NYT article about wireless phones creeping into more work places.
October 31, 1999
In Some Jobs, Employees Will Never Escape
From the Phone
By ERIC QUINONES
For Bob Aylward, vice president of the Seattle Mariners baseball team
for business and sales, having a wireless phone in the office is just as
vital as having one on the road.
In its three-month-old home stadium, Safeco Field, the team has installed an
AT&T phone system that gives 150 office and operations employees wireless
phones that share a number with the phones on their desks.
Both phones ring on every call -- an especially helpful feature on game days,
when Aylward could be anywhere in the stadium, escorting visitors or
dealing with one minor crisis or another.
"Our office is not just the four walls where our phone is, but really the whole
facility," he said. "Being able to have the calls follow you is a great way to cut
down on missed calls."
Safeco Field is among hundreds of workplaces that have been early adopters
of so-called wireless office technology, seeking more freedom for executives
and employees whose jobs often take them away from their desks. Beyond
addressing the needs of frequent travelers and telecommuters, companies that
switch to wireless systems are recognizing that many people can be mobile
workers within their own offices.
At a Sony compact disk manufacturing plant in Springfield, Ore., Sandy
McCallen is one of about 80 managers and technicians who have wireless
phones linked to their desk phones, freeing them to roam the 400-employee
plant. Ms. McCallen, the plant's telecommunications specialist, said that
during a particularly busy period last year she was getting 300 calls a week
that otherwise would have wound up on her voice mail and taken hours to
return.
Edward Nelson, president of K.C. Hopps, a chain of eight
microbrewery-restaurants in Kansas and Missouri, said all 10 of the
company's top managers had Sprint PCS wireless phones. He said he hoped
to have them all equipped with wireless data access soon.
Nelson said the company spent an extra $50 to $220 a month for each
wireless phone, depending on individual use. But those added costs are
balanced with savings on long-distance calls, because Sprint bills the
company for all calls at local rates.
"In the long run, we're probably just about break-even, with the long-distance
credit and the extra cost of being mobile," Nelson said. "But the amount of
value I get by the key people having a phone with them at all times is huge."
Having the office phone follow you day and night can seem as much a curse
as a blessing to employees who resent the intrusion of work into their
personal lives. But many managers using wireless phones say they'd prefer to
hear right away when important issues arise at night or on a weekend, rather
than having to catch up later.
"I can conduct business as usual pretty much 24 hours a day, which is
important, being in a start-up," said Thomas Lazay, president of Voice Signal
Technologies, a speech-recognition software company based in Cambridge,
Mass., which he helped found in 1995.
A few months ago, Lazay began using an Omnipoint wireless phone for
about half of his work calls and all of his personal calls, and to gain data
access through a laptop.
"Now at least I can deal with things and not have to worry about them when
I'm away from work," he said.
But, he added, there are times when even he prefers to be out of touch:
"Certainly, when I'm going out to a nice dinner or something, I just leave my
phone at home."
A growing number of workplaces are introducing wireless phones even when
round-the-clock accessibility isn't an issue. Aylward of the Mariners said that
just having the members of his staff immediately reachable throughout the
work day, whether they were in the next room or out in left field, helped him
prioritize his instructions to them.
"If it's something that's not urgent, you can do it through e-mail," he said. "If
it's a more urgent matter, then you know you can reach the person."
Wireless phone companies are promoting a vision of workplaces without any
traditional "land line" phones. But Robert Egan, research director for mobile
and wireless communication at the Gartner Group, a consulting firm, said he
didn't expect a significant trend toward companies abandoning traditional
phones and desktop computers for wireless phones and laptops for six years
or so: the technology simply has not caught up with the vision.
Instead, while a few individuals here and there may go all-wireless,
companies are generally using wireless networks to augment rather than
replace existing voice systems. AT&T's Wireless Services unit, which
equipped both Safeco Field and the Sony plant with dual wireless and
traditional voice systems, has sold similar systems to 355 of the Fortune 500
companies, according to Kenneth Woo, an AT&T spokesman.
Widespread adoption of all-wireless data networks, linking employees' laptop
computers to one another and to the Internet, is probably even farther away
because of limitations on transmission speed and reliability, though
manufacturers are racing to address those problems with new products.
Right now, wireless data networking "is very well suited as an occasional
alternative," said Egan, who is experimenting with an all-wireless work
environment in his home office in North Smithfield, R.I.
"For example, you're sitting at an airport where there's no data port available.
Your choices are do nothing or use a slow link to get some kind of access
and increase your productivity," he said.
But Lazay of Voice Signal Technologies said the convenience of wireless data
access, even in its early stages, often outweighed its lack of speed. Last
month, with Hurricane Floyd racing toward the Northeast, Lazay was
hurrying from his home in Boston to help his parents close up their summer
house in Branford, Conn.
He spent most of the three-hour drive on his wireless phone, talking to his
office and joining a conference call with a client. Halfway across Rhode
Island, Lazay pulled over on the side of the road and dispatched several
urgent e-mails from his laptop.
Without the wireless data connection, he said, "I would have had to knock on
someone's door and borrow their phone line."
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company |
