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Capital
One is conducting one of the more interesting
experiments in organizational management today. In its
"Future of Work" pilot project, the credit
card giant is lavishing funds on a radical rethinking of
the relationship between workers and the workplace. If
successful, the program will make Capital One more
competitive by boosting productivity, giving employees
more control over their home/work balance and cutting
real estate overhead - all but guaranteeing that the
"Future of Work" model will replicate faster
than a bird flu virus in a Chinese restaurant.
If
the Future of Work meets expectations, it also will send transportation planners back to their
computer models to recalculate projections for traffic,
congestion and the need for giant tax increases to pay
for more roads and transit projects. The United States,
with Virginia in the vanguard, is on the cusp of a
workplace revolution with consequences for
transportation policy almost as momentous as the 19th century
migration of the workforce from scattered farms to centralized factories.
That's
a big build-up, I know. What kind of project possibly have such a
dramatic effect?
Cap
One owes its success in the cut-throat credit card
business to an uncanny ability to spew out a continual
stream of innovations. Along with its trademark
methodology of testing and learning -- constantly
testing the marketplace with variations of the basic
credit-card product, and learning from the response --
Cap One regards the creativity of its employees as its
greatest sustainable competitive advantage. The company
gives inordinate attention to nurturing its
collaborative corporate culture: recruiting employees
who will thrive in that culture, and equipping them with
the tools they need to work effectively in it.
The
Future of Work experiment is taking place mainly at the
Cap One's West Creek campus, west of Richmond, with a
similar arrangement, on a smaller scale, at the
company's corporate headquarters in Tysons Corner. It
grows almost organically out of the company's previous Human Resource
initiatives.
When
planning the West Creek campus several years ago, Cap
One designed the facilities not simply to consolidate a
workforce of several thousand employees but to create a
physical environment where "associates" could find a workspace
that would match their work needs. Whether employees
want to zone out while jogging along an extensive
network of trails, meditate in a tree house, set up a
laptop on a bench outside or conduct a brainstorming
session over pizza in "the village," Cap One
offers a wide variety of settings in which to work.
The
company also has equipped "agile project
rooms" with state-of-the-art teleconferencing
capabilities to facilitate collaboration over great
distances. A digital
image of partners or co-workers in other cities appears
on a wall-sized screen that makes it appear as if the
meeting rooms are physically attached. Thoughts
scribbled on white boards appear simultaneously on the
white boards of the other room.
Meanwhile,
Cap One has established a reputation as one of the most
progressive employers in the Richmond region. The
company combines its emphasis on teamwork and collaboration
with a sensitivity toward employees' need to achieve a
work-life balance. Many Cap
One employees enjoy wide latitude about where
they work and when they work so they can juggle
conflicting responsibilities at home and the office.
Now,
pushing
the envelope in flexibility and mobility, the Future of
Work has abolished the personal desk. Although
certain categories of employees, particularly
administrative staff, remain tied to a fixed location,
most employees are not. They communicate with cell
phones, blackberries and wireless laptops. They can work
at home, or from the neighborhood Starbucks for all it
matters, when their physical presence isn't required at
work. When associates know they need to come into the
office, they reserve a desk or meeting room for the time
they will be there.
"Our
work is very technology rich, very team based, very
mobile," explains Larry Ebert, vice president of
real estate and one of the key players behind the Future
of Work. "We enable people to work effectively any
place within our campus, or at home, or working at some
other venue that is appropriately wired."
For
students of transportation policy, the most fascinating
aspect of Cap One's experiment is that 1,100 Future of
Work associates are working in an office originally
designed for 600. No one is being crammed into
Dilbert-styled cubicles. Rather, at any given time, some
500 people are working outside the office -- some in
collaborative facilities on campus, others off the
campus entirely. The Future of Work is still in the
pilot phase and there has been no final evaluation,
cautions Ebert, but the indications so far are
encouraging.
Just
ponder that: A Fortune 500 corporation may have figured
out a way to cut its requirements for office space
nearly in half. Many of those employees are working at
home, or they're driving into work at irregular
times. That's a lot fewer people clogging the roads
at rush hour.
While
Capital One may be the most high-profile company in
Virginia experimenting with the relationship between
workers and the workplace, it is hardly alone. The
Future of Work is part of a broader movement driven by
powerful technological forces. Workers are capable of
working more autonomously than ever because a tidal wave
of technological innovation -- inexpensive cell phones,
pagers, blackberries, personal digital assistants, wireless laptops and secure
wireless networks -- allows them to work in ways they
never could before. They can pack the entire content of
their desks, down to the digital of photos of the wife
and kids, into their laptops and take it with them
anywhere.
And they can stay connected by voice and e-mail.
This
is no passing fad like the brief 1990s infatuation with
"tele-commuting." The trend is fundamental, driven
by literally hundreds of technology companies, systems
integrators and management consultants. Just type the
phrase "mobile workforce" into Google and
you'll find 1,060,000 results. Scroll through, and
you'll find the names of hundreds of companies aiming to
make money enabling other businesses to go mobile. The
makers of microchips and routers, the software
developers, the telecommunications giants, all have a
stake in making it easier for you to work away from
the office.
Technology
companies aren't investing billions of dollars on a
lark: They see that the nature of work itself is
morphing. It's a slow
process, but it's remorseless, driven by changes in
global trading patterns. Increasingly, the United States
is exporting many of the jobs -- manufacturing, call
centers, back-office clerical operations -- that require
people to work at a fixed location. Increasingly, people
are shifting to knowledge-intensive jobs that entail the
creation of new products, development of new services
and the solving of complex problems, all of which
require intensive interaction with customers, partners
and suppliers. Those interactions frequently take place
outside the employee's home office.
In
a recent survey, The Yankee Group, a Boston research and
consulting firm, found that 37 percent of the
workforce can be considered "mobile." A mobile
worker, is one who spends 20 percent of his time away
from the primary workspace, says Gene Signorini,
research director of enterprise mobility. And he expects
the number to increase -- as much as a percentage point
per year. "As the mobile technologies mature,"
he says, "it's easier to become mobile."
Who
are these mobile workers? The Yankee Group classifies 45
percent as mobile professionals (IT workers,
managers, executives, consultants, knowledge workers).
Another 20 percent work in field sales, and another
14 percent of field service. The balance consists of a grab bag
of occupations from police officers to delivery workers.
While
technology makes it possible for people to go mobile,
the business imperatives to do so are those cited by Capital One. A mobile
workforce is more productive: People work where they can
best get the work done. Not many corporations offer Cap
One's fabulous campus setting, but anyone can choose to
work at home, out of a coffee shop, in a restaurant or
out of someone else's office, depending on their
schedule and their preferences. A mobile workforce also
has higher job satisfaction. Thanks to the ability to
always stay in touch, mobile workers have unprecedented
flexibility, which gives them a better handle on their work/life balance.
Employees will gravitate to companies whose policies
allow them to escape from the office to see little
Johnny's soccer game or little Mary's music recital.
Finally, a mobile workforce translates into lower office
overhead. By dumping the contents of the desk into a
laptop, companies can abolish the outmoded practice of
assigning a personal desk to every employee and whack as
much as 50 percent out of their real estate costs.
Capital One is a leader, but it's hardly the only company coming to grips
with the mobile workforce, says John Vivadelli,
president of AgilQuest Corporation, a Richmond developer
of software that measures office utilization and allows
employees to schedule office space and conference rooms.
(Full disclosure: AgilQuest is a client of my company,
Bacon & Eggheads.) Major accounting firms active in the Virginia
marketplace have adopted his technology, as have a
number of major technology firms. Even a federal
government agency -- the Treasury Inspector General for
Tax Administration -- has saved a bundle in reduced real
estate leases in a pilot project in Atlanta.
Although
companies adopt mobile workforce strategies for their
own reasons --boosting productivity, slashing real estate
overhead -- there is a significant benefit to the rest
of us. Mobile workers are far less likely to fighting
for lane space as we hop on the same roads driving to
the same office clusters at the same times of the day. The
greater the number of people who work at home, and the
greater the number who delay their trip to the office until after
rush hour, the less the pressure on the Virginia
Department of Transportation to add more transportation
capacity.
Transportation
planners make projections of future demand for roads and
highways based on past experience. The trouble is, the
economy is transitioning to a new worker-workplace model
for which there is no precedent. Virtually every
observer of the mobile workforce cites as one of the
biggest benefits the ability to avoid the stress and
frustration of rush hour. Indeed, if congestion
continues to worsen, the incentive to switch to a mobile
workforce only increases. There may be a downside,
however: Mobile workers may spend more time driving from
location to location throughout the business day, adding
to congestion outside of rush hour. The
only thing that seems certain is that the rise of the
mobile workforce will scramble all the old commuting patterns in
ways that are not entirely predictable.
Sadly,
many of Virginia's business and political leaders seem hell
bent upon pushing through a major tax increase -- likely
$1 billion or higher -- based on the conviction that
traffic and congestion will continue to worsen over the
next 20 years as it has during the past 20 years. I
would beg them to first visit the Capital One campus in
Goochland County. There, they'll see that the workplace of
the Knowledge Economy is changing in profound ways, and
so are the commuting patterns of Knowledge Workers.
Jacking up taxes without pausing to understand the
implications of these societal shifts amounts to
legislative malpractice.
If
Virginia's legislators don't bother to visit Capital
One, they should at the very least heed another
experiment, this one taking place in Northern Virginia.
Under the auspices of the General Services
Administration, Lockheed Martin has set up a network of
15 "telework centers" around the metro area:
seven in Virginia, six in Maryland, one in West
Virginia, and one in the district.
These centers are typically located only five to 10
minutes from workers' homes. They are stocked with
computers, broadband Internet access, printers, lockable
personal storage, fax machines, scanners, copiers and
other office amenities. The centers offer both public
and private workers the flexibility to reserve a
workspace whenever and wherever they want. People can
make reservations online from home, the office or even
while on vacation. If this project is successful, it
could become the prototype for an entire new category of
real estate: the neighborhood office.
Drawing
upon the experience of Capital One, Lockheed Martin and
the growing ranks of other organizations shifting to a
mobile workforce, the state could undertake a similar
experiment for its own workforce in Richmond for a few
million dollars. That would seem a paltry sum in
comparison to the billions that legislators want to
spend on expensive road and transit projects.
The
evidence is there for anyone willing to open their eyes.
We're in the midst of a workplace revolution; traffic
patterns will change irrevocably. Let us pray that
our lawmakers have enough foresight to build a
transportation system based on where Virginians are
going, not where they are coming from.
--
July 25, 2005
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