Telecommuting on the Day of Attacks

Sept. 26, 2001 -- Companies may now eye telecommuting as a way to deal with the aftermath of last month's attacks, firms which already had operational teleworking systems found they made crisis management a little less difficult.

Tested Through and Through

On the morning of Sept. 11, investment banker John W. Loofbourrow was waiting to board a flight in Houston, Texas, when he heard that a plane crashed into Two World Trade, where his offices were based.

With the flight cancelled, Loofbourrow, president of New York-based John W. Loofbourrow Associates, immediately dialed into the office's telecommuting system and changed the company's greeting to inform both clients and employees that he was safe and that all employees had safely evacuated the building.

Members of his firm has been telecommuting for over six years, and now they are even bigger believers. "Families and clients told me they were comforted when they got the message I left saying everyone was OK," he says.

The system went down hours later when the building collapsed, but with the existing infrastructure in place, it took only two weeks to restore and, Loofbourrow says, now "we even have our old — pre-Sept. 11 — greeting back up because it was digitally recorded."

Damage Control

The tragic events led Mark Lieberman, chairman and chief executive officer of Interactive Video Technologies, to issue wider telecommuting policies to both his New York and Los Angeles-based employees.

Half his staff was in the office, located just two blocks across from the World Trade Center, that day, and no one was hurt, but the company's telecommuting infrastructure failed when several of Verizon's switchers melted.

Undeterred, Lieberman called his wife and asked her to log onto his home computer to locate employees using e-mail and instant messaging. By nighttime, he had conducted a staff meeting using teleconferencing technology and was able to share valuable damage assessment in a follow-up company-wide meeting.

Very quickly every employee had broadband access and was signed up for other services to make sure they could do the same kind of work at home that they did at the office.

"People were and still are very anxious about what's going in the world," he says. "But we were all able to communicate electronically pretty rapidly to reassure people."

Technological Innovations

Verizon, one of the major telecommunications providers in New York, was itself hit hard during the attacks. The extreme heat from the two burning towers caused some switchers to melt taking down communications.

While the company was still dealing with the loss of key infrastructure, it decided to speed the introduction of a new communication service to help its New York customers stay in touch, said Rich McCusker, director of product development for Verizon.

The new unified communications service collects e-mail, voice mail and fax mail into a single mailbox, which can be accessed through a toll-free number. Besides the ability to also respond from the single box, subscribers also have a personal information manager, scheduler and address books at their fingertips.

Initially designed to create a more efficient system, it proved an extremely useful communications tool as New Yorkers began trying to put their lives back together.