Phone It In

More workers than ever telecommuting, according to new Gallup poll

Gary Roberts takes a break from his job working for Unum on his farm near Dayton, Tennessee, to pet his dog Lucy and feed his sheep.
Gary Roberts takes a break from his job working for Unum on his farm near Dayton, Tennessee, to pet his dog Lucy and feed his sheep.
photo Blue Cross Blue Shield Claims Specialist Esther Van Velze Sharpe

It's about noon, smack in the middle of a Wednesday workday, and Gary Roberts, a dental implementation specialist at Unum, is replying to work emails at his desk.

Next, he walks outside and makes the trip he's made hundreds of times across the backyard, past the swimming pool and the fire pit and on to the barn where the tractor and the grain are stored and where the barn cat naps.

Lucy, a Pit bull mix lopes along. Roberts whistles and 40 or so black-faced sheep come running toward him, bleating because they know it's lunchtime.

Roberts gathers scoops of food and pours them into troughs tied along the fence. Most of the sheep - a small male named Buddy excluded - are jumpy around strangers. Buddy loves people; he required extra care when he was first born because his mother abandoned him - it was care Roberts was largely able to give because he spends most of his work days here, on his 90-acre Dayton Mountain farm.

Roberts loves this arrangement.

And it's easy to see why. These open blue skies and mountain-top fields certainly beat the fluorescent lights and water cooler talk of a cube farm down the road.

***

The number of American workers who say they have telecommuted - or, worked from home or a coffee shop instead of going to a bricks-and-mortar office building - is at an all-time, according to Gallup. The fact-gathering group reported that after polling American workers in early August, 37 percent said they have either worked from home or from a remote location instead of going into an office. The total included employees who also reported working from home or a remote location in addition to working in an office, by putting in time on the weekend or in the evening. The total was up from 30 percent in 2008 and only 9 percent in 1995.

The poll result raise an obvious question: Are telecommuters as productive as in-office employees?

Those polled by Gallup gave telecommuters the benefit of the doubt, with 58 percent saying those employees are at least as effective as in-office workers. In 1995, Gallup asked the same question - do you think telecommuters are as efficient? - and only 47 percent of those polled said yes. Still, only 16 percent of those polled said telecommuters are more productive than their in-office counterparts.

***

It's not a secret to employers or their human resources departments that some people simply don't function as well in an office environment. There are, for starters, plenty of distractions in an office, namely other employees. But even simple things like the setting on the thermostat can turn into an attention detractor for some workers.

The New York Times published a story in early August about a study blaming a decades-old math algorithm for calculating office temperature for too-cool temperatures in office buildings, at least according to women. Rigorous debate followed the article's publishing, with men and women all over the country weighing in, many of them while on the clock at work.

For many workers, the best part of their day is leaving the office and going home. There's an obvious solution for employers: let their employees work from home, or another remote location.

Some of Chattanooga's biggest employers do it. Unum and BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, for example, are believers in the practice. At Unum, more than 1,000 employees across the country - and about 400 in the greater-Chattanooga area - telecommute, according to M.C. Guenther, director of corporate communications at the national insurance and benefits provider. And between 40 and 50 percent of Umum's contact center employees now work from home, she says.

In 2002, UNUM premiered its work-at-home program for call center employees, and 6 percent of workers in that department took up the company's offer to work remotely.

"Within five years, that number had increased to 50 percent," says Guenther, "and we've maintained 40 to 50 percent since then."

Meanwhile, at BlueCross BlueShield there are 1,259 telecommuters and more than 2,600 telework employees, or employees with remote access. BlueCross BlueShield is the second-largest employer in Chattanooga, with 4,437 total employees, according to the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce.

***

Esther Van Velze Sharpe, a native of the Netherlands, married an American man, landed in Chattanooga and took a job at BlueCross BlueShield in downtown Chattanooga. Sharpe has worked at the insurance giant for about seven years now. She is a claims expert, and she works from home in Hixson.

"When I first started, I used to love coming to the office," she says.

But when Sharpe gave birth to a son, her balancing act - life, baby, work, home and so on - became dramatically more difficult. If only there was a little more flexibility somewhere, she thought. If only there was more time that could be gained during the day.

She was willing to leave BlueCross BlueShield at one point to find the work flexibility she was looking for. But the company offered her work-from-home status. Sharpe gave it a shot, and soon fell in love with the arrangement.

"It's actually a wonderful position to be in," she says. "I think it's the biggest perk that BlueCross could offer me."

Sharpe says working from home not only freed up more time for her to be with her son, and now younger daughter, but it has also increased her productivity.

"My overall productivity has increased by - " she thinks for a second, and then continues "150 percent. I've done really well, because there are no interruptions at all."

Sharpe also says coming from the Netherlands, she's used to biking to work, which was not an option from her home here.

"Here, you really have no choice but to own a car," she says.

On the day of her interview with Edge, Sharpe said her work day started around 5 a.m., well before a normal day at the office. But it also means today she'll be finished with work in time to pick her son up from school and be part of of his afternoon. Even so, this arrangement probably isn't permanent, she says. Someday, both her children will be older and less dependent on her being at home or able to pick them up from school or shuttle them to activities. When that day comes, Sharpe says she looks forward to perhaps returning to the office.

"That's the one thing I really miss, the interaction with others," she says.

And she doesn't recommend telecommuting for everyone.

"You absolutely have to be focused," she says. "I love to be focused on my screen and just work. When I'm on the clock, I'm working."

Still, "if you are a person that loves to work with people, you would get really lonely at home," she says.

***

Roberts didn't always live so far from work. When he first started at Unum back in early 2000, he lived in a subdivision in Soddy-Daisy and didn't have a son. But when his father died, Roberts was left 90 acres of farmland on Dayton Mountain. Having grown up on a farm, Roberts wanted to pass that experience along to his son - even if it meant moving 45 miles from his downtown Chattanooga office.

"For the first three or four years, I actually drove into work every day," he says. "I made the commute every day."

The commute equaled 90 total miles and two unpaid hours per day. Unum offers a program for its employees to help them find others near them who commute to facilitate carpooling.

"Unfortunately for me, there wasn't anyone in my area at the time," Roberts says.

Eventually, the drive became a strain, but Roberts' department didn't have a work-from-home component. Hoping to escape the drive, he began looking around for other work possibilities nearer to home. He attended a job fair in Dayton, but came up empty-handed.

"Especially where I live," he says. "There aren't that many jobs that pay good in this community."

Roberts had a stroke of luck when he applied for and got a job in a different department at Unum and then discovered that it offered work-from-home positions. The only issue: Gaining work-from-home status required 18 months in the position at the downtown office. Roberts asked his supervisers about bumping up that timeframe, and was handed goals to attain in order to move to a telecommuting status.

That was seven years ago.

"I feel like I actually gained two hours a day in my workday," he says.

Like Sharpe, Roberts says there are fewer distractions at home.

"I don't have people coming over just to chit-chat," he says.

But he admits there are temptations for work-from-home employees, and discipline is required. Roberts keeps all the TVs in the house off during the workday: "Don't ever turn the TV on," he says.

Also like Sharpe, he often starts work a little earlier than normal office hours, which sometimes results in logging out of the computer at the end of the day at 4:30 p.m. - but not always.

"I've worked until midnight many times," he says.

Most of all, Roberts says being at home gives him more time to do things: mow the lawn, feed the animals and take care of things around the house.

"Most companies don't offer that, so I would rank it second or third [best benefit at Unum]," he says. "For me, it's a privilege and it's a benefit."

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