Redefining the Workplace

Technology is transforming the relationship between people and where they work. To fulfill the promise of the mobile workforce, we need to invest less in asphalt and more in bandwidth.

John Vivadelli, the CEO of AgilQuest Corporation, propounds a vision for the workplace of the future. Gone are the days when people, in lemming-like masses, all hop in their cars at the same time, drive to their offices along the same congested thoroughfares, do their jobs at central office complexes, then repeat the grueling commute on the way home …. day after mind-numbing day.

In the world that Vivadelli sees, employees have access to a "network of space” that allows them to work at the most efficient locations. “People have different kinds of workplace needs on different days, depending on what they’re doing,” he explains. Some mornings, they might work from home, linking to the office by telephone, e-mail and high-bandwidth video. Other mornings, they might zip over to a satellite office a few minutes away, plug into a work station they’d reserved the day before, and meet with co-workers at a conference room there. Then they might complete the commute to the main office when the roads are clear, shaving a half hour off the normal drive time.

“We have the highway capacity to get people where they need to go,” says Vivadelli. “We just don’t have it for 8:00 a.m. in the morning.” By changing the way we work – using office- and conference-scheduling tools -- we can redistribute the demand for transportation capacity away from its peaks at 8:00 a.m. and 5 p.m. to other hours of the day.

People all over the world have two broad options for coping with their increasingly stressed transportation systems. They can raise taxes to finance the massive road and transit projects that will only blunt, not reverse, the severity of traffic congestion during rush hour. Or, like Vivadelli, we can think creatively about how to reduce and redistribute the demand for scarce transportation capacity.

Bubbling up from the private sector, innumerable innovations that aim at curbing or reconfiguring transportation demand are gaining momentum. Entrepreneurs are using the Internet to help commuters share rides. Businesses are delivering real-time information about traffic conditions to PCs and cell phones so subscribers can plan alternate routes or change their schedules. A number of companies have introduced car-sharing services that supplement mass transit by allowing subscribers to literally lease cars by the hour. But when it comes to sheer, society-shifting potential, none of these compares to what Vivadelli is proposing.

Most significantly, the idea of using telecommunications to link workers with their work has come a long way since the 1990s, when early experiments were found deficient and the concept was largely written off as a public policy option. In the past half decade, high-speed Internet connections have been deployed all over the world, and it won’t be long before big bandwidth is nearly ubiquitous. Collaboration-enabling technologies have matured, making it possible to coordinate activity, project video images and share content for significantly less cost than it did a few years ago. Simultaneously, the cost of traffic congestion has doubled in major metropolitan areas, increasing the pay-off for telecommuting strategies.

The most important breakthrough since the 1990s has been conceptual. The notion of “telecommuting” yielded to the notion of “telework” and now to simple “mobility.” The 1990s idea of employees working at home is giving way to the 2000s vision of mobile workforces equipped with cell phones and wireless laptops, working anywhere, anytime: at the corporate headquarters, at home, at a satellite office, or on the road. Where “telecommuting” provided mainly a social benefit by getting people off the highways at rush hour, thus reducing the strain on the transportation system, a mobile workforce does that and slashes corporate investment in office facilities and enables employers to re-engineer work processes.

The Telework Consortium based in Loudoun County, Va., estimates that getting one worker off Northern Virginia’s congested roads during rush hour would save some $2,800 or more per year in the cost of expanding and maintaining the transportation infrastructure. You can add another $2,000 a year in social benefits from the reduction of gasoline consumption and air pollution, says Consortium President John Starke. Then consider the productivity gains for individual employees who spend less time commuting: a 10 percent gain for a $50,000-a-year worker amounts to $5,000 a year. Finally, toss in thousands of dollars more by reducing the need for office space made possible through Vivadelli’s “network of space” and other process improvements. Starke sees a $30,000 annual value per employee potentially flowing from a mature set of telecommunications processes.

Even if Starke is exaggerating the benefits by a factor of five or six, the economic logic of moving towards a more mobile, geographically flexible workforce is still compelling. The United States is on the verge of a workplace revolution. State-level policy makers don`t understand it yet, but they face a critical choice: Continue the unsustainable tax-and-build transportation strategy of the past half century, or deploy public resources to accelerate the shift to the workplace model of the future. AgilQuest provides a key piece of the workplace revolution. Their OnBoard® Workplace Management Solution enables companies to downsize their office space requirements by shifting employees from dedicated offices to shared offices. OnBoard is way beyond the concept stage – blue chip clients from Hewlett-Packard to DeLoitte & Touche are already using the Network of Space to save millions of dollars a year.

The typical office, says Vivadelli, is 50 percent to 70 percent empty at any given moment – so many people are out on sales calls, service calls, corporate travel or vacation that they spend only a fraction of their time in their offices. Nationally, he guesstimates, the American economy is wasting $300 billion to $400 billion annually in excess commercial real estate. “Literally trillions of dollars of assets are sitting there underutilized.”

AgilQuest software allows companies to shift to a “hoteling” arrangement in which employees utilize office space when they need it. Vivadelli`s software allows people to book space in any corporate facility, quickly transfer their office phone number to that location and even reserve nearby meeting rooms. As long as e-mail and other documents reside on the corporate network, the only thing people miss is the family portrait on the desk!

It’s a small step from downsizing an office facility through hoteling to distributing office space around a metropolitan area and moving quarters closer to where employees work or interact with their customers. AgilQuest’s technology provides unprecedented flexibility: People can work near home, clients or co-workers as the demands of business productivity dictate.

Starke and Vivadelli cite one other benefit to the Network of Space. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 demonstrated the vulnerability of highly concentrated business operations. The imperative of business continuity suggests that government and businesses – especially those near high-profile targets like New York and Washington, D.C. – should decentralize their offices and adopt the capability to reconfigure their workforces at home or in satellite offices should disaster strike.

The major barrier to radical change is workplace culture. Many executives believe they can’t manage employees they can’t physically see. There`s still a lot to learn, Starke concedes. “You have to increase the maturity and sophistication of your processes. You have to have performance measures, communications processes, collaboration tools.” But attitudes are changing as the pioneers show how mobile work can be managed.

Until those attitudes change, AgilQuest, the Telework Consortium and their allies will continue making the business case for mobile work by conducting research studies, lobbying for broadband deployment, sponsoring pilot projects and disseminating best business practices. A case in point is the Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate where Vivadelli chairs the Standards and Planning Metrics Workgroup (see related article.)

“People are beginning to get it,” says Vivadelli. “There’s nothing like gasoline selling at over $2 a gallon to concentrate peoples’ minds on the costs of commuting. Once they question the way it’s always been done, they awaken to the potential for boosting labor productivity and cutting the cost of real estate overhead. The next workplace revolution is upon us.”