Going Green

There has been a great deal written lately about organizations going "green" or at least trying to. It has finally become financially worth looking at conserving energy in any way you can. Most organizations are looking to the data center as the first likely target for savings. But there might be a better place to look.

The federal government has long had a program underway to promote telecommuting among its employees. Recent releases indicate that a majority of federal workers do not know that they are eligible to work from home much less having done so. Other recently released statistics indicate that enterprises (95% of them anyway) have gone to great lengths to make mobile applications available to their employees in addition to traditional remote access methods. Having grown up in the Washington, D.C. area I can attest to the need to reduce the traffic there as much as possible. With gas prices as high as they are and going higher why are more workers not pressing to work remotely, at least part time?

The answer is management. It turns out that most of today's managers have not become proficient in trusting the people they hire enough to empower them to get things done without being visible in an office somewhere. The best example of this is AT&T both pre and post the merger or buyout with SBC. AT&T used to be a big advocate of having employees work remotely, but as of the end of last year that was all but over. Now it seems that the management of SBC ( now named AT&T) thinks that everyone should work in an office somewhere. This causes more gasoline consumption, more emissions to deal with, and higher costs and growing dissatisfaction on the part of their employees. There is no indication that it was being done for any other reason other than "we do not trust you enough to have you work remote". This is clearly a management failure and not a technology one.

With rising cost, concern about the environment, and employee retention it would seem that this one would be an easy situation to solve. Not every job requires working out of an office, nor do they require constant contact with other coworkers who would most likely email you from their desk 30 feet from you when you are in the office anyway. Telecommuting is an easy strategy to get underway. Most enterprises have the infrastructure to accommodate it, and most workers have access to the tools necessary to make such a policy work for employers.

No new hardware or complicated implementation programs, just good common sense.