American business is waking up to smell the sweat socks -- the ones worn by free agents and telecommuters as they lounge in their home offices clad in their grubbies.
Telework and other alternatives to the 9-to-5 life are the focus of alt.office, a conference and trade show that opened Wednesday in San Jose, California. Architects, interior designers, facilities managers, and manufacturers of office furniture will spend three days examining how the work environment influences productivity.
Corporate interest is fueled by the belief that knowledge and innovation are crucial to success, said Cynthia C. Froggatt, principal of Froggatt Consulting in New York City. Froggatt consults with companies such as AT&T and McGraw-Hill on workplace strategies including virtual and nonterritorial offices.
"They're all chasing creativity and innovation. But then they tell employees, 'Come to our office at the time we tell you, sit in this fairly boring cubicle, wear the clothes we tell you to,'" she said. "And then they sit around saying, 'Well, where are the ideas?' when they've taken away all of employees' choices. Corporations haven't gotten it, and that's the point of these conferences."
While business may still be in the dark, workers are figuring it out for themselves, said Daniel Pink, a contributing editor at Fast Company, who stumped his way around the country talking to the self-employed for his January article titled "Free Agent Nation."
Pink estimates 25 million people in the United States are self-employed. "It's kind of incredible that without a single memo from headquarters, one out of five people became free agents," he said.
They're driven, he said, by the need to balance work with family and personal lives and the desire for authenticity. "If you don't have job security anyway, you might as well be yourself on the job."
Pink warned the design-oriented audience that neat new office furniture is not the answer. "Alternative officing is not about recreating the home office somewhere else or redesigning the workplace with pastel colors or nifty baskets on the side of the desk, it's about creating free agentry anywhere -- including within the organization. Don't think flexibility, think liberation."
Liberated workers should be able to choose the time, place, and tools to do their best work, said Duncan Sutherland, who teaches information systems theory at the school of business and public management at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Sutherland is also a consultant to office furniture manufacturer Haworth. "Knowledge creation is a multisensory phenomenon; the key to creative liberation is a rich sensory stew. But offices are constructed for entirely different purposes. We strip the smells out of the building, lower light levels to reduce glare, and thereby impoverish the brain."
Amy Nadasdi, a former manager of workplace transformations for Arthur Andersen in New York, recently became a free agent herself. She came for the networking opportunities at the conference and believes that successful alternative officing strategies are optional, not mandatory.
"Companies are recognizing that they're going to lose their best talent if they don't start to provide different solutions," she said, "but it should be offered as, 'If this is the right thing for you, you have the option of working this way.'"
Besides the human issues, Nadasdi said that the biggest stumbling blocks to successful telecommuting are usually kinks in the technology, such as network connections, and the challenge of ensuring a safe and professional home workplace.
Architect Drew Stelman, principal of Gateway Associates in San Anselmo, California, was drawn to the conference by the ecological implications of alternative office strategies. "While they don't necessarily use 'green' materials in their facilities, companies that allow telecommuting are saving significant amounts of resources like gasoline and the energy used for heating and light," he pointed out.
William McDonough, principal of William McDonough and Partners and founder of the University of Virginia's Institute for Sustainable Design, will speak Thursday on environmentally conscious design. Stelman hopes that these concerns will become more central to discussions on alternative officing.
