Bill Vass is the former Chief Information Officer for Sun Microsystems Inc. With more than 30 years of technical and IT management experience, he is an industry leader in the field of information technology. Prior to its acquisition by Oracle in January 2010, Sun Microsystems Inc. was a global fortune 100 company with a 26-year history of providing networking computing infrastructure solutions. For 15 years, Sun had a highly flexible work policy that allowed 19,000 employees to work away from the office at least one day per week.

In this series, TELUS Talks Business talks to Mr. Vass about Sun’s “Open Work Practice.”

Once implemented, were there tangible, immediate benefits to the company or did it take time?

Bill: Benefits were realized almost immediately.

Employees working from home two and a half days per week saved two and a half weeks commuting time per year, and they spent 60 per cent of that time saved working for the company.

Our teams also reported a 34 per cent increase in productivity and increased job satisfaction, and we were able to resolve our original challenge: the program allowed managers to source the best team members globally, as opposed to relying on physical proximity.

Finally, employee retention increased 80 per cent for Open Work Program employees, and Sun expanded quickly into new markets without the time and expense of real estate development and management.

What ‘rules’ or guidelines did you put in place that continue to this day, that govern your teams teleworking habits?

Bill: Sun’s management team reserved the right to rescind telecommuting privileges for under-performing employees, or when project needs required that they work from one of the Sun offices.

What was the initial financial investment required to launch and enable your company’s telework program?

Bill: Our initial investments were all centered around ensuring that the employees had what they needed to be successful working from home or on the road.

We reimbursed employees for high speed Internet and phone service in their homes and created a flexible telephone system that allowed for the routing of phone calls to any location.

We also created a hardware/software solution that allowed our teams to access full desktop and file systems from any location with a secure encrypted two-way transmission, and no physical storage of data on any employee devices.

How did you measure return on investment in the telework program? What specific ROI did your company realize?

Bill: The benefits that we realized were incredible: Sun had a highly flexible work policy that allowed 19,000 employees (56 per cent of our workforce) to work away from the office at least one day per week.

This program saved Sun $68 million per year in avoided real estate costs, $3 million per year in reduced power consumption and $25 million per year in IT expenditures.

Plus, our team enjoyed commuting savings of $44 million per year- that is about $2,235 saved per employee each year. We also saw a 34 per cent increase in employee productivity and overall Sun increased its retention and satisfaction of employees.

What would you say to other companies considering starting a flexible work program?

Bill: I would say it is important to remember the following:

• It’s about people, NOT technology
  
• Focus on change management
  
• One size does not fit all
  
• Executive support is crucial to the success of the program
  
• Look at full savings: power, people, real estate
  
• Deploy the program both at home and work
  
• Ensure your users understand the technology allowing them to work from home
  

Questions for Bill Vass on flexible work? Leave it, or a comment, here.

Bill Vass is the former Chief Information Officer for Sun Microsystems Inc. With more than 30 years of technical and IT management experience, he is an industry leader in the field of information technology. Prior to its acquisition by Oracle in January 2010, Sun Microsystems Inc. was a global fortune 100 company with a 26-year history of providing networking computing infrastructure solutions. For 15 years, Sun had a highly flexible work policy that allowed 19,000 employees to work away from the office at least one day per week.

In this three-part series, TELUS Talks Business talks to Mr. Vass about Sun’s “Open Work Practice.”

What were the primary business drivers propelling your company’s initial foray into flexible working? What were the challenges?

Bill: The primary factor that led to our Open Work Practice was recruiting. It was important to our company to access the most talented technical engineers in the world, and restricting the work environment to specific locations limited the talent that we could recruit. This was a huge challenge for us, so we decided we needed a way to quickly add new talent engineers without forcing them to relocate.

Other important factors that drove the flexible work strategy ahead included:

• We wanted to decrease our real estate portfolio and cost of operating our IT environment
  
• We were experiencing tremendous and quick growth, and we wanted to ensure that our employees remained as productive as possible by scaling faster than the constraints of real estate acquisition process
  
• When we surveyed our employees they told us that time flexibility was very valuable to them – our teams preferred to work expanded hours at home with breaks, as opposed to a typical eight hour work day
  

Where did you start? Did you research or find partners or model existing telework programs?

Bill: We did some preliminary research and discovered that a flexible work program would improve employee culture, the satisfaction of our teams and the company’s bottom line.

How did you determine who could work from home? How big was your first teleworking target group and what benchmarks for its success did you establish before you extended the program to a broader percentage of staff?

Bill: With multiple locations across the globe and differing business groups and employee needs, it took us about 24 months to implement the Open Work Practice across the entire company.

After full implementation, the average employee worked 2.5 days at a Sun office and 2.5 days at home or on the road.  After the complete deployment, about 19,000 of our 36,000 employees were in a flexible telework work environment, which allowed them to anytime, anyplace, on anything.

How we determined who could work from home?

Bill: We developed an automated survey to objectively determine if an employee would fit into one of three categories: assigned, flexible, or not assigned. This would determine the employees’ eligibility for the program, but after that, the employees’ manager would ultimately decide the status of the employee.  However, the tools to enable people to work form anyplace were made available to all employees regardless of status.

How big was the first target group?

Bill: Initially, we started by rolling out the program to the IT, HR, and real estate organizations, since they would be the ones that needed to manage the program.  The IT organization was the first to adopt the flexible work environment.  Our IT organization was about 3,200 employees in size.  The HR and real estate organizations followed close behind.

Next, we started with one specific business unit which had a strong executive that supported the program; it was about 2,500 employees in size.

I believe that it is always a good idea to start with the organizations that will be providing the service so that they will understand what it is like to go through the transition. They will have a chance to improve the tools and processes involved before any of the major business units are transitioned.

As always, we’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment and let us know how your company is getting a flexible work program off the ground.