Ray Van Eng (07/21/97)
The virtual office can be defined as anywhere from a spare room in the worker's house, a hotel room, a customer's premise, in an automobile on the road, a temporary leased office or any location not directly connected to the main office. IBM Corp., one of the biggest work at home practitioners, is reputed to have about 20,000 of its U.S. workforce (118,000 people) working away from corporate offices. In IBM's case, telecommuting was initially meant to be a cost saving measure, but found that it actually boost productivity by 10%. When KPMG Peat Marwick asked more than 100 heads of human resources of some of the largest firms in the U.S., it discovered that 53% of the companies realized productivity gains from telecommuters and a third says it save on real estate cost while workers enjoy higher job satisfaction that has resulted in a lower turnover rate. Sound like a win-win situation for both the employers and the employees.
Relocated workers commonly use a computer to access the corporate network by way of the Internet. In fact, in a FIND/SVP finding, almost 31% of these satellite workers depend on the Internet for corporate communication and that is twice the national average for people who access the Net from home. The increasing reliance on the Internet has brought new concerns about people using the global network to access improper web sites during company times. But that is regardless of whether the staff is working from home or at the corporate office. Last year, Nielsen Media Research reported that many big corporations including AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Apple, and even NASA are plagued by this problem with Penthouse Magazine web site being the top people's choice. In fact, access to sex sites far outstrip all connections to other non-work related web sites such as entertainment, sports, games etc. When it comes to regulating these kinds of activities, there is no shortage of web site filtering software that company administrators can use to screen off undesirable Internet sites. SurfWatch, Cyber Patrol, Net Nanny, On Guard Internet Manager, and the likes are prime examples. The other approach under consideration is a industry self-regulation measure whereby web site operators would voluntarily rate themselves and have the Internet browser rejects web sites based on the level of acceptance set by the user. All non-rated web sites are barred entry. Most of these blocking software and methodologies work as designed, but none offer a 100% fail-safe solution to deal with workplace porn problem especially the meaning of a workplace is a changing one with unsupervised satellite offices sprouting up everywhere. But regardless of how corporate managers choose to handle the situation, the telecommuting phenomenon will continue to grow. FIND/SVP believes that an increasing awareness of the positive aspects of this workstyle, a strong domestic economy coupled with a high employment rate would propel the number of telecommuters to more than 14 million by the year 2000. In fact, the New York-based market research firm indicated some employers would even use the work-at- home scheme to attract those highly skilled professionals in the information industry. Yes, in America and most other highly developed countries, it is all about personal freedom. In-demand knowledge workers of the on-coming Internet era will continue to enjoy a strong bargaining position in determing where, when and what to wear in the workplace. |
However,
many executives remain skeptical about this new working arrangement. They
counter that if workers are not under the corporate watchful eye, they
must not be working. But there has been wide-spread acceptance of this
alternative working lifestyle. Some managers have learned to relied on
the worker's output as a yardstick for performance.