The Ottawa Citizen reported last week that their city was attempting to cut costs and boost efficiency by endorsing telecommuting for some employees. The initiative by Mayor Larry O’Brien is part of a three-year plan to save $100 million in operational costs through 2011.
Councillor Rick Chiarelli, vice-chairman of the city’s long-range financial planning subcommittee, said one of the best ideas being planned is a pilot project for up to 150 staff members. The employees will work from home and the field, and use computers to keep in touch with managers and citizens. Employees will be able to book time in an office for meetings. The potential positions to be in the pilot will be identified shortly, then submitted to the task force and council.
Social service caseworkers, engineers and planners, public health nurses, building inspectors and communications staff are some of the staff members who could take part in the pilot project, said Mr. Chiarelli. He said it will require some changes in thinking but he said the city has to measure employee output not on the time they spend at their desks, but on the work they produce.
Source: Ottawa Citizen (Jan. 25, 2008)
This makes sense. The overhead to maintain office space and phone lines is high, and there are times—especially for certain positions, or on certain days—when a trip to a physical building lowers productivity. “We have snowplow operators who have a land line. What’s the point?” Chiarelli told the OC.
For Ottawa, this is a continued and conscious attempt to make efficient use of technology. Their paramedic service recently switched from a paper-based records to an electronic system. 300 paramedics now use tablet laptops to capture and retrieve patient information. Nine out of every ten city buses are equipped with GPS to centrally monitor the location and speed of the fleet.
Telecommuting is entering a second wave of popularity. Back in the Dot Com days of the early commercial Web, the motivation to have technologists work from home offices was a combination of business and cache. Yes, startup companies could distribute work without renting a larger place to house employees, but telecommuting was also a key recruiting perk for developer talent. The death knell for the first wave of telecommuters was also business and cache—the Dot Com investments crashed, and contemporary research was dystopic about the lack of face-to-face communication.
Today, the motivation to endorse telecommuting is not just business. It also reflects a new cultural shift toward sustainability and flex time to support employees’ family responsibilities. Video conferencing is improving distributed collaboration, as are platforms like Basecamp and Ning. Companies are also discovering value in locating employees in different regions, where local networks are different.
Ottawa is a city of over 1 million people. For smaller cities like Bloomington, there is still an argument to be made in terms of environmental footprint and resource networks to encourage workers to spend less time in the physical office. It doesn’t work for all jobs at all time (for example, a system administrator can’t troubleshoot a server remotely when the problem is network connectivity), but even a small reduction in physical traffic downtown could have peripheral benefits to the entire city.