Telecommuting

Telecommuting is a new buzzword and it is becoming more common. The major factors are rising gas prices, frustration with long commutes and evolving technology. In my business, I use telecommuting about one third of the year. I have also rejected jobs which are much better paying because of the long drive even though I had done that in the past. Currently, I have a tax business and I have an anchor job as an independent paralegal. The tax business is 1 mile from my home and I am eyeing properties for the future that are within 200 yards of my home. The company with my anchor job is 1.5 miles from my home. That is a departure from the past where I often faced commutes from 20 to 50 miles one way or 40 to 100 miles of driving daily.
So why do I telecommute? You have to understand the tax business. The tax season generally runs from January (tax year ends in December, can’t file a return until the tax year ends) to April 15 (the tax filing deadline). In between there is the occasional late filer for various reasons but that is by appointment only. During the tax season, it is like being a car salesman, if you aren’t there when the buyer stops by you don’t make the sale. That means I have to quit the job or do the job from my tax office during times without an appointment scheduled.
Fortunately, my anchor job lends itself to telecommuting. My base responsibility is to monitor the internet, mostly eBay, for the company’s products. It is basically a marketing and distribution company. While I take care of a number of other projects during the period I do go into the legal department, I really can handle it from anywhere I have an internet connection. There are a number of issues that arise. First off, when I find violations of the company’s intellectual property (unauthorized picture use or counterfeits being sold), I save the auction or web screen as an Adobe PDF file. When I am away from the office, I put these on a flash drive along with the correspondence and notices. Once a week I go in to download the auctions from the flashdrive. In the past, we printed out the auctions and kept paper files. This made it clumsy because if I had to refer to a past auction, the mountains of paper were at the legal department’s offices. I had to wait to take care of that during the weekly visit. The paperless office is a wonderful thing. Whenever an angry seller whose auction was removed or outside counsel preparing to file a lawsuit needs to see proof of what the auction contained, I now simply click through a few folders and attach it to an email. Before, that task involved looking through an index then searching through filing cabinets and flipping through stacks of paper followed by the copy machine and mail room or fax. That usually also involved cover letters and file copies, etc.
There is also the idea of internet access to computer files. Although there are risks involved with this, much of the work I do is not that sensitive and little if any of the correspondence is any internal decision making (ie whether we have grounds to demand removal of an auction and should we).
But as an independent paralegal, I also do work outside my anchor job. Many of these attorneys are 50 miles away or even occasionally across the country. These clients really benefit because my costs in setting up the office and computers, phones etc. are much cheaper than the clients can ever hope to achieve in the more expensive larger cities. I am in a less expensive city with an excess of empty commercial real estate. My office is a true bargain and if forced to I can simply work out of my fully functional home office. Meanwhile, rent for office space and the cost of equipment can add thousands to the cost of any employee as any business owner knows. I can charge a flat rate like $25 an hour that allows the attorney to save money on what their expenses would be for an in office employee while avoiding the responsibility to maintain that overhead. As I expand, I am finding that I can get competent paralegals to work for me for much less than they would think of accepting to commute to the large cities. I find a mix of their being able to work from their own homes or my offices is viable depending on the project. It is also very attractive to the worker who can then find decent paying work that allows them to manage their affairs much better by avoiding wasted time in a car and the accompanying expenses.
To the forward thinking business person, telecommuting offers expanded flexibility and cut costs. It is kind of ironic to think of attorneys and companies in Cleveland, Columbus and New York or Los Angeles shipping jobs to Canton, Ohio instead of India, Canada or Mexico but the economics and technologies are there. It just takes time for the realities to take effect.