Virtual office, real work

With technology, geography no longer matters. The vanishing old economy will be replaced by one even better. Business tax breaks actually can help create new jobs.

Just when these oft-heard reassurances were in danger of becoming broken promises, along comes Putnam Investments. The announcement by the Boston mutual fund company that it will expand to Maine with 200 jobs shows that good things can happen when business, education and government work together.

In this case, the good things are the work of: Putnam, a well-established financial services company; Maine & Co., a business-funded economic-development organization that pursued this prospect for four years; Husson College, which has partnered with Putnam to offer training programs; and Gov. King and the Legislature, which passed a tax break last session specifically designed to make Maine an attractive place for mutual-fund companies to do business.

The new Putnam employees will manage mutual fund and 401(k) accounts. They will be paid well, with good benefits. They, for the most part, will have college degrees, or at least some college education. Most notably, a lot of them will work from their homes, linked together through computer to a virtual office.

That last part seems more extraordinary than it it is. It’s called telecommuting. It’s been used widely for a decade or more around the country and around the world. It’s just new to Maine.

Some 14 million Americans do all or part of their jobs at home, nearly three times the number in 1995. These aren’t the self-employed with home offices — they account for an additional 20 million — but people whose home office is an electronically linked extension of an employer’s.

In this country, telecommuting got it’s start in large cities as an answer to traffic congestion. Businesses — AT&T and Pacific Bell have been leaders — quickly discovered that employees not frazzled by daily traffic jams were more productive employees. Numerous studies have found productivity gains in the 15-percent range to be common.

Federal agencies (and, at the state level, California in particular) use telecommuting extensively and have found that eliminating the enormous hassle of the urban commute is a great way to attract and retain good employees. Oregon, which was concerned both about traffic congestion and air pollution, has a highly developed telecommuting initiative for state, county and municipal workers, including those within its university system, and a well-funded state program to assist busineses develop their own.

Maine, with a few exceptions, does not have much commuter traffic congestion, but telecommuting can help solve several problems it does have. Putnam, which has a very successful telecommuting program in Massachusetts, is focussing its new recruiting efforts primarily upon Northern Maine, a region where many people drive long, even if uncongested, distances to work and where those with college educations can find the search for rewarding work discouraging. There is perhaps no current phenomenon more harmful to the future of the region than the ongoing brain drain and telecommuting offers a proven way to stop it.

Maine has very little telecommuting now. Despite the proven productivity and environmental benefits, no other business uses telecommuting extensively and, with the exception of a few case-worker positions in the Human Services and Corrections departments, there is no significant telecommuting program for state employees. Maine business, education and government did well in working together to bring Putnam to Maine. They can do well again by learning from this welcome newcomer.