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The Company from Nowhere |
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Links & Resources
Employee Jordan Karpowitz works at home, like all Johnson & Co's employees |
What if you never had to fight traffic to drive to the office again? What if you could work in your pajamas, any time you felt like it? What's only a fantasy for many workers is the reality for a small but growing number of companies.
Johnson & Company is a four-year-old marketing agency that is based nowhere. It's an agency that specializes in developing marketing strategies for high-tech firms, with employees who work out of their homes and communicate with each other and their clients largely via e-mail and the telephone. Jennifer Johnson, the founder of the company, estimates there are several dozen such "virtual" companies in the country.
Johnson & Company's employee Lynette Simmons gets a massage between work sessions at a retreat |
Her employees live out the promise of high-tech by demonstrating they can communicate and collaborate while living hundreds of miles away from one another. The company has 16 employees in six states, and all of them work less than full-time -- usually 15 to 25 hours per week. The company motto is "working anytime, anyplace, anyway, at any pace" and employees like to say they have "full-time lives, not full-time jobs."
The entire staff of Johnson & Company meets face-to-face about three times a year at short, intensive retreats. At a recent retreat in Salt Lake City, Johnson met two of her employees -- hired over the telephone -- for the first time.
Listen as NPR's David Molpus takes a look at this innovative company, and examines the lure and the limitations of total telecommuting.
Links & Resources
Johnson & Company at www.joandco.com
www.gilgordon.com has information on telework and other alternative offices.
Home Office magazine at www.hocmag.net
The John J. Heldrick Center For Workforce Development at Rutgers University, www.heldrich@rutgers.edu; contact researcher Carl Van Horn
E-Volve by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, published 2001 by Harvard Business School Press. Reflections and analysis of the virtual culture and how it's re-defining the nature of work.
Work Naked: Eight Essential Principles for Peak Performance in the Virtual Workplace by Cynthia C. Froggatt. To be published in May 2001 by Jossey-Bass. The do's and don't's and the joys and frustrations of tele-commuting.
Managing Telework: Strategies for Managing the Virtual Workforce by Jack Niles. Published in 1998 by Wiley.
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