All of these electronic innovations—e-mail, shared screens, videoconferencing, and video phone calls—are ways of overcoming physical separation. By the time they become commonplace, they will have changed not just the way we work together but also distinctions now made between the workplace and everywhere else.
In 1994 in the United States there were more than 7 million “telecommuters” who didn’t travel daily to offices but instead “commuted” via fax machines, telephones, and e-mail. Some writers, engineers, attorneys, and others whose jobs are relatively autonomous already stay at home for a portion of their work hours. Salespersons are judged on results; so as long as a professional salesperson is productive, it doesn’t much matter whether he or she is working in the office, at home, or on the road somewhere. Many people who telecommute find it liberating and convenient, but some find it claustrophobic to be at home all the time. Others discover they don’t have the self-discipline to make it effective. In the years ahead, millions of additional people will telecommute at least part-time, using the information highway.
Employees who do most of their work on the telephone are strong candidates for telecommuting because calls can be routed to them. Telemarketers, customer-service representatives, reservation agents, and product-support specialists will have access to as much information on a screen at home as they would on a screen at an office. A decade from now, advertisements for many jobs will list how many hours a week of work are expected and how many of those hours, if any, are “inside” hours at a designated location such as an office. Some jobs will require that the employee already have a PC so he can work at home. Customer-service organizations will be able to use part-time labor very easily.
When employees and supervisors are physically apart, management will have to adapt, and each individual will have to learn to be a productive employee on his or her own. New feedback mechanisms will have to evolve too, so that both employer and employee can determine the quality of work being done.
An employee in an office is assumed to be working the whole time, but the same employee working at home might be credited (perhaps at a different rate) only for the time he or she is actually performing work. If the baby starts crying, Dad or Mom would click “Not Available,” and take care of the child with unpaid minutes away from the job. When the employee was ready once again to focus on the job, he or she would signal availability, and the network would start delivering work that needed attention. Part-time work and job sharing will take on new meanings.
The number of offices a company needs might be reduced. A single office or cubicle could serve several people whose inside hours were staggered or irregular. Already, the major accounting firms Arthur Andersen and Ernst & Young are among the companies that have replaced large numbers of expensive private offices with a smaller number of generic offices, which can be reserved by accountants who are in from the field. Tomorrow, a shared office’s computers, phones, and digital white boards could be configured for that day’s occupant. For part of a day an office’s white-board walls would display one employee’s calendar, family photos, and favorite cartoons, and later on the same whiteboard walls would feature the personal photos or artwork of a different employee. Wherever a worker logged on, his or her familiar office surroundings could follow, courtesy of digital white boards and the information highway.
Information technology will affect much more than the physical location and supervision of employees. The very nature of almost every business organization will have to be reexamined. This should include its structure and the balance between inside, full-time staff and outside consultants and firms.
The corporate reengineering movement starts with the premise that there are better ways to design companies. To date, most reengineering has focused on moving information inside the company in new ways. The next movement will be to redefine the boundary between the company and its customers and suppliers. Key questions to reexamine include: How will customers find out about products? How will customers order? What new competitors will emerge as geography becomes less of a barrier? How can the company do the best job of keeping customers happy after the sale?
Corporate structures will evolve. E-mail is a powerful force for flattening the hierarchies common to large companies. If communications systems are good enough, companies don’t need as many levels of management. Intermediaries in middle management, who once passed information up and down the chain of command, already aren’t as important today as they once were. Microsoft was born an Information Age company, and its hierarchy has always been relatively flat. Our goal is to have no more than six levels of management between me and anyone in the company. In a sense, because of e-mail, there are no levels between me and anyone in the company.
As technology makes it easier for a business to find and collaborate with outside expertise, a huge and competitive market for consultants will arise. If you want someone to help design a piece of direct-response advertising, you’ll ask a software application running on the information highway to list consultants with certain qualifications who are willing to work for no more than a certain rate and have an appropriate time period free. Software will check references for you preliminarily and help you filter out people who aren’t qualified. You’ll be able to ask, “Have any of these candidates worked for us before and gotten a rating above eight?” This system will become so inexpensive to use that you’ll eventually rely on it to find baby-sitters and people to cut your lawn. If you’re looking for work as an employee or contractor, the system will match you with potential employers and be able to send your résumé electronically with the click of a button.
Companies will reevaluate such employment issues as how extensive a legal or finance department they should keep, based on the relative benefits of having expertise inside an organization versus outside it. For particularly busy periods a company will be able to get more help easily without adding more employees and the associated office space. Businesses that successfully draw on the resources available across the network will be more efficient, which will challenge others to do the same.
Lots of companies will eventually be far smaller because using the information highway will make it easy to find and work with outside resources. Big is not necessarily good when it comes to business. Hollywood studios are surprisingly small in terms of permanent employees, because they contract for services—including actors and often facilities—on a movie-by-movie basis. Some software companies follow a similar model, hiring programmers as needed. Of course, companies will still reserve many functions for full-time employees. It would be immensely inefficient to have to bid for the time of an outside professional whenever a company needed something done, especially if the outside consultant had to come up to speed. But a number of functions will be dispersed, both structurally and geographically.
Geographic dispersion will affect much more than corporate structure. Many of today’s major social problems have arisen because the population has been crowded into urban areas. The drawbacks of city life are obvious and substantial—traffic, cost of living, crime, and limited access to the outdoors, among others. The advantages of city life include access to work, services, education, entertainment, and friends. Over the past hundred years most of the population of the industrialized world has chosen to live in urban areas, after consciously or unconsciously balancing the pluses and minuses.