Turning to telework

Merrill Lynch

On the morning of Sept. 11, Michelle Bernal was about to board the ferry for lower Manhattan when she saw smoke billowing from the Twin Towers.

She didn't board the ferry.

"I decided it wouldn't be a good day to go in to work," says Bernal, the assistant vice president of global recruitment strategies at Merrill Lynch.

While she hasn't since been back to Manhattan, having lost her office - along with 9,000 other company employees at World Financial Center and other locations in lower Manhattan - Bernal was back to work within a week as a teleworker.

She and her manager formulated an impromptu work arrangement in which Bernal splits her time between her home office in Mineola, N.Y., and the company's Somerset, N.J., office. Until her company-issued laptop arrives, she's using her own PC and at last check was waiting for Verizon to install her second phone line.

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Although Merrill Lynch corporate e-mail servers were down in the days following the attacks, Bernal could correspond with co-workers via her cell phone and personal Hotmail account. If she couldn't access documents, she worked with team members to rebuild ongoing projects from documents co-workers had stored on their laptops.

These days, she shuttles between the Somerset office and a desk perched in an alcove in her home. Her Somerset days are long and involve a strenuous, 70-mile traffic-jammed commute both ways. In contrast, her home office "casts a calming influence." She says she can balance her job with her personal needs, work out and eat home-cooked meals more often, and generally live a healthier lifestyle.

Yet, in looking to the future, Bernal is realistic. She knows when Merrill Lynch eventually reopens its World Financial Center headquarters, she'll be asked to resume her old 70-minute commute by train. Even so, Bernal says Merrill Lynch seems willing to explore permanent part-time arrangements with workers who were dislocated by the attacks, adding, "I like working from home. It's just like being at work."

Sun

Before the terrorist attacks, Sun was knee-deep in implementing iWork, a formal telework program that relies on a combination of home offices, drop-in centers and flexible space in the company's New York-area offices. Sun had hoped to send as many as 5,000 workers worldwide home by year-end.

Instead, the loss of two floors of World Trade Center office space forced Sun to find alternative offices for 800 workers practically overnight.

"This wasn't the way we'd hoped to accomplish our goal," says Cathy Guilbeault, Sun's director of workplace resources.

Sun acted quickly. First, it suspended registration for the iWork program, letting the New York staffers - most of whom were technical support and sales representatives - sidestep a lengthy approval process. Next, Sun shipped out 200 laptops with the iWork CD-ROM loaded with Netscape Navigator, antivirus software and Sun's StarOffice office suite. Workers were given network access, call forwarding and faxing capabilities from their original office extensions, and offered remote work and management training.

"To get the flexibility we needed, we opened up the telework option to everyone affected," Guilbeault says. That way, those who wanted to jump right back into work had a phone and a system. And those who needed more time knew the tools were there when they were ready to come back to work.

"To us, it was all about providing the technology they need to work - whether it's from home, a Sun site or customer location," she says.

While it's too soon to say how many new teleworkers will choose to return to traditional offices, the sense is most who chose iWork will stick with it. In retrospect, Guilbeault is grateful so many of the dislocated workers opted to telework. With nearly half its New York-area office space lost, she doesn't know where Sun would have put them all.

American Express

While many companies affected by the attacks give telework full credit for helping them get back to business, some are a little uneasy with the long-term effects of a distributed workforce.

Take American Express. It has a long-standing telework program and relied on the practice to facilitate disaster recovery. But as a result of events, the company says it finds itself alarmingly dispersed - with employees scattered across half a dozen corporate locations and hundreds of homes.

While Julie Gerdeman's offices at 40 Wall St. were not damaged by the attacks, American Express relocated her 30-person department to home offices to make room for some of the 3,000 dislocated employees.

"Everybody got reconfigured," says Gerdeman, a vice president of account development with the group. Because Gerdeman's group provides corporate relationship services and expense management support for clients in New York, "it was a natural migration to have us working from home," she says.

But for how long?

"In the immediate aftermath, we focused on getting all those employees back doing their jobs day to day," says Tony Mitchell, vice president of public affairs and communications. "But now there's a larger question. Can all these folks can work effectively and do the company's business this way? It's a challenge to figure out where we all are going to be on a permanent basis."