September 29, 2017
Home health nurse Connie Gardner uses a cellular phone, portable fax machine and pager to stay in touch with hospitals, doctors and her bosses as she zips around Jefferson and Franklin counties in her little red pickup.
Financial planner Gary Goldberg places his clients' orders for mutual funds and other investments from their kitchen tables.
Salesman Jim Jeter uses a cellular phone to conduct conference calls with Hewlett-Packard clients as he drives between appointments in eastern Missouri. His laptop computer stores information on clients and lets him prepare expense vouchers when he's away from the office.
Gardner, Goldberg and Jeter are examples of a growing trend in American business - the movement away from a fixed workplace to one workers can take with them from office to car to home.
Link Resources, a consulting firm for mobile and home office workers, says that more than 60 percent of all American companies have mobile workers. They include 16 million who work at home, 13 million who travel at least 20 percent of their time and 25 million who work almost exclusively outside the office.
The movement even has its own magazine, Mobile Office, a monthly guide to doing business on the road. The 5-year-old magazine has 140,000 subscribers.
Wireless phones, pagers, computers and other gadgets are feeding the move to the mobile or virtual office. The gadgets help mobile workers become more productive, reduce drive time and can even allow employers to shrink the office space they own or lease.
The gadgets cost money. But mobile workers say the cost can be kept down by shopping around and buying devices only as they're needed rather than all at once. The cost of going mobile can range from a few thousand dollars for a laptop and cellular phone to $30,000 or more for a fully equipped desk installed in a van.
The $30,000 figure sounds high, admits Rick Malloy, editor-in-chief of Mobile Office. But the costs of a fixed office add up quickly when you consider rent, furniture, utilities and long-distance bills. Many office-bound workers can have several hundred dollars in phone bills - rivaling some mobile workers' cellular bills.
Most mobile workers get by with equipment that fits in a briefcase - a laptop, cellular phone and pager, Malloy said. Many are now adding fax modems that allow the computer to send faxes and connect to the worker's home office, bulletin boards, even the Internet. Portable printers that weigh under a pound are popular, too, he said.
The most common mobile worker is a salesperson who meets customers face-to-face, either at the customer's office, home or a meeting place like a restaurant or airport. But more businesses are taking to the road for all or part of the work day.
St. Louisans involved in the virtual office movement include home health care nurses, state office workers, insurance adjusters, service technicians and real estate salespeople, to name just a few. Most have moved gradually from reporting to an office every day to coming in once a week or even less.
Nurse Gardner goes directly to patients' homes from her own home in Valley Park. She faxes her itinerary to her boss at Incarnate Word Hospital. Except for weekly meetings to discuss her caseload with co-workers and supervisors, she rarely stops by the hospital at Grand Boulevard and Interstate 44.
Gardner's truck cab is her office. She takes and makes calls there, sends and receives faxes from her patients' doctors or the hospital.
Incarnate Word provides cellular phones to several home health nurses, Gardner said. The phones give people working in remote areas more mobility, and they provide security for nurses who work in unstable neighborhoods.
If Gardner is visiting a patient for the first time, the hospital faxes her background information written by the referral coordinator.
