TECHNOLOGY/Austin fights air pollution with telework program

To try to improve poor air quality, Austin, Texas, is using a Web-based service to allow city employees to telework (work from home). Since last July, qualified employees have been able to use the service to access their office computers from remote locations.

During the past couple of decades, as Austin’s population has grown and its sprawl has increased — resulting in more vehicular traffic — the city has been burdened by a smog problem. Using the traditional letter grading system, a 2001 report by the Sierra Club gave the city a “D” for the per capita rate at which cars and trucks produce smog.

Austin began conducting telework pilot projects in the mid-1990s, but, in recent years, the city has been establishing a formal program for city employees to work from home. The city began testing GoToMyPC, a product of Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Expertcity, in November 2001 before offering the service to employees last summer.

To use the service, an Austin employee first opens the vendor’s Web site to download the program onto his office computer. (The computer must be Windows-based.) After the installation, the employee can access his office computer by using any computer with a Java-enabled Web browser and by visiting the vendor’s Web site. The program provides full access to the applications and network resources of the employee’s office computer.

Approximately 400 Austin employees currently telework about one day a week through the Web-based program. For various technical reasons, another 100 employees periodically work from home using a virtual private network or a dial-in application.

The city has set a goal of having 600 employees work from home one day a week by the end of the summer. Within two years, Austin officials want to see the total rise to 1,000. The city currently has about 11,000 employees, and while teleworking is encouraged wherever possible, there are a number of positions — such as EMS technicians, landscape workers and police officers — for which teleworking is not possible, according to Wendy Willingham, telework program manager for the city.

Supervisors within each city department decide if an employee’s job responsibilities allow him to telework. Before they can work from home, employees must participate in an hour-and-a-half-long orientation session that instructs them on proper lighting and ergonomics for their home office. A portion of the session is dedicated to computer security, with officials instructing the employees on installing firewalls on their home computers.

Employees do not receive formal training on the Web-based telework system. The instruction consists of reading the necessary information on a PDF file. The answers to frequently asked questions about the program are listed on the city’s intranet site, plus employees can access information on the vendor’s Web site. If all else fails, employees call the city’s help desk. “But, there have been minimal problems,” Willingham says.

Austin officials hope that teleworking will help reduce the total vehicle miles traveled by its employees by 15 percent over the next five years. “Ultimately, we want to save those trips into work because improving air quality is what this is all about,” Willingham says.