INTERVIEW:
Question 1
What is your experience with teleworking?
Answer
I coined the word about 23 years ago, but I got into this particular field because
previously I was what is known as a rocket scientist - I used to design spacecraft for
NASA and the US military. I was looking for ways to adapt all this technology to the real
world. At one point an urban planner said to me: Well, if you people can put man on the
moon, why can't you do something about traffic? And the idea just occurred to me. I
thought: if we look at the way people live today, they behave as though this is still the
industrial revolution where people have to go to work at the factory everyday, but more
and more often the factory is in fact an information factory where people are moving
information around instead of nuts and bolts and things that they assemble on a mass
production line. What they're doing mostly involves communicating with each other, either
face-to-face or over telephones or increasingly - don't forget this was in the 1970s - by
computers. And so the obvious question is, why do they have to go someplace to do this ?
So we became interested in the whole idea of substituting the phone wires for the
freeways. How does this change things ? We did some experiments in the United States in
1973 and discovered that this concept of substituting telecommunications for
transportation works. When I had to think of a name for it two words came up. One is
"telecommuting" because the emphasis was on the daily commute to work, and the
other was the broader term of "teleworking", which includes telecommuting and
other forms, where you're working with people who are not even in the same city - they may
be halfway around the world - so teleworking is a much broader concept. Since the
mid-1970s my partner Lela and I have been developing a number of programs around the
United States and increasingly around the world, both perfecting the management issues and
investigating the sociological and environmental impact of this. Many of the discussions
that we've heard today, for example, talk about the downside of telework, such as feelings
of isolation, losing touch with the rest of the world and so forth. We've been
investigating this for more than 20 years and have discovered that basically it doesn't
happen, that most of the negative side effects of telework that we worried about 20 years
ago do not occur if it is managed properly. We've been developing the techniques that make
it work. In the beginning, in 1973, we had 30 or 40 teleworkers, now there are more than
10 million telecommuters and probably about 20 million teleworkers in the United States
today. The trend has now become a global one and we will be talking later about how this
is spreading, not just in the United States and Europe but the rest of the world. In the
next 20 years this use of communications and computer technology will transform the way
people work and live, and in a sense bring us back to the way it was before the industrial
revolution. People will be able to live and work in the same community and as a
consequence develop local friends - actually meet their neighbours - and get involved in
local affairs. On the one hand it will be like moving back to the 19th century in terms of
the social interaction, but into the 21st century in terms of the network of context
people will have on a daily basis.
Question 2
Lela Nilles, how long have you been working on these problems?
Answer
We've been working together on the subject of teleworking and telecommuting for
approximately 15 years. Prior to that, Jack conceived of the idea and brought to life the
first indications of it when he was at the University of Southern California, and so he
worked with a team there on the first project. I came into it with the spread of the
concept to the public sector and in relation to the work with the state of California. Our
work has encompassed several public and private sector groups and we have seen the growth
of this as an ever-progressive fact of our life, so that the more we're in it, the more it
grows, and the more we're in it. I consider that it certainly has changed my life quite
considerably since I have two offices and I telecommute to jobs which makes my life quite
different from what it would have been in the past. My other job is that of a classical
music record producer and I do part of my work from my office at our home. This has
had quite an influence on my second interest, a job which involves the production of
chamber music and solo recordings for a very small recording label. I've been watching the
technology advance in relation to this. We used to talk years ago about having people
record from studios that were widely separated, using digital technology and that's
happening. There have been two or three recordings that have recently come out which were
recorded from studios in Spain in conjunction with studios in Los Angeles and there are
some now being done in conjunction with studios in places like Kuala Lampur, sending
digitised recordings simultaneously and then putting them together. It works beautifully,
so that the combination of the technology and its usefulness in various aspects has become
more and more a part of my life.
Question 3
Jack, who is teleworking suitable for?
Answer
I think that a better question is, who cannot be a teleworker, because that's a smaller
fraction of the workforce. As Lela just said, you would not ordinarily think of performing
musicians as being teleworkers, but many of them are today. The fundamental concept that
people should think about is that if you examine your own job in terms of what you have to
do to make it happen and think about how much of the time you actually have to be some
place in particular to make it go because you're meeting people there or there's some
machinery there that you have to get to, generally you have much more time where it
doesn't make any difference where you are and that's basically the part of one's job that
is teleworkable. Something like 60 % of the workforce in the United States and close to
that in Europe are potential teleworkers, which means that where they are when they do
their work becomes less and less a matter of consideration. This is why with the increased
power of information technology, computers and telecommunications, that the idea of
teleworking is taking hold because it becomes less expensive to work at home and certainly
it effects traffic, it reduces air pollution, there are positive environmental effects.
People who live and work in the same place tend to care more about their local community.
We're doing experiments now in Los Angeles of trying to upgrade the economic level of slum
areas by bringing in telework. Bring the work to where the people are and at the same time
teach them higher skills so that they can bring themselves up and become self-sustaining.
We find that this is going to become a very important tool for employment development,
particularly in areas where there are low skills. Over these years we've been looking at
various combinations like this and we always try to keep notes on the things that can go
wrong, - the socialisation problems, the exploitation of the workers, etc. And so far none
of them have. We think we have been pessimistic in the sense that we look for the mistakes
that can happen but we become increasingly optimistic in terms of our experience with the
thousands of teleworkers around the world in that this seems to be a change in working
life in which everybody seems to gain: the employee, the employer, and the community in
which both exist. Other than that, I can't see any reason why you wouldn't want to do it.
Question 4
Clearly there is no risk of cultural or social isolation, but don't you think there is a
risk of physical isolation?
Answer
Most teleworkers are not full-time teleworkers. For the most part, people will work at
home or in a nearby telework centre part of the time, and the rest of the time they'll go
to some kind of traditional office, so that the contact between your co-workers doesn't go
away. It is one of the things we have been worried about for some time. What happens is
that because people realise that they may lose contact, they become more proactive about
it, that is, they will go out of their way to make sure that their network is still there.
Now, on top of this, when you have people spending less time getting to work - in Rome for
example I got a figure yesterday that some employees of a company we were spending 2 to 3
hours per day going to and from work. If you are given back those 2 to 3 hours a day, are
you just going to sit home? No, the chances are you're going to go out and meet friends in
the neighbourhood, so that the social contact doesn't disappear. In fact, we see people
get more social contact than they did before. If you're in an office, where are people?
They're in meetings. We even find that meetings become more efficient with teleworkers
because they become more impatient about the nonsense that usually goes on in most
meetings and they want to get to the topic so that they can get back to their work again.
Their social interaction occurs at a different level and at different times.
Question 5
Is there any aspect of telework which may be of particular interest from a women's point
of view?
Answer
I think that definitely is a plus as far as women are concerned because it gives them the
opportunity to continue a career even with children. That doesn't mean that one can expect
women working at home to also take care of the children at the same time, but the ability
to, for example, have someone there to watch the children for the time when great
concentration is needed and still keep the responsibility and the understanding of what's
going on gives a woman a great advantage today. In the past, the woman stayed home and
watched the children grow up after having interrupted her career. When she arrived at the
point where, say, the youngest child was 10 or 12 years old, when it was time to go back
into the workplace, she had been superseded. All of her knowledge was 12 years old, and
she had to go back and either refresh all that knowledge or take an inferior job. And this
makes a difference in her ability to keep up with the world as it goes along and at the
same time keep the responsibility of the home and the family. So it's wonderful for women,
and I know they do appreciate it greatly. We find that when we have teleworking programs
with companies, with, say, mid-level people - managers, professionals - roughly 50 - 55 %
of them are women. The point is that if you look at the breakdown at those levels of the
organisation, less than 50 % of the people are employed in those jobs, so more women are
enthusiastic about telework than men, at least in this point in time, and it's exactly for
reasons like that.
Question 6
You've written a book about telecommuting. Perhaps you could tell us something about your
book.
Answer
Yes, the critical part about making telecommuting or telework happen is that you have to
change the ideas of managers about how they manage. Traditionally, a manager works by just
watching what's happening, what Tom Peter has called "management by just walking
around". This doesn't work in telework obviously because there's nobody there to
watch. So for some years we've had a manual that we've developed to teach managers how to
manage teleworking and how to teach teleworkers how to manage themselves when they're out
of the office. This particular book is the result of that manual. We used to make custom
editions of this for each client, but a year ago, shortly after the large earthquake in
Los Angeles, we decided to make it more readily available, because there's a big demand
for "now how do we do this?" and now people are cut off from their jobs because
the roads have gone away. They all of a sudden felt this intense need to learn how to work
from a distance. So the manual came out in April of 1994 and it's been going very well
since then. In fact the Spanish edition of it will be out next month.
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