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Telecommuting is
still a realistic vision

A little more than 10 years ago, we were working with a large Fortune 100 mainland company and trying to extol the virtues of technology and how it was going to change the way we live and work.

Being a Fortune 100 company, they had the resources to produce a slick video showing people bicycling to "neighborhood telecommuting centers" where they would log on to computers and go about their days work.

This was 1994. The video was set in 2005. After every showing, the chief information officer of the mainland company would start out with, "We've been told to edit this video. We need to move the date up about five years."

Well, it's now 2005, and there isn't a city in America that resembles anything like the utopia presented in that video, and certainly not our Honolulu. What happened?

First of all, telecommuting is not dead. In fact, it's more popular than ever. The proliferation of high-speed Internet access, in conjunction with corporate Virtual Private Networks has eliminated the need for neighborhood telework centers. Just about any organization can (relatively) easily provide access to the corporate network, including e-mail, documents, and even resources such as color laser printers and fax machines.

Cell phones allow you to make calls from virtually anywhere. Practically all cell phone plans include long distance for "free," allowing you to call anywhere in the country for the same cost as a local call.

Several Hawaii companies have taken advantage of these technologies to eliminate their need for a physical office. For example, John Weldon, president of local management consulting firm Business Solution Technologies Inc., says "the need for a physical office nowadays is virtually nil for an organization like ours. We're almost always out at client sites. All of our employees have cell phones, and between those and e-mail, we can communicate with each other pretty efficiently."

When necessary, conference calls are set up.

Other companies that require their staff to be at client sites, or on the road, such as like those in sales-related fields, have had similar success with telecommuting.

But they are exceptions to the rule. Several factors continue to hamper telecommuting success. First and foremost is human nature. Only very motivated, conscientious and disciplined individuals can resist the urge to goof off when not closely supervised.

Telecommuting technology hasn't exactly shown its mettle either. The video teleconference was supposed to replace the need for face-to-face meetings. Today, high quality teleconferences are still relatively expensive. Unless you are conducting regular teleconferences interisland, or to the mainland, it is very difficult to justify the cost, especially when you take into account the real and perceived value of a face-to-face meeting. This value cannot be underestimated, especially in communities like Hawaii, where personal relationships are often the most important part of doing business.

Nevertheless, look for telecommuting to become more popular over the next few years, especially as generations of kids who've grown up doing their homework online enter the work force. In the shorter term, if office rent continues to rise, more companies might be willing to offset high rent costs by dealing with some of the shortcomings of telecommuting to offset high rent costs. The utopia of a traffic-free city, however, is far down the horizon.

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