THE THIRD WAVE
Nathaniel Samuels, an advisory director of the Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb investment banking house, agrees. Samuels, who already works at home 50 to 75 days a year, contends that “future technology will increase the amount of ‘homework.'” Indeed, many companies are already relaxing their insistence that work be done in the office. When Weyerhaeuser, the great timber-products company, needed a new brochure on employee conduct not long ago, Vice-President R. L. Siegel and three of his staff members met at his home for almost a week until they had hammered out a draft. “We felt we needed to get out [of the office], to avoid the distractions,” says Siegel. “Working at home is consistent with our shift toward flexible hours,” he adds. “The important thing is getting your job done. It’s incidental to us where you do it.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, Weyerhaeuser is not alone. “Many other companies also are letting their employees work at home,” the newspaper reports, among them United Airlines, whose director of public relations allows his staff people to write at home as much as 20 days a year. Even McDonald’s, whose lower-rung employees are needed to staff the hamburger grills, encourages home work among some top executives.
“Do you really need an office as such at all?” asks Booz Allen & Hamilton’s Harvey Poppel. In an unpublished forecast, Poppel suggests that “by the 1990s, two-way communications capability [will have been] enhanced sufficiently to encourage a widespread practice of working at home.” His view is supported by many other researchers, like Robert F. Latham, a long-range planner at Bell Canada in Montreal. According to Latham, “As information jobs proliferate and communications facilities improve, the number of people who may work at home or at local work centres will also increase.”
Similarly, Hollis Vail, a management consultant for the United States Department of the Interior, asserts that by the mid-1980’s, “tomorrow’s word-processing centers” could easily be in one’s own home”; he has written a scenario describing how a secretary, “Jane Adams,” employed by the “Afgar Company” could work at home, meeting her boss only periodically to “talk over problems, and, of course, to attend office parties.”
This same view is shared by the Institute for the Future, which, as early as 1971, surveyed 150 experts in “leading edge” companies dealing with the new information technologies, and spelled out five different categories of work that could be transferred to the home.
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