Rank Xerox, the office equipment giant’s joint venture in England, is helping to pave the way for Mom and Pop.
It’s letting managers and other professionals telecommute. They’re no longer salaried, and they give up pensions and perks like company cars; but the “networkers,” as they’re called, normally sign two-year contracts guaranteeing them work at least two days a week. Business with other companies may take up the remaining days. In a sense the Rank Xerox program could be a large corporation’s version of the hundred-hour-a-month arrangement that Jeremy Hewes worked out with the computer magazine.
“Clearly,” says Derek Hornby, staff support director and a member of the Rank Xerox policy committee, “we need and will always have a ‘core’ staff within the head office for day-to-day management. Many functions, however, can be fulfilled by networkers.”[[66]]
Computer work, pension advising, management training, even putting out the company newsletter, are some of the tasks with which the networkers may help core staffers. Who qualifies for the program? Someone the company wants to keep but whose services it needs only part time. The first networker, Roger Walker, a former personnel manager in his late thirties, helped cut costs in the most direct way, eliminating his job. He was planning, anyway, to venture out on his own. But the Rank Xerox program eased the transition.
“What do you answer,” I asked the company, “when people say, ‘Isn’t this really just an outplacement scheme?’”
“The rough cost of someone going networking,” said Phil Judkins, a Rank Xerox spokesman in London, “is approximately three times the cost of their compensation if they were simply declared redundant by Rank Xerox.”
More than a year into the program, how were the volunteers doing?
“Extremely well,” said Judkins—all of them. He said two networkers seemed “well on the way to one-million-dollar turnover companies.”
And Rank Xerox, needless to say, didn’t supply all that business.
Along the way the corporation was benefiting from the useful business contacts that the new entrepreneurs were making outside the company. Sensibly, it discounted its model 820 microcomputer for the networkers. They could not only do their normal work but help show off a company product.