Teleworkers Say It's A Gas-Gas-Gas Saver

The centers look and feel like almost any D.C. government office. Gray dividers separate cubicles stocked with sleek phones and flat-screen monitors. The constant blowing of the air conditioner is occasionally drowned out by inter-cubicle conversation. There's a fax machine, a water cooler and a kitchenette.

"Everything I can do at [Patuxent River Naval Air Station], I can do here," said Mary Ellen Knight, a buyer for the Naval Air Warfare Center who drives about 17 miles from Mechanicsville once a week to avoid the added miles of driving onto the military base. "It's great. I'd recommend it to anybody."

In May, Telework Exchange, a public-private partnership that advocates telecommuting and that tracks legislation, did an online survey of how gas prices were affecting people's work habits. With 377 responses, the group found that most people were likely to investigate telecommuting when gas hit $3.75 a gallon.

"Clearly, we're very much over $3.75," said Cindy Auten, general manager for Telework Exchange.

About four years ago, Federal Technology Corp., an information technology company then in Falls Church, moved a major section of its operations to the telework center at Bowie State. The company found that most of its employees worked in the Crofton-Bowie area, and decided that it didn't make sense for them to be commuting to Virginia every day, said Amy Foster, an on-site manager for the company.

Foster drives from Crofton, a 7.5-mile trip, in her Chevy Silverado 1500, which gets 14 miles to the gallon in the city. "We were all from this area. Everybody was. So, why not?" she said, sitting in a cubicle filled with pink, purple and yellow Post-it notes. "It's better coming here."

Amy's boss (and her father), Michael Foster, works from his home in Bowie. He said the move to the telework center was a simple decision.

"I basically gave my folks a pay raise when we moved across town," he said. "Gas prices were kind of going up at that time. When you start pushing $3 a gallon, that was a big deal for everybody," he said.

But as a manager who thrived on interpersonal communication, the shift to meetings via conference call and communication via instant messenger posed challenges. When his employees first started working in Bowie, Foster would drop in to the center at least two days a week. He said that in the past three weeks, he hasn't been there at all, and that he doesn't think productivity has been affected.

"It took me a while, because I was always an in-the-office person. . . . I wanted to go by and say hi to everybody," Foster said. "That's a big difference now. You don't do that."

Some workers at the centers said that although they don't get the face time with supervisors that they would in the main office, they don't mind.

"It gives me a life, working here," said John Tully, who is employed in finance for the Transportation Security Administration. He rides the MARC train to Bowie from Baltimore every day instead of commuting to Arlington. "All I did was commute, work, go home, sleep."