Case study: Home-based telecommuters cut costs
Case study: Home-based telecommuters cut costs
It takes a certain type of person to work at home
Her offices were too cramped, so Toni McClay, BSN, director of Memorial Hospital of Salem County Home Health/Hospice in Salem, NJ, planned to expand into additional space in her building.
The chaos caused by having too many managers crammed into too few offices wasn't only uncomfortable: The distractions caused by having tight office space were affecting productivity, too.
The company was losing money by maintaining two home health aide supervisors and one aide scheduler, none of whose work was reimbursable by Medicare or managed care contracts. Because the aide supervisors and scheduler had their desks in the same office as other managers, all three of these employees were constantly being asked to help with other tasks. McClay planned to give the aide supervisors and scheduler their own office spaces to work from.
Now, however, McClay gets by with just one aide supervisor; she scrapped her plans to expand into new office space, and she is about to send her aide scheduler home to work as a telecommuter. Already productivity and job satisfaction are up, while costs are down, McClay says.
"You have to be pretty creative in home care these days," she says.
The concept of telecommuting is in vogue at the moment, but in reality, there often is resistance to it either from employers or employees, McClay says. Many employers worry they won't be able to monitor employees' work if they telecommute. Sometimes workers don't want to work at home because they depend on the social interaction an office provides.
No distractions, so work gets done faster
Neither McClay nor her aide scheduler, Alice Paten, have any trepidation about Paten's telecommuting.
"In home care, you want to get people out of the office. It's too expensive and time-consuming to have them always coming into the office. And you're more productive at home. There's no one to chat with," McClay says.
For Paten, working from home will allow her to escape office politics and distractions.
"You can actually get your work done at home, you know?" Paten says.
There are many other benefits to Paten as a result of working from home besides higher productivity:
* Paten won't be constantly pulled away from her office by managers who need her help, so she can do her job faster.
* She won't have to get up as early to get to work on time.
* She can spend more time at home with her family.
* She won't have to spend as much money on her work wardrobe.
* She'll spend less money on gasoline and put less mileage on her car.
Though working at home will give Paten some freedom, she'll still have to work the same hours.
"Sometimes telecommuting allows workers to set their own hours, but you really can't do that with Alice's job. She has to be there to make and take calls from 8 to 4:30 every day," McClay says.
Also, the communication between Paten and the employees back in the office will have to improve, Paten says.
"Often I'll overhear information I need to know, like that a patient has been hospitalized. Even though I wasn't told that, I know because the nurses were talking about it around me. Now they'll have to think to call and tell me these things," Paten says.
This is how McClay and Paten recommend setting up a telecommuting agreement:
* Suggest telecommuting -- don't order it.
McClay presented her idea to have Paten work from home as a suggestion, rather than a fait accompli.
"I was talking with Alice about our office space problem when I said to her, 'I wonder how it would work to have you work from home,'" McClay says. "That way she felt like it was our idea, not just mine," McClay says.
She first began considering having Paten telecommute after she read in mainstream newspapers and magazines about the trend toward telecommuting and working from home.
Paten, who lives 23 miles from the office, was thrilled.
"Oh, I'd love to do that," she told McClay.
* Choose the right person to be a telecommuter.
Telecommuting isn't for everyone, of course.
"It takes a certain kind of person," McClay says. Someone whose happiness depends on human contact during the workday wouldn't survive it, she says. And a person who doesn't work well unsupervised wouldn't do well at home either.
"Alice is a good employee. She'll work just as hard at home as she does here. She's real motivated," McClay says.
* Help the telecommuter avoid isolation.
McClay says she recognizes that feelings of isolation are a common and serious problem for telecommuters. She and Paten discussed the issue and agreed that isolation won't be too much of a problem for Paten, as her job requires her to be on the phone nearly constantly with aides and others. Also, she still will have to go into the office once a week or so to take care of the aides' payroll and to attend staff meetings.
Supply equipment for the home office
* Provide needed equipment.
Paten happens to have some extra space and a desk that she will use to work at home, so McClay will just give Paten a reconditioned personal computer and a fax machine to use, as well as a telephone and a white board to track aides' schedules. The company also is paying to have two extra telephone lines installed at Paten's house so she can maintain her personal phone line separately from her work phone and fax lines.
"We're considering getting Alice an 800 number, because she lives some distance from the office and the areas where the home health aides will be working, so some of their calls to her will be long distance. We're not sure yet whether the 800 number will be cheaper," McClay explains.
* Provide advice on tax breaks for home workers.
McClay and Paten have a while before they have to think about the tax breaks available to telecommuters, but McClay says she feels the company owes it to Paten to help her take advantage of these tax breaks.
* Set up a system to monitor the telecommuter's productivity.
This is one area of Paten's telecommuting arrangement that has yet to be worked out.
"It will be hard to figure out what will be the best way to monitor her productivity," McClay says.
McClay says she might be able to gauge Paten's productivity by the timeliness with which aides are assigned to new patients. Also, she might assess Paten's performance by surveying the satisfaction of aides, patients, and nurses.
"I still need to figure out how to measure certain outcomes of Alice's work. But I'm not worried about this. She's a hard worker," McClay says.
In addition to Paten being happy as a telecommuter, her working at home will bring a very tangible benefit to her colleagues back at the office. Her former office space is being converted into a lunchroom. The staff has never had this amenity, as their office space is already cramped and their hospital and its lunchroom are eight miles away. *
* Toni McClay, Administrator of Home Health and Hospice, Alice Paten, Home Health Aide Scheduler, Memorial Hospital of Salem County Home Health and Hospice, 390 Broadway, Suite 900, Pennsville, NJ 08070. Telephone: (609) 339-6066.
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