Even in basically white-collar fields, some bosses and employers may look askance at universal telecommuting.
Some, for instance, may miss the hints of body language, the blink of an eye, the tapping feet, the little, subtle signs that many people feel to “read” friend and foe. Others simply miss seeing people hard at work. A Seattle hospital administrator, a telecommuter supervising two others working at home, says: “It ultimately comes down to an honor system.”[[63]]
So if you don’t trust your underlings and can’t objectively measure their output, you’d better keep your workers at the office and watch for eye blinks.
Not that every employee will want to telecommute, anyway. Management Recruiters International, Inc. asked six thousand people if they’d be willing to telecommute several days a week. Only 36 percent said they would. That’s still an impressive percentage, and it will grow as more people appreciate telecommuting’s virtues and it becomes more socially acceptable, but there’ll always be skeptics like Jack Smith.[[64]]
He’s a columnist with the Los Angeles Times, which once freed him of his commute. After six weeks, however, his granddaughter broke his typewriter, and he temporarily returned to the newspaper, where he rediscovered the joys of face-to-face contact and decided to remain. His columns perked up. He had missed “the friendly faces, fresh in the morning; the clothes; the gossip; the flirtations; the benign conspiracies; lunch-hour expeditions; the open forums on war and peace, Reaganomics, and the Rams quarterback controversy, none of which could be examined with such reckless spontaneity by anything canned for consumption on your home computer.”
“He realized that he really came back to the office not just to write but to renew his interaction with human life,” says William Renfro, a Washington consultant.[[65]]
Then again, Maxine Messinger, a gossip columnist with the Houston Chronicle, writes happily on a computer at home and brags that she hasn’t been to the office in years.
“For a long time it’s been far more efficient for me to work at home,” says another confirmed telecommuter, Hollis Vail, a part-time management consultant with the U.S. Geological Survey.
“I use my computer for writing, reports, and sending reports and messages,” he says, “and I can get all the data I want from the system.” The U.S. Geological Survey has thousands of people using electronic mail, and Vail can even hold conferences over the wire and record the results on his computer disks. Then he can sum them up. In fact, he can electronically cut and paste to produce policy documents reflecting many viewpoints.
David Snyder, now a professional futurist and consultant, fondly remembers the computerized conferences of his days as an Internal Revenue Service official. “I wrote a book with eight other people,” he says, “and we didn’t meet until it was written. It was a much better product because we could work that way. The travel would have been too expensive. And the mails would have been too much of a delay.” The coauthors left their contributions in each other’s electronic mailboxes for perusal and change. Back then Snyder was on a government computer, but later he hooked up an Apple in his Maryland home; he was planning to connect with aunts, uncles, and other members of his extended family, nationwide, who, together, do consulting and produce films. “You can’t have a mom-and-pop steel mill,” he said. “You can have a mom-and-pop information factory.”