This could be a horse we’ll ride for a while: Telecommuting as a way of addressing both employment and energy issues. Turns out it’s a current area of active public policy research under the more contemporary tag of “telework.”

Totally unrehearsed, we wondered (see previous post) if it wouldn’t make good economic sense to reward small business–which accounts for two thirds of all new jobs creation–for hiring telec0mmuters (sometimes called virtual workers). The energy savings could be enormous, we noted, if even, say, 30 to 50 percent of jobs became work-from-home–as opposed to burning billions of gallons of gasoline in traditional commuting.

That was just a stab in the dark, a what-if. Well, it actually turns out that with today’s information technology, 40 percent of all work may lend itself to that model, according to Undress for Success, a major on-line aggregator for work-at-home research. Currently only 4 percent of U.S. workers actually work from home.

This research purports that if even half of the potential were realized, we could:

• Save more than 450 million barrels of oil (57 per cent of Gulf oil imports) valued at more than $19 billion (based on $42/barrel).
• Reduce wear and tear on our highways by 180 billion miles a year, saving communities more than $3 billion in highway maintenance.
• Save more than 150,000 people from traffic-related injury or death. Accident-related costs would be reduced by almost $18 billion a year.
• Increase national productivity by 6.2 million man-years or $200 billion worth of work.
• Save businesses $194 billion in real estate, electricity, absenteeism and turnover. Together with the value of the increased productivity, that’s roughly $7,900 per employee and more than double the average first-year cost per teleworker. Additional savings would result from reductions in other utilities, janitorial service, security, maintenance, paper goods, coffee and water service, leased parking spaces, ADA compliance, equipment, furniture and office supplies.
• Save enough in office electricity to power 1.5 million homes for a year.
• Save employees between $2,500 and $11,000 in transportation and work-related costs. In addition, many would also be able to cut daycare and eldercare costs.

Now, take all that one step further: Enact incentives to distressed businesses for at-risk employees to become virtual workers.

I suggest it’s time to start a movement. Let’s call it E/E Now (for the employment & energy equation).

Thanks to Susan D. for her Reinvent Your Work LinkedIn discussion group contribution of one of the more compelling articles that has crossed our e-desk in a while. This must-read by Drake Bennett–”The end of the office… and the future of work: We love to hate the workplace, but we’ll miss it when it’s gone”–was published recently in the Boston Globe.

I won’t attempt to address all of its points here, except for one. And this one was a forehead-smacker: The enormous cost–especially in terms of energy resources–of the mass daily commute of tens of millions of people to what we’ve here been calling the traditional factory/office-model job in the Internet age. Have you ever sat in rush-hour traffic pondering this enormous waste of resources, in most cases because that’s just the way it’s always been done?

The average commute, according to the bean counters, is about 8,000 miles a year. If the average car gets (almost) 25 miles per gallon, that’s about 320 gallons per employee annually to get to and from work. Now multiply that times 150 million employees, and you’re starting to get into some really big numbers.

So big, in fact, that my calculator tells me that’s 48,000 million gallons of gasoline. Somebody who’s better at math than me, please correct me, but I think that’s 48 billion gallons of gas per annum. Whatever that mega-number is, what if we could save even 30, 40 or 50 percent of it?

Talk about killing multiple birds with one stone. President Obama has proposed simple tax credits for small businesses that add staff. Even better, what if we gave similar breaks to employers who employed telecommuters?  Not every job lends itself to that model, but an increasing number do.

it would be a win-win. Have you noticed that gasoline is a good deal cheaper than it was a year and half ago before the Great Recession? What if we reduced demand even more? Think about it.

Monday I showed up for only the second job interview I’ve had in 14 months of unemployment. The first one ended with a quick Dear John letter the next day, and it was fairly clear that my problem had been showing up there with gray hair.

This time I had much higher hopes based on three factors: 1. It was a Christian organization, and (despite growing evidence to the contrary) I still tend to expect higher standards of behavior 2. I was all over the qualifications with only one exception 3. Through a friend, I knew exactly what that exception was, and I had four days to remedy even that deficit.

When my wife read the job req, she said, “This reads like it was written for you.” I felt the same way.

The position was director of communications for a missions organization, supposedly supervising the work of people such as who did hands-on work in graphic design. Nevertheless, knowing that I’d had no exposure to a particular software application, I spent four days eating, sleeping & breathing this application.

The only problem was 0n the day of the interview and test, it turned out that my prep–viewing every last video tutorial produced by the software manufacturer and replicating it on my home computer–had not prepared me adequately for the specific challenge contained in this test.

I ran out of time and failed to complete the last two items on the test. All I can say is what my gut tells me: This was an easy way to justify what they wanted to do anyway when they saw I was a senior.

I know God is in control, and He must have something better for me. I have full confidence in that. Yet, I also know that discrimination is alive and well in America. It may not be racial anymore. But if you happen to have gray hair, watch the heck out.

And we’re going to have to do something about that, my friends.

Quotable quote: “Your need for expensive toys or vacations is often correlated with your level of loathing for your job.”

That’’s another golden nugget from Pamela Slim in Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur (Portfolio/Penguin, 2009), which we’ve visited a couple times before. Pamela explains:

When you can’t stand your daily working existence, your need to escape rises dramatically. Often, you think you must indulge in luxurious vacations with lavish food, endless tropical drinks, and extreme extracurricular activities in exotic locations. You reason, “I must make this one week the absolute antithesis of my daily life the other fifty-nine weeks of the year.” The problem is, at about day three you begin to dread the return home, and your frantic need to enjoy every second can lead to disappointment. By contrast, when your everyday working life is pretty darn happy, a family Scrabble night can provide as much emotional connection, fun, and stress relief as a week-long stint in Jamaica. Minus the sun damage.

Ever been there? If I didn’t know better, I’d say Pamela had been spying on me. I’d say most of our family vacations were more or less disappointing for me because I had such unrealistically heightened expectations.

The light went on for me 10 years ago when we set out with our two youngest daughters for Mesa Verde National Park on the other side of Colorado. It was supposed to be a memorable camping trip in an archeologically significant site. I was so stressed-out by work–in my dream job, no less–I really needed this to be good.

The closer we drew to Mesa Verde, a curious cloud of smoke grew in the distance. “Gee, I hope that’s not Mesa Verde,” I chuckled as we drove. Actually, it was the historic Mesa Verde fire of 2000. We were among the first arrivals to be turned away at the park entrance.

Dejected, we managed to get a camp site in a private operation across the highway, from where we had a front-row seat for watching a national park burn. The question “why me, Lord?” haunted me most of the next day while trying to salvage something from this vacation.

It was then that I began to realize something was out of whack in life. Some of it was me–I needed to make an attitude adjustment. Now I realize I also needed a change in that thing I did five days a week that helped make me that way. Sometimes the price we pay for the trophy job and that “big house in the city,” as Pamela puts it, is way too high.

Does this ring any bells with anyone else?

Last week we suggested looking to the local church as a great though often overlooked resource in the job search. More and more churches are seeing the unemployment problem as an opportunity to be a good neighbor to those whose lives have been disrupted by the Great Recession.

The help comes in many forms–hosting jobs clubs, material assistance to families on the brink, even dedicated facilities with computers and counselors to help in the job search. And it’s usually free.

Here are are a few that have been identified by our researcher Steve Kipp:

Recurring Workshop Approach

Career Solutions Workshop offers a 12-week Workshop for Finding a Job God’s Way in locations such as Dallas, Fort Worth, Grand Prairie, Carrollton, and Euless, TX;  Clearwater, FL; Columbus, OH; Detroit, MI (817-354-4864). Assists more than 500 job-seekers each year. (David Rawles also has a nationally syndicated talk show every Saturday morning; broadcasts, including past airings, available online.)

Prototypical Networking and Support Group Organizations

Career Transitions Ministries Network, P. O. Box 797771, Dallas, TX 75379, 972-307-2080

C3G, based out of 4350 North Point Parkway, Alpharetta, GA 30022 (678-892-5000). Re-Employment Ministry of Small Groups–providing practical, emotional and spiritual support for unemployed groups members.

Networking in Christ: Available Talent Chapters, 6660 Delmonico Drive, Suite #171, Colorado Springs, CO 80919 (719-359-4460). New chapters beginning in North Dallas, Frisco, Alliance and Hurst-Euless-Bedford portions of Texas. In addition to its regular business chapters, organization builds upon focus that it’s better to give than receive in offering support, practical assistance and tips, speakers and networking and encourages those seeking employment to visit and introduce themselves at business chapter meetings.

Career Coach Referral Networks

Career Coach Academy, 877-659-3769. (Please note that CCA offers a “Christian track training” for its coaches, but not all coaches listed have been screened or evaluated firsthand by this author to pinpoint which coaches have undergone such training.)

Organizations Providing Nation-wide Networking Referrals to Local Church-Based Employment Assistance Groups:

Crossroads Career Network, based in Charlotte, NC. This network is growing. As of publication, it had referrals in 20 states–although in some states it may be only one city. (States: AL, AZ, CA, CO, FL, GA, IL, IN, KS, MI, MN, MO, NY, NC, OH, OK, OR, PA, SC, TN, TX, WI; country: Port Elizabeth, South Africa.)

Examples of Other Church-Based Unemployment Support Groups

Job Seekers, Our Father Lutheran Church, Centennial, CO.

Orlando/Central Florida: Christian Help.

Mt. Pisgah Get2Work, Mt. Pisgah United Methodist Church, Alpharetta, GA.

Woodstock First Baptist Job Assistance Ministry, Woodstock, GA.

The BUMC Employment Ministry, Barrington United Methodist Church, Barrington, IL.

More Than Carpentry Christian Ministries, St. Louis and Wellston, MO.

Church-based support groups in Mecklenburg County, NC.

Prestonwood Baptist Church, Plano TX, in conjunction with Career Transition Ministries Network, Crossroads Career Network, and Christian Coach Academy, hosted a Career Transition Ministry Leaders Conference April 25, 2009.

Falls Church, Virginia: The Falls Church, The Jobs! Ministry has a 17-year history.

I will be the first to admit that the home office environment or self-employment is not for everybody. To paraphrase the old saying about the lawyer who represents himself: “The worker who goes into business for himself has a fool for a boss.”

That is, quitting your job to work for yourself is no automatic solution to the troubled career. If some of your woes are of your own making or due to your own shortcomings, hiring yourself to be your new boss may do no more than trade one set of problems for another.

Not everyone is sufficiently self-disciplined or self-directed by nature to work alone, just as some people are not by nature team players. According to management consultant and professor Harry Levinson, there are some psychological needs that the workplace provides that are absent at home—principally a sense of achievement and  connectedness, the “need to depend on others and be depended upon.”

Levinson is founder of the Levinson Institute, Waltham, Massachusetts, which focuses on the psychological aspects of leadership in organizations. These factors are remarkably reminiscent of the first two of our three universal human needs—relationship, impact, and integrity.

Brad Schepp, author of The Telecommuter’s Handbook, says a sense of isolation and disconnectedness is the biggest drawback for the worker at home. “People who telecommute full-time are especially prone to feeling they are no longer part of the team. Psychologists call this company-connectedness feeling organizational identification, and it is important because how much you identify with your company affects how high you’ll climb the corporate ladder.”

Some of that isolation can be combated with commonsense approaches—staying in touch with others by phone, lunch dates, e-mail, and just getting out of the office periodically.

Then there are others who work fine solo but face the opposite problem—too many intrusions and distractions from friends, associates, and other family members. Or maybe it’s the temptation to distract themselves by playing computer solitaire, listening to the radio, watching television, surfing the Internet, or chatting excessively on the phone.

Possessing a vivid imagination for failure, an acute drivenness, and the gift of worrying, I have rarely experienced those distractions for long before I start barking, either at others to back off or at myself to get serious. If anything, my own temptation is the opposite—to let my work life intrude into my personal and family life through crash projects and long hours, which is another classic pitfall.

The fact that headcount-conscious, downsizing U.S. corporations are turning increasingly to outsourcing actually creates new opportunities for entrepreneurs and the growing class of professional independent contractors.

In many ways, the historic trend in the relationship between work and life is coming full circle, to the point of giving entirely new meaning to the term “cottage industry.” Companies large and small are being affected by these changes in corporate culture and personal lifestyle.

The Big Four accounting firm of Ernst & Young, for example, adopted “hoteling” for some workers. Instead of being assigned offices and working behind desks, the company’s management consultants in some cities spend most of their time out at client sites. When  they are in the office, they are assigned working space in some common office areas set aside for the purpose. Information technology is making it increasingly possible to perform many jobs from anywhere.

Efficiency-minded American business is discovering that in many cases the person who works at home is actually more productive than in the office. An average 15 to 20 percent increase in productivity has been associated with working at home. Factors include fewer interruptions and distractions than in the traditional workplace with all of its meetings, announcements, paperwork, and water-cooler chitchat.

But it would be premature to pronounce the traditional work environment obsolete.  Clearly, working at home is more applicable to service industries—such as computer and other information workers, accountants, sales reps, insurance adjusters, and market research analysts.

There is also the intangible human factor. Those who have been working at home may be those most equipped and motivated to do so, and therefore more likely to succeed. As their ranks grow–approximately 20 percent a year–only time will tell if this trend holds up.

Telecommuters, for example, have to justify themselves to their bosses and co-workers with hard results to avoid the unspoken suspicion of lounging about. The self-employed at home have a more direct incentive: Produce or don’t eat. There is no organizational safety net beneath them if they slack off.

But, as one who routinely pays those dues, I see nothing wrong with being responsible for myself. Anything else is probably doomed to fail in the long run, anyway.

It breaks your heart to hear how a certain class of people in America are treated today. Consider, for example, the words of “William”:

Because of reversals in the markets, I was compelled two years ago to re-enter the work force. I have a PhD and experience in academic administration that includes advanced skills in writing, speaking, budget management, personnel management, etc. I have applied for over 60 positions and been granted three interviews. Each time, I was recommended as a finalist, and each time was not hired. Corporate America won’t even grant me an interview. I have strong reason to believe that age discrimination is affecting my lack of success, but proving it is another matter since the hiring process is routinely conducted in a black box. Finally, I landed a position in retail sales that is both stressful and financially unrewarding. I’m 67 years old, in excellent health (I feel about 45), and lead an energetic lifestyle, but can’t break through the stereotypes. Any suggestions?

I totally relate. In 14 months of unemployment, I am reporting for only my second employment interview next Monday. (Pray for me!) My first one was ab0rted when I showed up with gray hair….

The major problem is the sorry state of age discrimination case law today, which has given employers a license to steal. Despite the fact that age discrimination complaints are up 30 percent over a year ago, few lawyers will even take such cases because the odds are so poor.

I think the answer is not through the courts, but through people power. They didn’t hear us during the town hall meetings. They didn’t hear us during the march on Washington. They didn’t hear us during the Tea Parties. They started to hear us in the Massachusetts upset. I predict that they’ll really start to hear us when a leader arises who can really tap into the angst of the Boomers.

This a gargantuan demographic. If every person over the age of 50, for example, threatened not to pay taxes, this thing would be over in a heartbeat. We are the ones who pay 75 percent of everything that happens in America. That’s what I call power.

Anybody with me?

P.S. Can you believe that some people are challenging my right to free speech because I’m t0o pro-business? As preposterous as that is, I undererstand the psychopathology and accept its implications…

It never would have entered my mind to do anything so crassly partisan–until the left started piling on us recently. (They can be nasty!)

So, here goes. How about this for partisan?

Congratulations, Scott! May every seat in Congress be the people’s seat.

The first iteration of Back to Work! in multimedia is done. Let me know if you’d like a copy. I’ll also try to post one that’s clickable here.