Despite technology advances, office remains the place to be

The technology explosion of the past decade, thrusting laptops, cellphones, and Internet connections into widespread use, promised to untether workers from their offices.

Telecommuting was supposed to eliminate traffic jams, give employees the flexibility of working from Cape Cod or the Rocky Mountains, and enable employers to set up remote operations around the world at little cost in bricks and mortar. In the mid-1990s, some futurists even predicted the death of skyscrapers and neckties.

Ten years later, telecommuting has advanced in fits and starts. But like other trends touted in the first flowering of the World Wide Web, it has grown more slowly and proved far less revolutionary than many expected. Office parking lots remain full, cars still back up at rush hour on the interstates, and most employees get dressed for work.

"Telecommuting has been more of an evolution, not a revolution," said Gil Gordon, a telecommuting consultant based in Monmouth Junction, N.J. "It's become an adjunct to, not a replacement for, the traditional office. Without a doubt, it's continued to grow, but it's growing in different forms. It's morphed into multiple work situations."

Among the 12.2 million telecommuters employed by US businesses this year, according to estimates by the In-Stat/MDR research firm, some work from their homes and some from the road -- and a growing number do a combination of both.

"There's really very little difference between a person working at home, or working from a hotel room or a Starbucks or a client site," Gordon said. "We have this enabling technology that allows people to work anywhere."

But economic and cultural factors also come into play. And when it comes to telecommuting, they often have trumped technological considerations. The practice of working remotely was spurred by the Internet boom, for example, when employers hiring in a competitive job market held out telecommuting as a perk to attract talented workers. When the boom turned to bust, a different dynamic took hold.

"With the economy going south, people were saying, 'I need more face time at the office,' " noted Merle Sandler, analyst for the International Data Corp. research firm in Framingham. "People were worried that if they were out of sight, they'd be the first to get laid off."

Like many other research firms, IDC overestimated the momentum of telecommuting in the late 1990s and was forced to scale back its forecasts. It now projects the number of telecommuters -- employees who work remotely three or more days a month -- will climb just over 2 percent a year through 2008. Before the slowdown of 2001 and 2002, the firm had anticipated an annual growth rate of 5 to 6 percent.

Aside from the economy, many employers and more than a few employees have resisted moving forward with telecommuting. That has resulted in a patchwork approach to the practice among and within companies, with some spelling out formal policies and others sanctioning informal arrangements between certain workers and their supervisors.

"It's become more of a seller's market" for jobs, said Lisa Pierce, a Forrester Research vice president and telecommunications analyst. "And that means employers have been able to do what they're most comfortable with: what they did in the '50s and '60s and '70s."

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 initially were seen as a catalyst for telecommuting. But much of the increase in home worker activity following the attacks was short-lived and confined to New York and Washington commuters, analysts said. In the same way, thousands of office-based employees could work from home for a week or so during the Democratic and Republican conventions this summer, without swelling the ranks of permanent telecommuters.

While there have been few public stories of people exploiting a telecommuting arrangement to shirk work or to deceive a boss, the management fear, usually unspoken, is that employees working from home "are just going to drink beer and watch TV all day," consultant Gordon noted. Gordon, who advises employers how to implement telecommuting and is a strong advocate of the trend, makes the reverse argument.

"The office is not a paragon of productivity," he said, noting that employees can fritter away valuable hours talking about sports or television. "The office is a terrible place to get work done."

But not all employees clamor to telecommute, either.

"It's a certain lifestyle that doesn't appeal to everyone," Sandler suggested, citing the often unappreciated social aspects of the workplace. "Many people like to be in the office and chat around the water cooler."

Pierce, of Forrester, has been telecommuting for 11 years, first from her New Jersey home, where she initially worked for a technology training company based in Kansas, and now from an island near Sarasota, Fla., where she moved to care for aging parents. Both in her previous job and in her work for Forrester, she has traveled extensively. And she insists telecommuting has made her more productive "vs. getting stuck in traffic." For home-based employees, she estimated, "at least 50 percent of what would be commuting time gets given back in work time."

But she acknowledged the telecommuting model works best for knowledge employees, such as technology analysts, financial workers, or white-collar professionals, rather than for manufacturing workers or customer-facing service employees.

"A lot of it depends on the product a company makes," Pierce said. "In our case, it's an intellectual resource. The more three-dimensional the product you make, the less likely it is that you're going to be able to telecommute."

Or, as Gordon put it, "It's kind of hard to have a drill press in your living room." But, he added, design engineers or managers overseeing drill presses on three continents could work from home.

Even for them, the issue of information technology support looms large, especially for the less technologically savvy. Computer crashes, interruptions in Internet access, and faulty connections to an employer's computer network are all common problems that can cause headaches and eat up time for telecommuters. Some companies have begun to dedicate full-time technicians to manage remote access service for their telecommuters, but such technology support remains rare.

"Our culture is getting more friendly to telecommuting," Pierce observed. "But it still isn't embracing it."

Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.