Three years ago, the eight employees at OLS Trading worked in a 20,000-square-foot Gaithersburg office and warehouse, liquidating businesses’ fixtures, furniture and electronic equipment that usually wind up in landfills.
Then, CEO David Cornblatt figured that his company did not really need a brick-and-mortar office. Each employee, including himself, now works from home, saving employees a total of 50,000 commuting miles annually and his company about $250,000 in lease payments, utilities and other costs.
Today, OLS Trading has grown to 15 employees with $6 million in revenues last year. Employees used to commute to Gaithersburg from as far as Lanham. Now they work as far away as Warrenton, Va., and the company also has virtual offices in Florida and other states. Not only does OLS save clients such as Bethesda concessionaire HMSHost Corp. and Baltimore accounting firm KPMG thousands of dollars in liquidation costs, it even gets them some money back.
As gasoline and other energy costs continue to rise through the roof, Cornblatt has taken his company further along than most others in this telework trend that is growing more popular among companies in Maryland and nationwide. From small businesses such as OLS to larger ones such as Towson toolmaker Black & Decker Corp., employers are turning to telecommuting and other alternatives to attract and retain workers fed up with long commutes, save costs in a tighter economy and reduce traffic congestion.
Along with rising gasoline, utility and real estate costs, technological advances have helped propel the telework trend. Better computers, videoconferencing and webcam capabilities, personal digital assistants and faster broadband connections let employees accomplish at home most anything they can at the office. Some companies give teleworkers allowances for their broadband connections and the latest technological advance.
More family time
‘‘This idea was really about helping my employees have more time with their families,” said Cornblatt, 45, who now offices out of his Germantown home or his GMC Denali.
He said he did not like the distractions of the office and ‘‘meetings about how we were going to have meetings.” He also wanted to work early — from 4:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. — and then go for a 20-mile bike ride.
‘‘As I sat back and thought, I realized that our employees saw me more than their spouses and children,” Cornblatt said. ‘‘I wanted to give our employees what I wanted for myself — flexibility to be with family and work at the time that they are most productive.”
Chuck Wilsker, president, CEO and co-founder of the Telework Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy organization incorporated in Maryland, said he has not heard of any other companies in this area make such a drastic conversion as OLS has.
Whereas OLS once paid for a warehouse, it has since established an asset evaluation and sales implementation process that utilizes methods such as an online bidding and simultaneous multi-location sales far in advance of a move to liquidate equipment and actually gain a return for clients. That enables the company to do without a warehouse and go virtual while still growing revenue.
Telecommutingup in region
Telecommuting has grown to the point that most advocates now refer to the practice as telework, to focus more on the overall workforce benefits than just the commute. Wilsker and Nicholas Ramfos, director of Commuter Connections, a program of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments that helps employers with telecommuting programs, carpooling and other ways that get vehicles off highways, said they are getting significantly more inquiries from companies about starting telework programs.
Wilsker said he has received more inquiries in the past few months than during any period in the last several years. That includes the aftermaths of the 2001 jetliner attacks and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when companies sought ways to continue operating in the midst of disasters.
‘‘Nothing has come close to this” level of interest, said Wilsker, who usually works out of his Rockville home. The coalition’s other employees also telecommute most days.
In the Greater Washington region, which includes Montgomery, Prince George’s and Frederick counties, some 456,000 employees telecommuted at least one day a week in 2007, some 42.5 percent more than in 2004, according to a survey of workers released by Commuter Connections. The percentage of employees in the region who telework rose to 19 percent from 13 percent in 2004.
At Bethesda defense and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin Corp., telecommuting is one part of several programs offered employees to deal with rising gas prices and other cost-of-living increases, said Keith Mordoff, a spokesman for the company’s information systems and global services unit in Gaithersburg. Those include flexible work hours, alternate work schedules and commuter assistance, which encourages employees to use mass transit by taking pretax salary deductions.
Calverton research and consulting firm Macro International began its formal telework program in 2003, although some employees previously teleworked on an informal basis for years. The company has more teleworkers in its Bethesda office because that area is a transportation management district requiring employers to help ease traffic congestion and parking is expensive, according to a case study report by Commuter Connections.
The Bethesda division initiated telework informally to retain technology employees in the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, but ‘‘business continuity has come to play a larger role,” the report says.
