City, county workers experiment with homework.

Southland takes the lead in telecommuting experiment

Since January, about 325 Los Angeles City Hall workers have failed to show up at their downtown jobs at least one day a week -- and they haven't even been docked. It's not part of a union action or payroll glitch but a pilot program to see how effective telecommuting can be in slashing smog and gridlock.

When fully geared up, the program will include 500 city staffers working at home one day a week instead of braving the Southland's often-clogged freeways.

"People in the program, almost without exception, claim that they love it," said Walter Siembab, project manager for the city's telecommuting program. "It gives them more control over their family life. . . . We think it's the wave of the future."

That prediction could prove more than wishful thinking about the benefits of the electronic age.

Workload productivity by telecommuters, compared to productivity inside city office space, has generally increased, in some cases by three percent. Indeed, the prospect that telecommuters would spend too much time watching soap operas, dotting on children and spouses or toiling on other projects just hasn't materialized, as skeptics worried. Neither have there been major blowouts with organized labor.

"Typically we have found from focus groups that productivity and quality of life goes up, sick days go down and retention is higher," Siembab said. "What's more, managers say it's working. Even the most conservative supervisors say productivity is no worse than in the office."

Surprisingly, the advantages of telecommuting have come on the cheap -- especially when compared to the costs of building a 300-mile, $150-billion county rail system during the next 30 years or mandatory carpool programs.

Besides some in-house administrative and training costs, the city has only had to fork out $284,000 to a private consultant who has crafted, implemented and will evaluate the demonstration project when it ends next June. In-house training to teach the program to workers and managers only takes about two hours.

Another reason expenses have been kept down is that participants use their own computers or bring "non-electronic" work home with them. Roughly 60 percent of the city telecommuters have their own computers and bring in their own disks when they return to City Hall, Siembab said.

Agencies with the largest participation in the program are the City's Attorney's office, with 32 workers, the Planning Department, with 24 staffers, and 147 Information Services' employees. The Los Angeles Police Department has 107 officers enrolled, including 18 in its involved-shooting investigative unit and five or six in internal affairs.

Right now, officials are doing the final preparations to set up three or four "satellite centers," where city personnel who prefer working close to, but not at, home can do their jobs without driving all the way into City Hall. Likely sites are in Van Nuys, San Pedro and the Mid-Wilshire areas.

"Part of this project is seeing, as we get the results, what fraction of the city work force you spread telecommuting to. It could be half of all city employees, but that is something we'll have to find out," said Jack Nilles, the city consultant with West Los Angeles-based Jala Associates.

While Los Angeles is believed to be the first major U.S. city to move forward with a telecommuting program, it is hardly the first public entity to test the flexible worksite waters. Two years ago, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors endorsed plans for more than 1,850 county employees to work from home two to three days a week, in some cases four days.

Since that time, Seattle, San Diego and Orange County have taken their cues from Los Angeles, and Ventura and other Southland cities are watching the results of L.A.'s pilot regimen. The state, itself, has a 1,000-worker telecommuting program.

According to Nancy Apeles, who oversees the county program, "The costs of the program have been minimal compared to the savings."

Across the board, productivity has risen between 20 and 33 percent. In the assessor's office alone, telecommuting savings has totaled $5,000 a month, Apeles said.

Originally, however, the Service Employers International Union, Local 660, the union representing the majority of the county's 80,000-member work force, wasn't wild about telecommuting. Union leaders wanted the county to pick up the tab for the computers, modems and faxes used by telecommuters and believed seniority should be a major factor in deciding who gets to work from their homes.

While labor concerns have been eased, primarily because the costs borne by workers have been small, they still could resurface, Apeles said.

Unlike the city program, the county is more liberal in whom it allows to telecommute, though both entities their work-at-home staffers to secure approval from supervisors.

"The main ingredient is that the manager trusts the employee as someone who can work independently and has good time-management skills," added Apeles. "Right now, we have telecommuters ranging from secretaries and lower level clerks to the director of beaches and harbors, hospital administrators, computer programmers and deputy probation officers."

At the city level, most telecommuters are generally seasoned employees in the lower and middle levels of the work force. Staffers are generally prohibited from telecommuting before of after weekends or holidays to deter the natural inclination for consecutive days off, said the city's Siembab.

Both city and county officials expect to see lower health costs by telecommuters, though definitive studies have yet to come in. Neither entity has reported any workers' compensation claims by staffers working from home.

If the program was vastly expanded, major costs related to parking subsidies and garage construction could be trimmed. At the same time, though, both city and county officials declined to predict whether elected officials would agreed to buy into such an increase.

While telecommuting is gaining popularity in the public sector, private businesses seem less wild about it. A survey by Mid Wilshire-based Commuter Transportation Services found 90 percent of workers offered telecommuting would grab the chance, but management at most large companies were much less willing to grant it. According to that study, only 7 percent of Southern California companies with 100 or more workers offered the work-at-home option.

That survey conflicted, however, with figures collected by the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which requires all local companies with 100 or more workers to develop rideshare plans to cut congestion and smog. Of the 5,000 plans in the air district's hands, about 20 percent have some type of telecommuting regimen.

Locally, companies like the Los Angeles Times, Pacific Bell and IBM have established work-from-home programs. Nationwide, there are about 5.5 million people who telecommute, up 1.5 million workers from a year earlier.

"The fundamental issue is that businesses don't like to innovate now when it comes to management style," said Nilles, the city consultant. "Their rule seems to be is that if it works, don't fix it."

Because of population growth and urban sprawl, telecommuting would have to be embedded past government bureaucracies into companies large and small to produce a noticeable impact on smog and congestion, according to AQMD spokesperson Claudia Keith.