Remote work brings good benefits

Solowork, which has been presented to the Tucumcari City Commission and the Quay County Commission, is part of a revolution in the way Americans think about work.

The idea of Solowork is that if employers won’t come to Quay County, at least work can be sent to them.

Communications technology has made such remote work commonplace.

Pat Vanderpool, the county’s economic development director, sees major benefits to Quay County’s workforce through this idea, which has taken a while to catch on, even though it has been around in some form or other since at least the 1990s.

For a while, when I lived and worked in the Los Angeles area, I helped to pioneer telecommuting, which meant I worked one day a week in a remote facility similar to the Solowork center Vanderpool would like to establish in Tucumcari in cooperation with Mesalands Community College.

For that day, I was spared the three-plus hours I spent daily traveling to and from my workplace.

For me it worked well. In fact, no one but my immediate cubicle neighbors could tell I was elsewhere.

I was able to do just about everything I normally did, except attend meetings. I could even use an 800 number, so I didn’t add to the telecommuting center’s phone bill.

If I wanted to write, I could focus. I could read uninterrupted. If I needed to make phone calls, I was in a quiet area free of background noise.

If something came up that required my physical presence, which never came up that I can recall, there was a minimum one-hour wait while I drove there even in light traffic, though.

The first application Vanderpool has in mind for a Solowork center is call-center duty.

The need for warehouse-size rooms full of cubicles and wiring is dwindling in the age of texting, Instagram and extremely high-volume fiber optic cables for whizzing data, photos and documents from one point to another.

A call-center worker in an internet-enabled cubicle in Tucumcari would be able to answer a call from a customer and retrieve information to deal with the customer’s issue instantly.

In addition, when needed, the call center worker could easily bring an expert or supervisor into the conversation.

After training, a remote call worker would only need to maintain the discipline to arrive at the call center on time and work conscientiously until quitting time without a supervisor being present.

I know of at least two individuals in Tucumcari besides me who are working for remote employers from office space in their homes.

I am writing this column in my backyard office, which is 15 seconds away from my back door.

In recent years, results of workplace skills assessments in Quay County demonstrate the county has enough educable and trainable workers to serve most small to medium employers who would think of locating or expanding here.

If the employers won’t come here, however, we should not have a problem providing them with skilled workers who can send work to where they are.

Steve Hansen writes about our life and times from his perspective of a retired Tucumcari journalist. Contact him at:

stevenmhansen

@plateautel.net