These days the swine flu scare may be settling down a little. But it’s still there and not going away any time soon. Many people are taking extra precautions to avoid exposing themselves unnecessarily – the top one is to avoid crowded places. And those crowded places for many, 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, are corporate office buildings.

That’s right - telecommuting is a popular option these days to avoid the germ-ridden corporate cafeterias, restrooms, and cubicle mazes. And in some cases, it’s not just an option, but a requirement. Some large companies have temporarily shut down facilities in areas that are most heavily impacted by the swine flu. They’re telling their employees to work from home.

But what is the impact to this innocuous-seeming solution?

The answer: a mad scramble for IT workers to make sure the infrastructure can handle the sudden dramatic spike in telecommuting. That precious Virtual Private Network or VPN that allows employees to “tunnel” into the corporate intranet from home needs servers running to support it, licenses for concurrent connections, and internet bandwidth. And as volume grows, these resources become overloaded. If there aren’t sufficient servers, etc, then everyone (not just the people in the location that was shut down) will suddenly see drastic reductions in quality and speed to their remote connection. They may even start losing their connection intermittently and have to keep reconnecting.

While those who usually work in the office and are just working from home temporarily may tolerate this inconvenience, the diehard career telecommuters who work from home every day will certainly notice the difference. And chances are they’ll be calling the helpdesk and yelling at whoever will listen. That adds up to increased support calls which means even more IT costs. And don’t forget the increased support costs from the large number of people who find themselves trying to work remotely for the first time and don’t know how to setup their connection properly.

While some companies may have the extra capacity to handle one or two sites being shut down here or there, do they have the capacity to handle large numbers of sites, possibly all sites, being shut down? If the swine flu truly turns into a major pandemic, will the IT infrastructure be able to support this new way of doing business?

Companies are willing to pay for an extra server or two for Disaster Recovery, in case the main servers running their VPNs break or the data center they’re located in go down. But in general they tend to size their solution assuming a certain % (say, for example 5%) of the company is working at home at any given time. Most companies will not pay to have numerous spare servers, licenses, and bandwidith available for the unlikely event of a world-wide pandemic of epic proportion that requires 20%, 50% or more of their employees to work at home concurrently. The cost vs risk analysis simply doesn’t add up.

It looks like Swine Flu is not shaping up to be the massive pandemic that the media was originally painting it as. But it certainly could have been. Every CIO/CTO of every large company has probably been sweating about this one and whether the infrastructure is going to fail under their “reign”. They can’t justify shelling out the big bucks to beef it up, so they’re crossing their fingers and hoping the “big one” will happen after they’ve retired and some other poor shmuck has taken over.

What can you do? Well for one, make sure you’re set up now to telecommute – that you have the equipment you need and know how to setup your VPN. And start using it, even a day or so per week. The more people who start telecommuting on a regular basis, the more resources IT can justify now, and the less impact there is if a major pandemic really does send the whole company to work from home! Depending on your position in the company (especially if you work in IT), if you can start asking probing questions to management about telecommute capacity, it might just get them to try to prepare a little better for the worst case scenario.

One more thing – if there is a major rush on telecommuting, when you have your VPN going, don’t disconnect. The licensing limitations (among other things) may be set on a first-come, first-served basis.

Technorati Tags: telecommute careers, telecommuting, remote work, telework, work from home, work at home, work from home mom

The other day my husband decided to telecommute because he had a bit of a sniffle. Normally this would never have stopped him from going into the office on a typical non-telecommute day. But this time he continued to work from home every day for 3 days until his cold had mostly passed.

Why? I give you two words: Swine Flu.

In the very unlikely event that he had somehow contracted swine flu, my husband didn’t want to take the unnecessary risk of infecting others.

I really applaud his approach. He had a few face-to-face meetings that he had to change around a bit, but he felt it important to keep his germs out of the office. Corporate offices are an awful opportunity for germs and illnesses of all kinds to spread. We’re all crowded into small spaces, sharing the same restrooms, cafeteria, etc. If one person is sick, it can spread through an office like wildfire.

Now I agree that the media may have hyped Swine Flu up a little in some cases. I think people are starting to suspect it may not be as severe and as serious of a pandemic as it was initially considered.

But we just never know - and nobody wants to take unnecessary risks.

I’ve read a lot about people who come into the office when they’re sick, because they don’t like telecommuting, feel they won’t get as much done, or that they’re afraid their managers won’t like it. I’ve heard that some managers do in fact discourage their somewhat sick employees from working at home because they just don’t know how to deal with telecommuters and truly think they won’t be working if they “work” from home.

These attitudes (both the worker’s and the manager’s) are selfish and frustrating. To get others around you sick (some of whom may have other health issues, where what seems like a mild illness for you has a major impact to them) for these reasons is inexcusable. If a manager can’t judge how hard his employees are working by the work they produce, rather than how many hours he sees them at their desks, he isn’t worth his salt.

And especially now with what many perceive as a potentially deadly illness circulating around, it’s ridiculous to ignore the risk mitigation that telecommuting has to offer. With all the technologies we have today like laptops, Instant Messaging, and virtual private networks to “tunnel” into your company’s intranet from home, there’s just no good reason not to spend a couple of productive days at home.

Now if those few days at home are an annoyance to your manager, think about this. When a co-worker gets me sick, and I’m either too sick to work or perhaps am just less productive than usual, by the time I’m finally getting better my kids are then sick and have to stay home from daycare. So I have to take more time off to care for them. But my kids probably already spread their germs at daycare before their symptoms started (nothing like sucking on the toy that some other kid just sucked on to spread even the smallest amount of germs) and suddenly other kids are getting sick, staying home so their parents have to take time off work. Then those parents get sick, are less productive, come into their offices, and spread the illness to all their co-workers. All because my co-worker couldn’t telecommute for a couple of days! How’s that for annoying?

And, too, unless your work is completely independent, think about how your co-workers getting sick from your cold will cause them to fall behind on the work that’s critical for your own project! Your own selfish actions can ultimately turn around and bite you in the backside.

So please, whether you do it for selfish or altruistic reasons, when you feel the sniffles coming on, skip the commute and fire up your laptop from home!

Technorati Tags: telecommute careers, telecommuting, remote work, telework, work from home, work at home, work from home mom