Alternative work arrangements

As the network operations team leader at Lotus in Cambridge, Mass., Jay Bendonis often finds himself woken in the middle of the night to repair a network outage.

But if he stays all night, his colleagues might have a tough time finding him the next day.

"If I'm paged at 2 a.m. and I've been here working until 8 or 9 in the morning I'm like, 'OK guys, I'm going home. See you,' " he says.

Lotus' network operations team is responsible for keeping the WAN up and running 24-7. With 10,000 devices on the network, it's a big job. But while that might inspire rigidity among some managers, at Lotus it allows for just the opposite.

Bendonis says an informal, flextime arrangement within his department allows some of his staffers to start at 7 a.m. and knock off at 3 p.m. Others start at 10 a.m. and finish up between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. The flexibility extends week to week as well.

"Instead of saying, 'We worked 80 hours this week, let's do it again next week,' we try to rotate people," he says. "So the next week Bob gets a day off, and the following week someone else gets a day off. Otherwise, you lose employees."

From flextime to telecommuting and job sharing, alternative work arrangements are taking hold in the workplace. As one indication, 23.6 million people teleworked during the third quarter of 2000, as compared with about 8.5 million in 1995, according to the International Telework Association and Council (ITAC).

Telecommuting and other arrangements offer advantages to workers, including increased time with family and less time spent commuting. But even enthusiastic supporters cite downsides, which include lack of administrative support and reduced contact with co-workers.

Some situations are more compatible with flexible work arrangements than others. At network consulting firm GNTS, about 85% of the approximately 400 employees are considered telecommuters, according to Jeremy Bono, director of recruiting. The term is somewhat misleading, because most consultants are at client sites most of the time. Still, when they aren't on the road installing networking infrastructure, most work from home offices.

Bono, who works out of his home in Londonderry, N. H., says that eliminating workers' commutes, even one or two days per week, can make them happier and more productive.

"There are a lot of studies that suggest people who work at home outperform in-office workers by as much as 10% or 15%," he says. "From where I live some people commute into Boston [a 90-minute trip], and they're pretty frustrated when they get there. It can affect your workday and take some time to adjust."

Of course, there are benefits to the company as well, especially when the number of telecommuters is high.

"It probably saves us between 50% and 60% per employee," says Bono, who factors in the cost of office space along with reduced phone and IT expenses.

Bono says that letting employees work from home allows his firm to recruit the best and the brightest without concern about where the people live. Still, the GNTS tries to cluster its hires around major metropolitan areas, so that it's easier to get people together for the quarterly meetings it holds to let co-workers spend time with one another.

Russ Rogers is director of solutions consulting for GNTS and lives in Portsmouth, N.H., not far from the company's only office, in Newington, N.H. He typically spends four days per week at client sites and the fifth day at home.

He says he's happy with telecommuting but there are complications.

"I don't get good cell phone coverage where I live, so if it [doesn't work], you don't have access to your people," he says. "And I don't have DSL or broadband capability in my neighborhood so I'm stuck using good old-fashioned [dial-up]."

Chuck Wilsker, executive director of the ITAC, says some middle managers still resist such programs as telecommuting because they feel they have less control over their workers. But advances are being made, he says.

The federal government recently mandated that telecommuting be made available to at least a portion of federal employees whose jobs are suited to it.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency has started a pilot program in several cities whereby companies can earn tax credits for every mile not driven by telecommuting employees.

Back at Lotus, Bendonis says he is hoping to add telecommuting to the repertoire of options for those in his department. One motivator is the lack of space for new employees.

Among the innovations that will allow more of the network team to work remotely is creating a simple list of server connections in the data center.

"That way if we know which server is having a problem and we know which port it's connected into, someone could telnet into the switch from anywhere in the world and do a lot of the troubleshooting from there," he says.

Duffy is a freelance writer in Haydenville, Mass. He can be reached at tomduffy62@aol.com.