Sun Microsystems' Solution to Traffic That Doesn't Move? Satellite Work Centers

Two days a week Kirk Scanlon, a Sun Microsystems new product manager, cuts 60 to 85 minutes off his normal commute time to his Newark, California, office and heads instead to one of his company's three satellite work centers. There he will work for a couple of hours or for the entire day at a desk that will be assigned to him on a first-come, first-served basis.

Called alternative drop-in, hoteling, or telework locations, Sun's satellite work centers are comfortable but no-frills operations, little more than a series of cubicles, each equipped with a computer workstation and a telephone.

But it is the computer with its high-speed network connection, the ergonomic desk furniture and good lighting, along with the work center's office support-equipment like fax and copy machines, that make the satellite office Scanlon uses in Pleasanton more attractive than working from home.

"The drop-in center I use is only five minutes from my house in Dublin, but there I have all the software tools that I need to work efficiently," he said. Thanks to Sun's own proprietary technology, any computer he sits down at is able to bring up his work files, allowing him to proceed as if he were at his own desk, he noted.

"I know I won't get interrupted, and I know I won't face the distractions that I would get at home," Scanlon said. "There is something about the drop-in center that says 'work.'"

Sun opened its first three drop-in centers almost three years ago at the suggestion of a group of engineers who were tired of wasting so much time getting to and from work on the ever-more-congested Silicon Valley highway system, said Brent Daniels, a manager in Sun's workspace effectiveness department. Employees were polled, and many enthusiastically supported the idea of a shared work location nearer to where they lived that they could use on a periodic basis, Daniels said. And, he added, it was refreshing for company executives to realize how committed their staffers were to increasing their own individual productivity.

The company's first three centers, one located in downtown San Francisco, one in Campbell, southwest of San Jose, and Scanlon's in Pleasanton, serving the East Bay area, were immediately popular.

"Right now we operate on a first-come, first-served basis, and Pleasanton and Campbell are heavily used to the point where about two or three days a week some people have to wait for a seat," Daniels said. But because the turnover is high, generally the wait still involves less time than if employees got back in their cars and drove the rest of the way to their regular work sites, he added.

The facilities are open 24 hours a day, which means that if Scanlon ever has trouble sleeping, he could head into Pleasanton to cure his insomnia, Daniels joked. Most often, though, the 3,000 workers who regularly take advantage of the drop-in facilities are there for only an hour or two during the regular workday. "They head in there to get some work done while they wait for the traffic to die down or they leave work early, planning to spend another hour or so at the drop-in center before they go home," he said.

Parking is plentiful in the suburban Campbell and Pleasanton locations, but employees using the downtown San Francisco location either get savvy about finding on-street parking or use public transportation. "I work at the San Francisco site and find I actually enjoy using public transportation to get here," Daniels said.

He said the company does discourage staffers from using their offices-away-from-the-office more than two times a week, however. "We don't want the drop-in centers to become a second desk. We'd create another Set of problems if people were absent from their regular work environment more than twice a week."

Sun, which is very aware that its success depends on a happy workforce, has made giving its 40,000 employees work-site options a top priority, said Sun workspace architect Scott Ekman. "The drop-in centers are part of an initiative we at Sun call 'the network of places,'" he said. "This initiative is part of our overall effort to keep Sun a competitive place to work. In today's tight labor market, employees are able to exert more control on where they live and work. We are constantly looking at ways to accommodate a rapidly growing workforce within the constraints of having to get the work done."

Among the other workplace initiatives is just plain not assigning workers to specific desks and instead allowing them to float between shared work areas. This saves money by cutting down on the amount of space needed for each worker, Ekman said, and gives employees more control over how they use their time.

The company is also trying to make it possible for Sun employees to routinely work from its vendors' and partners' locations.

"What this means is that we are putting more emphasis on getting the work done rather than where the work gets done," Ekman said. But Ekman said that allowing workers to have more to say about where they work means that managers needed extra support to make sure they had the tools to adequately supervise a more mobile workforce.

"We have had to think about much more formal ways to keep supervisors and their staffs connected and to base accountability on the actual work that gets done."

For Scanlon, whether or not to use the Pleasanton drop-in center is decided by his daily meeting schedule. "There are some days when no matter how bad the traffic is, I have to drive all the way in because people need to see me face-to-face," he said. "But I find that when there are no meetings on my schedule, when I am just going to write up a report or do research, what we like to call 'headsdown work,' the drop-in center is the place where I'd rather be."

Daniels said the company put a lot of thought into where it located its first drop-in centers, choosing the Bay Area because of the high concentration of workers living there, more than 1,000 at last count. "For instance, about 300 Sun workers live near or on the way past the Campbell site, and I would say that, as of now, about one-quarter to one-third use it."

He also said they intentionally are using Class B real estate, in other words nice office buildings, rather than the spacious campuses more often associated with larger companies like Sun.

"Once you're inside, it looks like any other Sun office, but we didn't feel we needed to spend the money on outside landscaping."

The drop-in program has proven so successful in California that the company opened a satellite center to serve its workers in the suburban Denver area. Sun is also planning to open a similar facility in Nashua, New Hampshire, in March to serve its new East Coast headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts.

"We expect that facility will be at capacity as soon as it opens because we are already hearing complaints about the commute times to Burlington," Daniels said. "Fully one-quarter of our staff live over the border in New Hampshire, so it makes sense to locate a drop-in center there."

The Nashua center is also being designed to accommodate "unassigned workers," those who do not have their own desks in the Burlington facility.

Sun is developing a networking product that would allow other companies to set up similar work centers with the same type of high-powered computer links back to their hub locations. "We were in a unique position to try this idea because our proprietary 'smart card' technology allows the remote computers at our drop-in centers to recognize the workers and bring up their last work sessions immediately at log-in so that, from a computer standpoint, the employees feel as if they are at their own desks," Daniels said. "We think there is going to be a lot of interest in this idea from other industries."

Caroline Louise Cole is a freelance writer based in the Boston area.

Getting Satellite Work Centers in Orbit

To establish a satellite work center, give employees and their supervisors time to buy into the idea, says Brent Daniels with Sun Microsystems' Workplace Effectiveness Group.

With a little advance planning, setting up a drop-in can be a straightforward method to improve worker productivity.

Here are some pointers based on Sun's experience:

1. Survey employees to learn what exactly they need to get their jobs done at an off-site location.

2. Get a second opinion from managers so they feel the drop-in center contributes to their teams' productivity.

3. Choose locations based upon where employees live and the commuting barriers they currently face.

4. Put employee convenience ahead of the class and status of the real estate.

5. Get the technology right before you open.

6. Clearly communicate how-tos and protocols for using the space.

7. Please reasonable limits on services provided and how often people can use the space.

8. Make the space feel like an office away from the office.

9. Assign an on-site manager to help employees and to keep the place running smoothly.

10. Measure your results including time saved, productivity, utilization, and overall satisfaction.

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