Page 179 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

158 � mAnAgIng the moBIle workForCe

In May 2004, the Los Angeles Times featured a story about JetBlue.
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Seven hundred JetBlue reservation agents worked from home at the
time—that’s all of them—with company-supplied second phone lines
and personal computers. Of course, that’s just one of many companies
with home workers. The article also reported that, at the time, 70 per-
cent, that’s almost 100,000, of Hewlett-Packard’s employees worked
from home part of the time. Work at home reaps tangible benefits too.
AT&T, for example, reaped over $180 million in operating benefits
from telework. In fact, the article reported that the number of U.S.
company employees working from home at least part of the time grew
from 11.6 million in 1997 to 23.5 million, or 16 percent of the Ameri-
can workforce, in 2004. Can you imagine the numbers now?
Today there are few barriers to doing many jobs from anywhere.
JetBlue and others are leading the way to break location-based work
paradigms. The air carrier finds that as the work–life balance im-
proves, turnover goes down and there is higher employee satisfaction.
In fact, JetBlue’s founder and CEO, David Neeleman, estimates that
productivity of employees improves by 25 percent when they are home
based. Not bad.
Hiring and training mobile workers isn’t as easy as all of that, of
course. The people reporting to you might be located across the street,
across the country, or at un petit bistro in Paris. Here are some ques-
tions you might want to ask yourself when contemplating taking on a
teleworker or two.

1. What type of individual would you hire to work from home? What
type would you trust to travel from one hotel to the next, or from
one client to another, day after day?
2. What tools and advice will you seek when looking at the knowl-
edge, skills, abilities, and attributes of potential mobile employees?
3. What are the functions and responsibilities the employee will be
expected to perform?
4. What resources exist to support your mobile employees? What
will they need to be successful?
5. Are the managers trained to supervise mobile workers? Do they