Home becomes the office
| Saturday, Jun 13 2009 09:29 PM
Last Updated Tuesday, Jun 16 2009 03:09 PM
"I get as much done as if I was there, and I get to stay home with my kids without giving up a paycheck."
-- Shersta Gatica, who works from home
Images
Henry A. Barrios / The Californian Matt Gardner speaks to one of his employees over the Internet. The bookkeeping and tax firm has employees who work from home.
Henry A. Barrios / The Californian Matt Gardner uses the Internet to communicate with employees who work at home.
Shersta Gatica likes working from home.
The mother of three does bookkeeping early in the morning and late at night so her days are free for her children, ages 18 months to 10. It bothers neither her nor her boss that she's in Eagle Mountain, Utah, and he's in Bakersfield.
"I get as much done as if I was there, and I get to stay home with my kids without giving up a paycheck," Gatica said.
Technology has made it possible for employees to work for companies across town, across the country or even across the world.
E-mail, instant messaging and project management software allows employees to communicate and collaborate from almost anywhere, and the expansion of bandwidth in home and corporate offices has made rare the jerky, grainy videos that gave teleconferencing a bad name in years past.
"If you're doing five or six people in different locations it can get choppy, but if you're one on one and you've got a good camera and a cable or fiber-optic connection, it's like looking right at them," said Chuck Wilsker, president of The Telework Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.
It's hard to quantify the extent to which employees are working remotely. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics counts workers by where they are employed, regardless of where the work is actually performed.
But the growth of people working from home could shed some light. About 45.1 million Americans worked from home in 2005, according to the latest data available from The Dieringer Research Group. That was a 33 percent increase over the previous year.
When Matt Gardner needed a bookkeeper for Bakersfield-based Accounting Overnight, he advertised nationally because he doesn't care where his employees live.
"I have a virtual, 21st century company," Gardner said. "Everybody working at the same time in the same place is a 20th century model."
If anything, Gatica's distance works to his advantage, Gardner said, because when he starts his day, Gatica has already been working for several hours in the later time zone. Often, his first task of the day is to sign off on work done while he slept.
The company encrypts data behind a firewall to protect it from hackers, and although Gardner says he trusts Gatica to use her time productively, he doesn't have to guess about it.
Work flow software allows him to monitor whether Gatica is logged on, and if documents on her desktop are in active use or just sitting there.
David Plivelich owns The Marcom Group, a Bakersfield advertising agency that employs a Web developer who lives near Chico State University during the school year and here during the summer.
Because Ronnie Miller, 22, started out as a local employee, Plivelich said he was comfortable with letting Miller work out of town.
"I knew his work ethic and what kind of person he was," Plivelich said.
Most of the time, it doesn't matter where Miller is because clients want projects e-mailed to them for review, anyway, Plivelich said.
And remote employees make you more organized, he added.
"A lot of our communication is in writing, so everything is documented and there's a record of what was said to refer back to," he said.
"And it forces us to plan better, because we have to communicate the expectations prior to going into anything."
Cynthia Hoffman, 23, has never worked in a traditional office environment. Her employer, North Carolina-based AgCareers.com, hired her straight out of school to be the human resources company's sole Bakersfield employee.
Hoffman works out of leased office space at ValleyHQ Business Center, which has all of the latest telecommunications equipment for connecting with her supervisor in Ames, Iowa, and marketing and sales colleagues scattered across the United States, Canada and Australia.
There is an annual retreat for team members to get face time, but the vast majority of internal communication is conducted via phone, e-mail, instant messaging and videoconferencing. That includes a monthly conference call, to the chagrin of Hoffman's co-worker in Australia.
"She has to wake up in the middle of the night to talk to us," Hoffman said.
She misses the camaraderie of having co-workers nearby to chat with, but says she never feels out of touch with her boss or colleagues.
"We're in constant communication," Hoffman said. "And we're all in strategic locations, so we see each other sometimes when we're traveling to industry events."
Web developer Miller said not chatting with co-workers in an elevator or at the water cooler keeps him focused.
"There aren't as many distractions," he said. "You get more work done."
Factoring in that increased productivity and real estate savings, allowing employees to telecommute saves money in the long run, said Sasha Poljak, owner of ValleyHQ.
Putting one or two individuals in key markets is a lot cheaper than leasing or buying a satellite office that has to be fully staffed and furnished, he said.
And routine matters can be handled without customers having any idea that, say, the administrative assistant who took their call is in one state, and she's transferring them to someone thousands of miles away.
"You can have all the sophistication and professionalism of a big corporation with offices all over the world, but for a fraction of the cost," Poljak said.
