Nortel Networks has struggled on a number of fronts as a leading telecom equipment manufacturer, but as an employer, the company is without question seeking to enable its employees to be more productive while also reducing the consumption of energy by commuting, lighting office buildings and conducting business.

Nortel came early to the telecommuting game with its “Home Base” program, launched 15 years ago, that first enabled its employees to work from home on a regular basis. “We were pioneers in this area,” recalled David Dunn, leader of Workplace Planning Innovation and Construction at Nortel. “We were recognizing that mobility was opening some doors of opportunity. We created a telework strategy and deployed it globally. The company provided all sorts of support and tools to help teleworkers -- everything from how to manage employees or engage in a telework agreement to provisioning of home-office furniture. We now have 15 years of learning and history around telework.”

About 10 years into that process, Nortel had what Dunn called “an epiphany” – the company decided to take a detailed look at how its office space was being used. The result was revelatory.

“We observed every office space for every hour for two solid days, and we discovered that spaces were fully booked but were empty half of the time,” Dunn said. “The peak never got beyond 50% utilization. Parking lots weren’t that full, and cafeterias weren’t that busy. People were using the tools, technologies and choices to work in a different way – the population had shifted out from under us.”

The company pulled together a team to figure out how to capitalize on these changes in a way that made sense both for Nortel and for its employees. The
Business Boundaries Project became the forerunner to a new global corporate policy related to how office space was assigned and used. Nortel’s Integrated Work Environment program set up a policy to support employees in any one of multiple options for how they work.

“We had free-address and fixed-address workers,” Dunn said. “They can be road warriors, part of a project team in collaborative spaces, or working from home, as opposed to being locked into going to a cube or going to an office. We understand the full spectrum of mobility, one of those components being telework. Now everyone is fixed or free – and they have the tool kits and support for those various scenarios, whether they choose to primarily work out of a home office and come into office one day a week or vice versa.”