By Sarah Jane Tribble
CONTRA COSTA TIMES
Posted on Thu, Jan. 26, 2006
Tired of juggling long commutes and a family life, Antioch resident Anna Mariano-Morris tapped technology to begin working from home and is now quietly inspiring one local leader.
Contra Costa Supervisor Mark DeSaulnier plans to use Morris' example as a "telecommuter" to execute a board order encouraging county workers to do the same with their jobs. He also hopes to launch a countywide advisory group, joining the ranks of politicians nationwide pushing the work force tool.
"When you look at transportation and growth, there is no one tool," DeSaulnier said. "It's the classic, 'Where are those people commuting?' And here's this woman in the mix of all of them who figured out one of the solutions."
Contra Costa County workers travel an average of 32.1 minutes to work - making it the 10th worst commute in the nation and the worst on the West Coast, according to a 2005 U.S. Census ranking.
About 4.6 percent of Contra Costa's work force travels more than 90 minutes for a job, according the study. Alameda and San Francisco county workers also deal with long commute times, reporting averages of 27.2 minutes and 28.5, respectively.
Morris used to begin her days with a 4:30 a.m. commute to be a concierge at a Silicon Valley hotel, which recently became the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara. She spent an average of 13 hours a day away from home.
But while expecting her second son five years ago, Morris met Skip Rodenbush, a co-founder of Interactive Multimedia Artists based in Santa Monica, and learned about equipment that would allow her to talk with others using a television screen. The hotel invested in the idea.
Now, a live image of Morris is projected eight hours a day on a 50-inch plasma screen in the hotel's lobby. With the help of a flat microphone, speakers and a camera, she can see people within a 20-foot radius and respond to them as if she were actually sitting there.
Morris is a virtual concierge, and she won the Silicon Valley Concierge of the Year award for 2005.
There are indications that an increasing number of employees nationwide are also trying to do their jobs from home. A 2005 study done for WorldatWork, a nonprofit workplace association, found that about 7.7 million full-time employees worked from home at least one day a month from 2001 to 2004. That number jumped to 9.9 million employees in 2005.
A few companies, such as AT&T and Cisco, have embraced telework. In the Bay Area, San Francisco-based Telecommuting Advantage Group reports a recent rise in private businesses finding ways to use telecommuting.
Firm co-founder Rick Albiero, who has an ongoing project with Santa Barbara County, believes increasing commute costs as well as more acceptance by corporate management is spurring interest.
Across the country, Rep. Frank Wolf, a Republican from Virginia, has spent most of the past decade pushing for more telework by federal employees.
His efforts have provided incentives for an increase in government workers using telework and also helped create the Telework Consortium, a nonprofit that analyzes and promotes working from home.
"The challenge is, how do you maintain viable economic development and do that in a context where people have to spend two hours to get to work and trucks can't do deliveries?" said William Mularie, chief executive of the consortium.
But employers and employees have been slow to use cameras and phones in place of an office presence, in part because of a cultural perspective, Mularie said.
"You punch the time clock, and if you are there then you are working, rather than the metric being what you produce," he said.
In Virginia's Loudoun County, about 30 miles west of Washington, Supervisor Lori Waters began using teleconferencing equipment to hold meetings, avoid traffic and to send a message that it is useful. She meets with constituents and others a couple of times a week by projecting her face in a conference room.
"It's one level of commitment to just have a voice, but there are idiosyncrasies you can't pick up over the phone," she said.
In his early visionary stages, Contra Costa Supervisor DeSaulnier said that at the very least he could set up a teleconference room for his office.
On a larger scale, he wants to introduce Morris to the county's mayors and brainstorm how to encourage telecommuting in their work forces. They could try to apply Webcasting to 5 percent of the county's work force, he theorized.
"What kind of difference would it make in getting people off the roads?" DeSaulnier asked.
On a recent afternoon in her second-story home office, Morris reflected on how her life has changed since ditching the commute.
"I look at my kids and I don't know how they would have turned out if I wouldn't have been there ... if I hadn't worked from home," she said.