Merrill Lynch program gets high marks

In 1994, Merrill Lynch saw the future. When the federal clean air legislation mandated that companies reduce the number of cars on the roads during peek commuting hours, the company responded by launching a telecommuting pilot program of 32 employees - at a time when the terms telecommuter and teleworker were unfamiliar to most.

Over the years, Merrill has grown the program into a mainstay of its company culture. Today, about 5% of the company's 70,700 employees work from home two or three days a week, shuttling between their homes and offices in New York, Somerset, N.J., and Jacksonville, Fla.

Merrill credits the program not only for helping reduce traffic congestion, but also for raising employee morale, stemming turnover and expanding recruitment opportunities. Of the 3,500 or so employees who have entered the program, only one has opted to return to full-time on-site work.

While many companies were turning to telework informally or on an ad hoc basis to relieve overcrowded offices, retain valued employees or attract new ones, Merrill Lynch believed from the start that success required a structured, standardized program that included intensive technical training in a telework simulation lab and a dedicated staff of IT professionals to support remote workers.

"We want telecommuters to be successful from day one," explains technical manager Chris Gioe. A 10-year Merrill Lynch LAN support veteran, Gioe was tapped four years ago to develop the company's remote worker infrastructure.

"Without training, [teleworkers] will call us up when they get home and say, 'I have my PC. OK, what do I do now?' " And while a support call in the office might take five minutes, dealing with the same issue over the phone can take 45 minutes, Gioe says.

Before prospective teleworkers make it to the simulation lab, they first need to pass a few management hurdles. Employees must submit a written proposal to their supervisor outlining personal and professional attributes that would ensure success. In turn, the manager lays out what he feels will be the success factors for the worker and any specific concerns. Then, each goes through training geared to help make the long-distance relationship a success.

"This helps managers make the shift to managing by face time to managing by results," explains Janice Miholics, Merrill Lynch's vice president of global telework strategies. "It's no longer about how many hours an employee works but the final product that determines the performance appraisal," she explains.

Miholics adds, "There's nothing new or different introduced into the equation simply because the person is working remotely."

Merrill Lynch requires teleworkers to have dedicated office space, whether a dedicated room or a clearly defined section of one. Merrill supplies all the equipment, down to the furniture and two analog phone lines for voice and data.

"Ergonomics is a critical component of the program," Miholics says. "We don't want anyone to feel disadvantaged by working remotely, so we take great care in ensuring that office standards are extended to the home."

When employees are approved for the program, they're sent to school - specifically to one of Merrill Lynch's telework simulation labs. Introduced in 1996, the labs are located in New York, Somerset, N.J., and Jacksonville, Fla., with new facilities planned for Denver and Chicago.

In the classroom, teleworkers learn how to connect to Merrill Lynch's servers over a remote connection, how to access network drives, synchronize and transfer files, as well as perform daily backups and troubleshooting basics. Teleworkers then spend several days working in the lab as if they were home, which culminates in an online quiz. Before going home, teleworkers burn a mirror image of their system files to a CD-ROM, in case of system failure.

The second half of the equation is remote technical support. One of Gioe's first decisions was to assemble a dedicated staff for teleworkers. "We knew that the LAN support people were worried about taking care of people in the office. They don't have time to worry about people who they can't see," Gioe explains.

Five technicians are on call during regular business hours to support Merrill Lynch's teleworkers. "Our remote support technicians have good communications skills, first and foremost. They know how to ask questions and put the telecommuter at ease so we can get them to the point where the solution is easily resolved," Gioe says.

And good teleworker training has paid off. Gioe recounts the time a teleworker called the support desk with an e-mail problem. The support tech walked her through the steps to resolve it, and a few weeks later she called back saying she'd had the same problem again in the office but this time had been able to fix it herself.

"This tells us we're educating people," Gioe says. "The smarter our clients are, the easier it is for them and for us."

Keeping pace with technology is an ongoing challenge. Gioe and his staff have gone from supporting desktop workstations running a mix of OS/2, DOS and Windows 3.1 connected to headquarters by an Attachmate RLN Server, to a standardized fleet of Windows NT 4 laptops connected via the Windows NT remote access server.

"We learned as we went along and kept things as simple as possible," Gioe says. "For instance, we wrote a batch file that simulated the network log-in script, so when workers went home, they ran the batch file to log on to the network."

Connecting remote workers effectively and reliably to Merrill Lynch's network has also been a challenge. Although several phone companies have pitched ISDN service to the company over the years, it was unimpressed and stuck with analog connections for 95% of its teleworkers until two years ago.

"ISDN was cost-prohibitive, not as readily available as advertised, and the turnaround time was five weeks," Gioe explains. "With dial-up, it's less than a week."

Because most of Merrill Lynch's teleworkers are systems professionals, "a 3270 screen took care of a lot of what they needed," Gioe says. "Because we teach them how to work offline and how to run apps off Microsoft Terminal Server, in some cases, we can get over the limitations of analog connections," Gioe explains.

Though dial-up worked for most end users, programmers using Visual Basic and Web development tools needed faster data rates. Two years ago, Gioe and Merrill Lynch executives began looking at broadband service offerings. But because DSL wasn't yet available, they contracted business-class service from several local-area cable providers. Before going with cable, Merrill consulted its internal Technology Risk and Protection Group, which is responsible for Merrill Lynch's data security, as well as Gartner Group, both of which assured Gioe the architecture is secure.

"The remote machines are designed for corporate use only, not for cruising the Internet," Gioe explains. "If teleworkers need the Internet, they'll come in through our corporate proxy server. They'll also have a VPN tunnel to our network. It's as secure as it can be."

The other reason Gioe went with cable over DSL is the benefit of service-level agreements (SLA), still absent from DSL providers' residential offerings. "Anything we roll out has to be 100% all the time," Gioe says. "Right now, DSL service is on a best-effort basis. If I'm putting it in a telecommuter's home, I need an SLA."

Even so, Gioe is keeping his eye on DSL and rolling out a pilot program with a handful of workers, including Eileen Keyes on Staten Island, a teleworker since 1996.

"The tech team is the core of what made me be able to do this," Keyes says. "They taught me how to take all the plugs out of the machine, shove it in boxes, drive it home, then put it all back together again. It's been wonderful. I don't have to skip a beat."