In eight years, Tim Kane grew his Pittsburgh start-up Kinetic Workplace into a leading telework consultancy.
ITAC's newly elected president, Kane recently spoke with Net.Worker Managing Editor Toni Kistner about telework's expanded role since Sept. 11.
How has your business changed since the attacks?
Sept. 11 has created a new market driver, but one that's hard to get your arms around. Before, I could provide metrics for each of the telework benefits: I could show companies how the more tenured employee is a better employee and better able to serve customers; how not leasing real estate can save you so many dollars per month. But there isn't a specific set of benefits that come from distributing your workforce. You can't quantify the benefits or necessarily time them. Security-driven projects don't provide a quantifiable return on investment. Even so, a lot of people have foregone ROI and timing. They're just saying, 'Hey we better invest in this.' We're trying to sell a very emotional decision.
Rethinking where people work
Turning to telework
Ten tips to telework
Technologies in the front seat
New telemanagers better learn fast
Too much room at the office
Is the change being driven by employees or by management?
Both. On a recent trip to New York, I met with a handful of businesses executives and federal agency officials. All said they can't afford to not be compassionate. Federal workers throughout the U.S. feel anxiety every time they have to enter one of those buildings. In New York, some workers are debilitated and have severe panic attacks going into tall buildings. What's making it worse is that any time you enter a tall building these days you have to deal with increased security; guards search your bag and you feel like you're in a state of martial law.
What will companies do in the long term?
They're looking at strategies to ensure that nothing like this can ever debilitate our organizations again, ways to build more redundancy into the system. We'll see an interesting move to general worker mobility. And in major cities, where companies routinely leased space in million square-foot office towers, you'll see them instead leasing in several smaller sites with a lot more mobility between them, and using the home office. Not just in New York, but all over: As leases come up for renewal in Chicago, companies will ask themselves, 'Do we want to put every single worker in the Sears Tower?'
Related links
Toni Kistner is managing editor of Net.Worker. Contact her at tkistner@nww.com.
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