Will Telecommuting Stick?
- William Fulton
- May 12, 2020
- 4 min read
With coronavirus-induced remote work cutting traffic and air pollution by dramatic levels, California’s regional planning agencies are laying plans to keep telecommuting at high levels once the pandemic has subsided. And the state may soon follow suit. "The entire State of California is going through an amazing real-time experiment in cleaner air and less congested roads," Lucy Dunn, head of the Orange County Business Council, said at the California Transportation Commission meeting on May 13. She and fellow commissioner Joseph Lyou, who was a longtime member of the South Coast Management District Board, challenged Caltrans director Toks Omishakin to come up with a plan to incentivize employees to work at home more in order to effectively increase Caltrans's road capacity Omishakin said Caltrans itself had pivoted toward telework -- 85% of its employees now work at home, up from 5% at the beginning of the COVID crisis -- and promised to "look into it". Most regional planning agencies already have a transportation demand management (TDM) program, which is designed to work with employers to provide such traffic-reduction techniques carpool and vanpool services and transit passes. These programs are often undertaken in conjunction with air pollution control districts. But TDM programs have experienced only marginal success, and the potential for remote work – as evidenced by its success during the COVID-19 crisis – appears much more promising than any other technique. “In our region, air quality, where the measuring stations are, we’re 73% better than it was a year ago,” SANDAG’s executive director Hasan Ikhrata said told San Diego’s Channel 7. “We see an opportunity here for more employers to allow their employees to work from home at least some of the time and that could have a huge impact." SANDAG is currently doing a survey of employers to assess their interest. So far the regional planning agencies have taken the lead, but the state might step up as the COVID crisis winds down. “Businesses have implemented telework policies at a scale we’ve never seen before, and meetings that would have taken place in person are now remote,” Louise Bedsworth, executive director of the Strategic Growth Council, told the PPIC Blog recently. “We’ve seen that these sorts of changes can rapidly reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Looking ahead, we can think about how to incorporate some of these changes into how we work.” Traditionally, employers have been skeptical of telecommuting – especially working from home -- because managers have struggled with the challenge of holding employees accountable for their productivity. But the COVID-19 crisis has created a gigantic experiment in how to make telecomuting work. Not all workers can work from home – a wide range of workers in agriculture, industrial plants, the medical field, hotel and restaurants, transportation and many other sectors must work onsite. But the best estimates suggest that about half of the American workforce is currently staying home – and many employers are finding that productivity is holding steady, at least for now. So California’s metropolitan planning organizations and councils of governments, which have traditionally focused on incentivizing alternatives to commuting alone, are quickly pivoting toward a more broad-ranging and sophisticated approach. First, they are providing support to companies and employees who experience barriers that preent them from telecommuting. And second, they are rethinking their commute incentives, which currently assume that employees travel to work every day by the same mode of travel. For example, one of the biggest hurdles many employers and employees face has to do with the technology associated with working at home. In many cases, neither the employer nor the e employee has the equipment required to work at home – and oftentimes employees do not have the broadband service required. “I called up the mayor of Delano and asked if their employees were telecommuting,” said Ahron Hakimi, executive director of the Kern County Council of Governments. “And she said, no, because we don’t have laptops. Well, that’s something we can help with. We can use the COG’s money to buy laptops. And we can help with broadband too.” Indeed, the move toward telecommuting has raised another question: Can funds meant to incentivize employees to commute in alternative ways be used to help them work at home instead, Or, as Brian Griesenbeck, director of data and analytics at SACOG in Sacramento put it, “Can we use vanpool money to provide broadband?” Indeed, Greisenbeck and other SACOG officials have highlighted an important barrier to encouraging more telecommuting: Most incentives and programs are focused on a single mode of commuting. Some funds must be spent providing carpool or vanpool services. Others must be spent on bicycle facilities or transit passes. Many employers provide parking subsidies for their employees. The system, Greisenbeck says, “treats people as tribal” – meaning employees are divided into tribes devoted to one form of commuting only. But he says, “most people commute in a variety of ways.” So the trick will be to combine different governmental programs to encourage the maximum amount of alternative commuting, including remote work. This may require an overhaul in program rules to make funds more flexible – perhaps not just using vanpool money to provide broadband, but also providing more flexible financial incentives to employees, so they might work at home one day, commute by bike or transit the next, and drive alone when necessary. Overall, regional planners see the potential for the telecommute movement to revitalize their moribund TDM programs. Such programs were popular in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when business district management entities often worked together with regional planning agencies to provide carpool matching and vanpool services as well as – in pre-Uber times – cars that could serve as a “guaranteed ride home” in case of an emergency. But in the last 10 to 15 years, TDM programs have not grown and regional planning agencies have had difficulty getting employers interested in them. Prior to COVID-19, telecommuting didn’t get much attention either. Ikhrata told Channel 7 that in 2016, SANDAG received a federal grant to do a pilot telecommuting program with 10 companies. “Frankly, we couldn’t get 10 to participate, only had four,” he said. Now, however, regional planners see the opportunity to seize the moment. Greisenbeck said SACOG might seek to help companies beef up their information technology horsepower and revamp their human resources policies to make sure telecommuting sticks: “How do we help businesses make this part of their culture?” Contacts: Hasan Ikhrata, SANDAG, Hasan.Ikhrata@sandag.org Louis Bedsworth, Strategic Growth Council, louise.bedsworth@sgc.ca.gov Brian Greisenbeck, SACOG, bgriesenbeck@sacog.org Ahron Hakimi, Kern County COG, AHakimi@kerncog.org
