Teleworker. Mobile worker. Bedouin. Nomadic.

Location agnostic. Professionals who sometimes—or always—work at a location other than the office have gone by a variety of terms over the years. It’s an alternative style of working, but not an insignificant one: “Roughly one-fifth of [the American] workforce is part of the so-called Kinko’s generation, employees who spend significant hours each month working outside of a traditional office.”¹

According to a 2005 report from IDC, a global market intelligence provider, the worldwide mobile office population will increase from 425.1 million in 2004 to 543.1 million in 2009.² Asia Pacific and Japan are expected to experience the most growth (5.5 and 8 percent, respectively). Meanwhile, Western Europe’s mobile worker population is expected to increase 1.5 percent, and the U.S.’s 2.7 percent. Analysts at Gartner Dataquest predict the number of mobile workers in the U.S. will grow 10 percent annually.³ WorldatWork, an organization that focuses on human resource issues, estimates that 100 million workers [or about two-thirds of the workforce] will telework at least sometimes by 2010.⁴

Why We’re Working Everywhere?

There are a variety of reasons for this burgeoning trend. Mobile technologies, affordable high-speed Internet access, and more secure, cost-effective virtual private networks have helped managers gain faith in something workers have long known, i.e., there are times when you can be more productive someplace other than the office, or even the home office.

Today, workers work from an average of 3.4 locations, including airports, coffee shops, and vendor or customer sites.⁵ Companies have always talked about being closer to the customer; with today’s technology, they can be sitting right next to a customer without sacrificing access to their own company’s data. The results are powerful. In an Economist Intelligence Unit study of 1,500 executives worldwide, “50 percent [of highly mobile respondents] said that mobility yielded improved customer satisfaction.”⁶

Productivity also increases. In Best Buy’s ROWE (Results-Only Work Environment) program, managers “...can judge employees only on tasks successfully completed— even if none were done in the office.... Employee productivity has increased an average of 35 percent in departments covered by the program.”⁷ In another example, AT&T figures it receives $150 million worth of additional productivity from its teleworkers.⁸

Better productivity won’t have much of an impact however, if the right workers aren’t on the job. Alternative work styles that allow people to work when and where they want entice older workers to stay in the workforce longer. That is a factor as many skilled workers in developed economies are nearing retirement. In the U.S., for example, the baby boom generation (those born between 1946 and 1964) will number 46 percent more in 2010 than in 2000, an increase of 11 million.⁹ By 2020, almost half of the adult European population will be over 50.¹⁰ In response, leading companies are trying to give workers reasons to come and stay.

Other ways of working also provide the improved work/life balance highly valued by “emergent workers.” They are the 52 percent of the American workforce who are “confident, self-reliant, and distinguished by a set of workplace values and expectations that vary drastically from what managers have previously encountered.”¹¹

Contrary to popular belief, the ranks of these “emergent workers” are filled with people of all ages, although the ”digital natives” predominate. They have grown up with technology and already view e-mail as an old way to communicate and resist traditional boundaries. As Charles Grantham, a principal at Future of Work, has said, “Their worlds bleed together. It’s pretty useless to try to draw borders around different spheres of life for them. It’s Set Them Free 2 l better to let them shift among them at their own choosing, as long as the work gets done.”¹²

In fact, 86 percent of U.S. workers said work/life balance and fulfillment are top career priorities, according to a survey conducted by Spherion, the recruiting and staffing agency; 96 percent said an employer was “more attractive when it helped them meet family obligations through options like flextime, telecommuting, or job sharing.”¹³ AT&T considers its telework program a success in this regard. “Turnover in our virtual office population is half that of the turnover in our general salaried employee population,” according to Joseph Roitz, AT&T’s telework director.¹⁴ Sun Microsystems has also cut its turnover rate in half for the employee population that works in its iWork at Sun program, in which employees can choose from three primary work arrangements.¹⁵