Take this job - and get back to the cubicle
By James Thorner, Times Staff Writer
Published May 6, 2007
The virtual office, the practice of fully wiring employees to work from home, was all the rage at AT&T a couple of years back.
It's easy to see why Ma Bell got modern: Sparing workers commutes and coddling them in domestic comfort chopped $30-million off AT&T's office expenses and boosted annual productivity by $150-million.
But in the two years since the company was acquired by SBC, the former "baby bell" split from AT&T in the 1980s, telecommuters are being herded back into cubicle corrals.
Closer to home means employees must unplug the home offices and report for duty in Tampa Bay Park at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Himes Avenue in Tampa.
Not all AT&T telecommuters are getting recalled - not yet at least. The company is trying to come up with a uniform work-from-home policy after recent acquisitions of Cingular Wireless and BellSouth.
But the signs look poor for the stay-at-homers. In 2004, AT&T couldn't praise virtual offices enough. A third of its managers operated from home. The domestic employees left the company at half the rate of the cubicle hamsters.
AT&T even hired a guy named Joseph Roitz and made him its "telework director." Today at San Antonio, Texas, headquarters it's "Roitz who?" A spokesman says he's no longer with the company.
Want to know the real irony? SBC, before and after its acquisition of AT&T, has heavily marketed its ability to - ta da! - wire its customers' employees to work from home. Even voice mail isn't a problem when you can access your mailbox from the Web.
Suspicious minds might wonder why AT&T is clamping down on a perk that doesn't cost it a dime and supposedly makes it a bundle in productivity gains.
The new AT&T was formed from SBC, AT&T, BellSouth and Cingular. They're all phone companies, so it's likely many jobs have become redundant.
Maybe the company of 300, 000 employees isn't averse to a bit of turnover. Don't want to commute an hour each way between Hernando County and Tampa? Well, if you don't like it ...