see, the topic of the Remote Revolution is not one-sided. It’s duplicitous, paradoxical, full of gaps, holes, speculation, and wonderful shining points of light. There are far too many things to cover when you’re talking about what can happen to our society when this shift occurs and there are also too many things that are happening right now that I cannot keep up with.

I am deeply committed to what I am doing here. I have some loyal readers, even at this early stage, and it those readers who keep me doing this. I realized today, however, it’s not just because someone is reading, it’s because someone is becoming part of a community—a community in the micro sense as this blog can be seen as one, but also in the greater sense. By keeping up with this project, offering as much information as I can (without going broke—this takes a lot of time in writing, research, follow-ups, etc.) and continuing with the effort, this small community becomes part of a larger one. And communities are the best vehicles to spearhead change.

Power in numbers. Power in words. Power in communities. These are things I believe in. I believe in them as independent concepts and as a collection of interdependent forces.

There is something on the horizon. We will look back in 25 years and see so many things, especially related to the way we understand work and career, that will seem so outmoded, so unnecessary, so harmful to an earth that may be in even worse shape than it is now at that point in the future—unless we start doing something. Now.

Official Statement from U.S. Office of Personnel Management Puts the "Giddy-Yap" Back in Telework

If there’s one thing I love on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, it’s a press release from the federal government where an official recounts how he hopes to add some “giddy-yap” to a policy initiative. I like these releases even better when that giddy-yapping is put behind an expanded super-power effort to rev up telework at the federal level.

During a much-anticipated discussion today in Washington, which is the subject of this press release, the head of the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) mounted his steed and declared a full-on “high-ho, silver” to kick off the assault on a telecommuting plan that has hitherto been lackluster—at least in terms of the initial expectations about the number of federal employees who would be able to telecommute and what kinds of data would be kept to monitor progress.

Although he was just recently appointed by the Obama administration to head the OPM (he came from a director position at the National Zoo—what an easy shift into managing people who also have been confined in cubicles, no?) the new head of Personnel Management, John Berry has finally provided some substance to the government’s claims that they will soon become the model for state and local governments as well as for private business nationwide.

I hate to admit this, but part of me was expecting another vague, generalized, yet still grandiose set of statements to go along with several others that have come from the federal government in response to increased attention on their ambitious teleworking program. These statements offer the “duh” side of the argument in favor of telecommuting but little in the way of direct calls to action. However, this release certainly did contain some “giddy-yap” of a very specific nature, which was a pleasant break that offers some sound sense of direction for what’s coming.

Here are some select issues the address brought up today—specific ones, finally.

* My favorite one so far – “encourage each agency to establish the position of Telework Managing Officer who would ensure that telework policies are applied fairly and supported by agency managers.” I am going to stifle my cry of, “you mean you didn’t have someone like this already in each agency?”

Putting together an “advisory group” of interagency teleworking managers and coordinators so there can be some collaboration and idea-sharing that takes what one agency learns and (hopefully) carries it over to another.

Offering reviews of all telework policies before they go into effect, presumably done via the advisory group already set up. Following this, the OPM would assist with the practical matters of implementing and maintaining these new, revised, or restructured policies.

Extending telework training to managers with “broadly accessible training to remove managerial resistance to having staff work out of sight and to ensure managers and employees alike are trained and prepared to use telework successfully” (Well, hallelujah! It’s about time someone started seeing the issue of managerial resistance to telecommuting as one of the biggest stumbling blocks in a public kind of way!)

These issues at the federal level are important for us to pay keen attention to because the federal government does actually seem committed to their goal of becoming a model for teleworking policies as they move off the mall and onto Main Street. By keeping a close eye on these developments, we can carefully monitor (since they’re not always the best about it)

I know you can look for yourself at the release, but I also found these interagency telecommuting statistics for the government interesting. Where have these been hiding?

Today’s press release had some important data tacked on the bottom about OPM employees:

• 807 employees had telework agreements with their managers in 2008, up from 774 in 2007

• 177 of the teleworking employees worked from home 3 days per week in 2008, down from 328 who worked from home 3 days per week in 2007

• telework has been integrated into the agency's COOP Plans 

So, giddy-yap OPM! There's a new sherriff in town!

And after eight years of the past administration's real live cowboy talk, the down-home irony of the "giddy-yap" is charming. I used to be seized with unspeakable dread when leaders talked like cattle ranchers.

Why the Federal Government Will Not Be America's Next Top Model. For Telecommuting. Yet.

When the Obama administration announced plans to make telecommuting a priority and declared that the government would seek to become the model (or supermodel) for successful teleworking programs, I was postively giddy. 

However, it's hard to determine a supermodel without effective criteria to go by, therefore one can fairly suggest, via crass metaphor, that as a model, the fed is coming up a little short. It has the height, the confidence, the class, but its catwalk skills are a little iffy.

The potential for a pandemic looms again in the minds of many Americans and once again, there are a fresh round of news stories and press releases about organizations beginning to think seriously about telecommuting for the sake of emergency preparedness.

In a post about emergency preparedness and telecommuting earlier this week that came in the wake of the initial panic over Swine Flu, I discussed how companies cannot wait until people are already ill (or for that matter, to take it out of the swine flu context--or already facing dangerous weather) and need to get policies in place now so they can be monitored and tested for success or failure. 

I talked about how the federal government, in its effort to become America’s Next Top Model of Telecommuting, has taken steps, if only for the sake of emergency preparedness in the wake of dramatic events or even for dangerous driving conditions.

According to the interagency federal telecommuting website that offers reports based on each year of information it gathers from various agencies within the government, telecommuting is seen as an overall beneficial practice, but they have yet to develop any monitoring program to evaluate real success.  In other words, they have a sound set of telecommuting policies in place but few ways to monitor and report on the effectiveness.

Wait a minute—the federal government is not monitoring something? This strikes me as odd and a little out of character…

In order to truly be crowned the top model for companies seeking to implement teleworking solutions, it is imperative that they pump more research and energy into coming up some firm numbers to back up their claims about the multi-agency success.

According to their annual report on telework from 2008 (which looks back over the previous year), the government states that even though they have seen general benefits from a shift to telework whenever it’s possible for a specific agency, “few agencies are actually measuring outcomes for their telework programs” (Telework.gov, 2008). Those who have instituted some form of measurement claim that there was improved morale (32 percent), human capital (recruitment/retention, etc at 29%) and a tie in productivity/performance and transportation (27 percent)” (Telework.gov, 2008).

Those are some rather low reporting numbers there, wouldn’t you say? I just cannot seem to understand why, with all of the publicity and attention on this subject the federal government, out of all organizations, cannot seem to offer something more concrete. Especially since they wish to pave the way for companies who are going to be looking hard for some valid, verified and strong numbers.

While I certainly applaud the federal governments push to increase the number of telecommuting employees, out of all organizations, this is certainly one that should be keeping far better track of how the program is working, especially since they have admirable goal (albeit lofty—considering a lack of overall organization as an institution) of having 50 percent of those working in the General Services Administration teleworking by 2010. I’m sure that sounded like a long way off when they devised that goal a few years ago but 2010 is right around the corner and without solid measurements, it might end up a bit of a disaster when they finally try to mitigate any issues.

As it stands, there are a number of privately-held companies (see the case study of Hewlett-Packard and their telecommuting program here at RemoteRevolution) that might not be doing things on quite such a grand scale but who are doing one hell of a lot of research about the true effectiveness of their teleworking programs.

I understand that reporting and assessing data on telecommuting is incredibly difficult, I do recognize this and have discussed the problem of telecommuting statistics here (and will continue to do so based on organization-specific issues) but really, federal government, if you’re striving to become America’s Next Top Model (for telecommuting success, it’s high time you leave the self-reported data streams and halfway assessment efforts aside and show some real numbers—some real proof –of the reported success of this program.

I believe you can win the crown, feds. You just gotta work it a little harder.

Perceived Legal Barriers to Telecommuting - Part II of Interview with Law Scholar Ross Runkel

If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to read the first part of a discussion with employment law scholar and founder of LawMemo.com, Ross Runkel, about some of the most frequently-cited legal barriers some employers anticipate before implementing telecommuting programs.

In that post, there is a discussion about the initial motivation behind having such a chat in the first place as well as some clear, insightful answers from Ross Runkel about the true nature of these perceived barriers. In general, we come to the conclusion that employers should be far more worried about organization-specific issues such as trust long before they ponder the fairly routine legal process behind allowing telecommuting.

The first part of our discussion contains some practical advice from Ross Runkel about wage and hour concerns under the Fair Labor Standards Act, provides some commentary about privacy issues, and talks about how employee agreements should be essentially the same for on-site and off-site workers. In essence, as the interview reveals, there are few barriers to telecommuting from a legal perspective but again, none of these barriers matter if you don’t trust your employees enough in the first place.

The second and final half of our discussion today discusses OSHA (for non-Americans, this involves standards set forth by  the Occupational Safety and Health Administration), inspections for telecommuting employees (and the privacy and other issues that topic invokes) as well as zoning laws, how companies deal with the shift, and most importantly, what first steps a company should take when implementing a telecommuting program…. And guess what? Those first steps are not necessarily legal—back we go again to the trust and workplace culture topics…

Select portions the interview transcript:

N. - Employers worry about OSHA standards and how these will change or be harder to keep up with in a remote site. What do employers have to worry about and what about employees as well?

R.R.-  The reason OSHA does not bother to inspect homes where people are telecommuting is the nature of the work. Typically a person is working with a computer, a telephone—typically they’re not working with dangerous equipment, toxic chemicals, so the reason for looking there just doesn’t exist.

When employees are in a different situation and are assembling dangerous materials, using dangerous chemicals, that sort of thing, I’m sure OSHA would be very interested in inspecting, but as it stands, there is no reason for them to mandate inspections. They’re just not necessary.

What we need to realize is that once you move off-site, you’re still working for the same employer; the same standards need to be applied so if ergonomics, certain kinds of chairs, certain elements of the working environment are present on-site, they should be off-site as well.

N. - Another persistent question about legal barriers to telecommuting I’ve heard relates to zoning laws. I know this is not your specialty or area of focus, but do you think these are valid concerns?

R.R. - I’ve heard the same thing and what’s happened is—and zoning laws are peculiarly local—the city, the county—they’re the ones in charge of the zoning laws and so there are hundreds of thousands of different zoning laws across the country. But some cities and counties are requiring in their zoning laws that you have to have a permit in order to have a home office, which goes way back to when you had to have a permit if that was your only office—if you’re a hair stylist, an accountant, or lawyer and you’re working out of your home—most cities already require that you have a permit. They’re just extending that to the individual employee.

Typically a zoning law would apply to the location where the home is, so it would be as between the city and the company and the employee—I think that would be an arrangement between the employee and city. The employer might want to finance the permit, pay for it, help with it, but I think the actual responsibility is for the person that owns the land.

But if you want your employees to telecommute, you cooperate with these things. It’s a small matter, a small expense…

N- What are the realistic first steps a company should take from a legal standpoint? Is it difficult legally to implement telework?

R.R. - No, it’s difficult at all and there are two lines you have to go down. One is the legal end, typically that can be handled by simply imposing the same rules for the home as at the factory. The other end is personnel policy and trust.

Of course, there are also some serious questions about proprietary information, customer lists, trade secrets, confidentiality,

The concern will be everything from the employee has the information on a laptop, what if they leave it at the coffeeshop? And we’ve seen that happen—people have stolen laptops with credit card information, top secret government information, all sorts of things. Well, of course ,that can happen whether the employee is working from home or not.

If a person is home working 8 hours a day with their computer open, there are passwords that are used to gain access to the company computer, many come in straight on a connection and there could be someone who sits down at the open computer, gets the passwords, etc. Those are the security risks.

Quite simply, employers should have confidentiality agreements that apply for both on-site and off-site workers.

Then the next step is identifying whether there are peculiar problems with the offsite location? The employee needs to agree not to leave the computer open, needs to agree to frequently change the password, those kind of things. And another thing an employer can do is change the security arrangement so that the on-site computer can access what thye need to know but cannot access other information.

N. - What about the Americans with Disabilities Act and the idea that someone might have the right to telecommute?

R.R. - There are some employees who because of their individual needs are going to much more productive if they can work from home. People who have some disability, childcare or eldercare responsibilities, or any of a number of other reasons why it’s difficult for them to drive in, stay for 8 or 9 hours and then drive back. I mean, if I had a third-grader who I knew was at school until 2:30, I would want to be home then and I think I would be more productive that way—and save a little gas.

There are cases where people have claimed they had a right to telecommute because of their disability. Typically the way that goes down, you look at how much being present at the site is an essential function of the job. Also, there’s the question of an employer who’s never allowed telecommuting and they’re being asked to change that policy.

I think an employer can succeed simply by saying that being supervised is an essential function of the job and that’s the only way the job would work. However, if I start telling some employees they can telecommute but tell a disabled employee no, then certainly this is a problem.

N.- Aside from trust issues and the others we’ve identified, what are the very first things employers should do?

R.R. - The first thing is to make sure that whatever employment policies exist on site are the same off-site, especially in terms of hours and wages and who gets to do it so you don’t have a situation where, for example, the boys can do it and the girls can’t. You should have a uniform policy, something you should have anyway.

Make sure worker’s comp agency knows I’m doing this, make sure there’s some different way to record hours, which for me, I use a log where people log in with pencil and paper and that solution works.

Trust is key. If you don’t trust your employees, maybe you should visit your whole business plan.

Trust they’re not going to have a dangerous office, that they’re going to do their work, put in their time, take breaks, report if they’re injured on the job—all things they would have to if they were on-site. Otherwise, you’d have to send out a supervisor, which kind of defeats the purpose of the whole thing in the first place.

I would also notify my insurance company who covers me for liability and make it clear or not if liability is covered at the home office or not.

I would say the legal barriers to telecommuting are extraordinarily small. The personnel policy questions are important. It’s important to have a clear understanding about what the employee will be doing, where she’ll be doing it, when she’ll be doing it—it’s important to be sure the relevant insurance companies are brought in so we’re sure the worker’s comp is going to be covered.

N. - Any closing thoughts—things you might want resistant employers to consider about the topics we’ve addressed?

R.R. - If an employer’s bringing out a new product they’ll focus all of their energy on brining out a new product, it’s the same thing with telecommuting. If they want it to happen, they’ll do whatever it takes to make it happen. If they don’t want to make it happen, they’ll think of all sorts of roadblocks and it won’t happen.

End of transcript.

I would like to thank Ross Runkel for taking time to speak about this issue and to provide this kind of useful information to the public. If you are a legal buff looking for more information on employment law and other legal issues, including court rulings, I encourage you to visit LawMemo.com. You will also be able to find Ross Runkel’s full biography in addition to the wealth of other materials for the legally-minded and curious alike.

Questions, comments, reactions?

Perceived Legal Barriers to Telecommuting - Part I of Interview with Law Scholar Ross Runkel

This past Friday, I had a long chat with Ross Runkel, Professor of Law Emeritus at Willamette University College of Law and specialist in employment law. He is the founder of LawMemo.com and has extensive experience as an arbitrator and advisor on legal employment issues ranging from employment discrimination, labor law, and labor-related arbitration. Given his track record, distinctions, and experiences, I was honored to have the opportunity to talk with him as he was able to provide clear, pertinent insights about the intersections between employers, rights, responsibilities, and the law.

The purpose of our interview was to discuss the legal barriers many employers think exist between them and sound telecommuting arrangements. What was most interesting, however, is that we came to the conclusion that the legal barriers are incredibly small and are far outweighed by larger, more complex issues such as the level of employee/employer trust and general matters of simple personnel policy.

Much of this interview is offered in select transcript format as we spoke over the phone via recorded call, but before I post parts of it, there are a few things I would like to say about what sparked a desire to speak with someone to help clarify what the legal problems for employers are when shifting to telecommuting.

Preliminary Notes

When I first began doing research about the slow adoption of telecommuting as broad policy for many organizations who would be prime candidates to see success with such policies, I often met with resistance from company leaders and a fair number excuses and reasons about why it just wasn’t possible. Some of the most frequent reasons given for not using technology to allow remote work were not supported by research (productivity, cost and savings issues, for example) and some that smacked more of a distinct fear of change rather than concrete reasons. Perhaps it was some combination of both when employers would tell me that the legal barriers to permitting telecommuting were too high—that they did not have the legal capacity to allow their employees to leave the traditional worksite.

At the time, I figured there must have been something I missed—after all, there were relatively few times legal matters were ever mentioned in the context of telecommuting. There were legal agreements about privacy, confidentiality, trade secrets and the like, but chances are, these were rules most employers had in place to begin with and employees had read over and signed when they began working for the company.

Every once in a while I would encounter notes about wage and hours concerns and how the lack of on-site monitoring might permit violations of these requirements (as set forth in the Fair Labor Standards Act, for instance) but there appeared to be very few legal barriers preventing employers from adopting remote work arrangements. Worker’s compensation, insurance, these were all things to consider, but as Ross Runkel informs us in the interview, these are minor issues and do not vary much between the standards that already should apply to on-site workers.

Although I had been expecting to delve into legal specifics during my interview with Ross Runkel, as our conversation progressed and we began talking about the telecommuting-based legal barriers many employers seem to think exist, our chat tended to discuss issues of trust more than the law. And it makes perfect sense.

For today’s post, I will be providing some of the transcripts as they relate to the most frequently-asked questions about what many companies perceive as the biggest legal barriers to telecommuting. These include wage and hour concerns, teleworking agreements, monitoring and tracking, and privacy issues for the employees. Tomorrow's post will deal with other specific telecommuting legal issues for employers to consider, but for now, this provides more than enough fodder for questions, thought, and debate.

Part I of Interview Transcript

N. - What do you consider to be the most pressing issues related to the wage and hour concerns for telecommuting employees, especially in the context of the Fair Labor Standards Act?

I see a couple of possible problems, but the main thing I want to say about workers off-site is simply that the same rules that are going to apply to them off-site are the same ones that will apply to workers that are on site….How many hours they work in a day, how many hours they work in a week.. These things need to be made clear; how many hours they’re expected to work and how many hours they’re allowed to work. 

The problem is that an employee off-site doesn’t have a supervisor looking over her shoulder and so the employer needs to be pretty upfront with that employee about what the expectations are.

N. - Can a teleworking contact lay out these things clearly?

R.R. - I would not actually call that a contract, and maybe this is too technical, but I would refer to it as an agreement—and it would be the same agreement that would apply to any employee, whether he or she was on-site or off-site. Perhaps there are starting hours, there are ending hours, mandatory breaks, mandatory work-free lunch periods…

Employers always have to deal with the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and whatever state labor requirements there are. And that varies quite a bit—some states require a certain number of minutes for a break in the morning and then the same thing in the afternoon, so much time for a work-free lunch break.

The agreement with an off-site employee should track the same kind of elements in the agreement with an on-site employee.

N. - It can be difficult to monitor these hours for some employers without having a tracking system or monitoring devices. What about privacy issues when enforcing these mandated hours? Is that a concern?

R.R. - I have employees and they are all allowed to telecommute and we simply do not have these problems (laughs). I trust them, they trust me and it works out well.

The trust is important. Even with an employee who’s working on-site. There’s not always someone here to supervise what they’re doing constantly so we simply have to trust them to do what they’re arrangement is. What time they come to work, how long they work, if they take breaks—there’s not always someone there to monitor them on-site and this certainly isn’t the case off-site, so we simply have to trust one another.

But your question had to do with privacy. But if an employer is interested in monitoring an employee’s hours and exactly what they’re doing, it would seem to me that an employee who works from home has given up any expectations for privacy. So if an employer is normally monitoring the on-site location, the same should and can be true off-site.

N. - Would it be legally permissible for an employer to take this to an extreme and show up at an employee’s house to check on productivity, adherence to standards and guidelines, and to see that the remote office was in good order?

R.R. Yes, if you’re asking a legal question—is that legal? Yes, of course it’s legal, but we always have to separate what is lawful from what is good personnel policy. I don’t think I want to show up at my employee’s home unannounced because that would break the trust that we have. If I need to look at their home for, let’s say, safety reasons to make sure they have a safe environment, I can call them up and say, “can I to come over and check things out,” but it’s more a matter of how you get along with employees as much as it is what the policy is, what the law is.

* This concludes this first half of the interview. I put his quote about the separating of what is legal with what makes sound personnel policy as it defines our discussion. It seemed that nearly every issue we discussed--every perceived "legal" problem with telecommuting does simply boil down to employer/employee trust. 

Remote Possibilities – Telecommuting, Emergency Preparedness, and the Contingency Call

Although it has not hit crisis status, despite the relatively routine designation by the CDC as a public health emergency, the arrival of swine flu provides a time-appropriate window to discuss the role of telecommuting in the event of a public (or for that matter, company-specific) emergency.

I agree that it's a bit far-fetched at this point, what if this virus hit pandemic-panic stage and schools and most non-essential places of business were temporarily closed? As a business owner, would you have a contingency plan that would allow full or partial productivity to occur? As an employee, would this mean going back to the office to find a war zone because of the piles that have accumulated? Would everything fall apart if normal operations ceased unexpectedly?

Emergencies ranging from the local and moderate to those that on a nationwide scale inevitably cause secondary crisis for business owners. Not only are they dealing with the personal implications of the crisis, they are worrying about how to get back on track when things blow over and in more drastic cases—how to rebuild.

Doesn’t having a sound telecommuting policy in place that employees understand and have used, if only for the purposes of experiment and trial make perfect sense?

Not all businesses operate in an environment that requires remaining open during a crisis, but many are faced with difficult decisions about whether or not they should. Certainly hospitals and medical treatment facilities would remain open to the public, but there are numerous sectors that would be forced to either shut down entirely or make a tough decision about telling their employees they had to be present even though there might be danger. Again, it all depends on the nature of the crisis, but where’s the harm in adopting a broad telecommuting policy that can be put into practice, even part-time, so that when disaster or danger is present, there are options outside of simply closing up shop or putting people at risk by having them brave whatever crisis looms?

As part of its broad initiative to expand telecommuting wherever possible, the federal government holds telework as a key to its continued operations in the event of crisis. “Telework is frequently cited as one of the key organizational tools for planning and operating during both short-term and long-term emergencies. Federal agencies have clearly recognized the importance of this connection. In 2007…forty-five percent of [government] agencies provided training addressing telework during emergencies/closures, up from 34 percent in 2006” (Telework.gov, 2008). Certainly some of these policies come in the wake of national threat-level emergency planning, but these policies also give the government more flexibility in non crisis-emergencies such as dangerous weather or widespread outbreaks of the flu, for instance.

The federal government under the Obama administration has slated broader telecommuting initiatives as critical to economic, workplace, and contingency-related success and has stated that they wish to serve as a model for private companies throughout the United States. Although I hope nothing ever happens to spark a live test of the system, it will be interesting to see how these telecommuting-related emergency preparedness pushes actually play out in the event of a national emergency. If the fed is serving as a model, one would hope that if government offices are closed for several days on end unexpectedly, they can still achieve top productivity levels.

Nearly all organizations already have some sort of contingency plan in place for when emergencies, which are more often than not weather-related, occur. Emergencies for snow, ice, fog, and other conditions are par for the course but due to the nature of many daily operations in several industries, closing down for the day entirely is a last resort. In an effort to mitigate potential losses, companies rarely close their doors and although they might be more lenient about late arrivals, need to have their employees on site—even if it requires braving dangerous roads to get there.

This sort of request to drive no matter the conditions, no matter the threat level for any other potential public emergency, is typical and few question it. Work is work. And you have to be there, no matter what, right? After all, it is your job and isn’t that what so often comes first or second when we make decisions?

The Contingency Call…

Businesses can devalue the environmental, worker satisfaction, and other legitimate claims that support a shift to remote working, but it’s hard to devalue the contingency plan / emergency preparedness angle.

When I worked on a the project that led to the creation of RemoteRevolution, I interviewed several business owners in industries where well over half of their employees could do at least 75% or more of their work off-site. There were always excuses to counter every reason I proffered about how it might be beneficial for all parties if they made the switch to at least some telecommuting and usually there were “sound” reasons they shot me down with in reply.

But when I brought up the issue of telecommuting as part of a contingency plan—part of an emergency preparedness system, the retort was not quite as quick as usual in coming.

That’s because it makes sense. Telecommuting whenever it’s possible for your employees makes perfect, rational sense. Especially in times of crisis. But it’s not as though you can jump right into it at the last moment and decide, mid-emergency, that you’re going to open up your databases for access in remote locations or allow your employees to suddenly take their work with them and do it remotely.