By Fiona McQuarrie,
University College of the Fraser Valley

Irina cradled her baby daughter in her arms and looked at the piles of unfinished work covering her desk.  She wondered how such a great idea - telecommuting to her job while working at home - had gone so wrong in only three months.

Irina was a mortgage officer at a large bank. She had joined the bank twelve years ago, and had worked her way through successively more responsible jobs until she achieved her current position four years ago. She enjoyed the work, assisting clients in completing mortgage applications and then processing and approving or rejecting the applications. Irina found it very satisfying to help her clients achieve their dream of owning their own home or business. However, the real estate market in her city had become increasingly competitive, and her employer had responded to the greater demand for mortgages by promising better customer service than the other banks.  This resulted in the mortgage officers working longer or different hours - sometimes as much as 80 hours a week - to be more available to potential clients.

When Irina and her husband discovered that their first child was on its way, they were delighted. But Irina saw that there would be problems when the baby was born. Obtaining full-time day care for a new baby was nearly impossible, not to mention expensive.  She certainly could not continue to work 80 hours a week, and her husband was not able to alter his work schedule to stay home and care for the baby.

So Irina went to her supervisor, David, and her department head, Ottavio, and made a proposal. She offered to continue working full-time once the baby was born, but she wanted to telecommute from home. “Much of my work is on the phone, which I can do from home as well as I can at work,” she told them. “And if I have a computer at home, I can do most of the processing of the applications there as well. I can also work outside regular office hours, because I won’t have to leave when the building closes.” David agreed to the idea, as long as Irina would come into the office once a week for the regular mortgage officers’ meeting. Ottavio was more reluctant, pointing out that a similar scheme had been tried several years ago and was unsuccessful, but eventually he also agreed, since Irina had an exceptional work record.

Irina took a month off work when Sarah was born, but eagerly returned to work as a telecommuter.  The company provided her with a computer, modem and printer at home similar to what she had in her office, and arranged for a courier to deliver and pick up mortgage applications once a day. At first, the telecommuting arrangement worked well. Irina did not have to get dressed up for work,  she did not have to fight traffic or find a parking space, and she was able to work while spending time with her new daughter.

The first major problem Irina encountered was in trying to find a useable place to work in her house. With Sarah’s arrival,  most of the free space in the house had been taken up with baby furniture and supplies. For the first few weeks, Irina tried working at the kitchen table, but she found that  the computer was too bulky to move on and off the table at every mealtime. She eventually purchased a second-hand desk and set it up in a corner of the living room, right next to the television set. While this arrangement allowed her to keep all her work in one place, it also meant that the work was always visible, even when she was trying to relax and watch TV.

Irina then discovered that caring for an infant was far more demanding than she had expected.  Sarah was a good baby, but frequently she would cry when the phone rang and kept crying even after the phone was answered. Irina also found it difficult to arrange times to call clients back, since she had to fit those calls around Sarah’s feeding schedule. And, since Irina often had to get up in the night to take care of Sarah, she frequently felt exhausted during the day. Although Irina had arranged to be available to clients outside of regular office hours, she often found that she was so tired, especially in the evening, that she was not very productive during those times.

Once a week, as agreed, Irina came in to the office for the regular mortgage officers’ meeting. She enjoyed seeing her coworkers, but she was somewhat disturbed by the remarks they made about her new work arrangements. “So what’s happening on all the soap operas on TV? I bet you can watch those whenever you want!” “It must be nice to not have to work as hard as we do here.” Irina also found that while the meetings were informative, there was a lot at work that she was missing out on. Frequently discussion would focus on someone she didn’t know, and only after she asked would she be told that the person had just been hired. People would also leave or be transferred to new positions, and Irina would not know about that either unless it came up in the discussion.  Irina also found that the mortgage officers who worked in the office were getting many more clients than she was, simply because they were available to help new clients visiting the bank’s offices.

After last week’s meeting, David asked to see Irina privately in his office. He told her that he had received several phone calls from clients complaining about a baby crying in the background while they were talking to Irina. He also said that Ottavio had expressed concern about Irina’s level of productivity since she had started telecommuting. Irina asked what the problem with her productivity was. David told her that since she did not have to spend time driving to and from work and dealing with distractions in the office, the bank expected her to be more productive than the other mortgage offices. In fact, David said, Ottavio had even wondered if Irina was working the hours she had promised, since her productivity did not seem to match the hours she claimed she was putting in.

“Well, David,” Irina responded, “I am working as hard as I ever did, and I am doing what I agreed to do, including coming into the office once a week. The company is saving money by not having to provide an office for me here at work, and I am making myself available to clients outside regular office hours as I promised. I don’t know what else I can do.”

“All I can say,” said David, “is that Ottavio is very concerned about your productivity and the image you are communicating to clients. In fact, Ottavio said that these were the same problems the company encountered before when they let people telecommute. If things don’t improve within the next month or so, we will have to ask you to return to your regular hours at the office.”

Discussion Questions

1.   What are the major problems in this telecommuting arrangement?

2.   Is it Irina’s or the bank’s responsibility to solve these problems?

3.   What solutions can you suggest to the problems that you have identified?