Portrait of a Telecommuter

The consulting firm the Gartner Group offers some averages about telcommuters as well as some predictions.

By 1999 more than 80% of all organizations will have at least 50% of their staff engage in some form of telecommuting, according to the Gartner Group, a Stamford, Conn., consulting firm.

Average number of telecommuters in the United States . . . . . . in 1992: 6.6 million . . . in 1993: 7.1 million

Average productivity increase per telecommuter (measured by employers): 10% to 16%

Average annual savings in facility costs per telecommuter: $3,000 to $5,000
Average time spent in office per telecommuter: one day a week
Average work-time increase per telecommuter per day: two hours
Average annual corporate investment per telecommuter: $1,000 to $1,500

Average telecommuting equipment provided by employer: 486 PC, fax-modem, telephone line, dot-matrix printer, office furniture, and telephone (average cost for setup: $2,000 to $4,000)
Source: "Telecommuting Changes Work Habits," by Jonathan L. Yarmis, vice-president, and Kris Balmer, research associate, Gartner Group, Stamford, Conn., 1994

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It's Off to Work We Go
"The office itself and most of our models for information technology today are industrial models. The notion of an office really is just a wholesale transposition of industrial processes. We process words in the same way we process metal to put into a car. And when you have a processing mentality, a place for processing, like an office, is essential. But the moment we abandon that processing model and go to stranger and newer models, then the idea of having a physical place where you go and sit down and have a desk and a stapler and all that becomes very quaint."

-- Paul Saffo, a director of Institute for the Future, Menlo Park, Calif.

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"People who suggest the end of the workplace totally misunderstand the social nature of work. There is a social fabric to work. Techno-geeks will talk about people wanting to get out of the office and wanting to work by E-mail only, but techno-geeks don't have the social side of life. They don't miss what regular people do."

-- Scott Cook, CEO, Intuit, San Francisco

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"The Conference Board report shows that more than 70 percent of large employers offer telecommuting options for employees. . . . So far, less than 1 percent of the employees eligible for the programs actually telecommute."

-- Urban Transport News, July 21, 1994