If you haven't faced it yet, chances are, you will soon. Your mail distribution network will become more complex as your workforce becomes more distributed. It's a logical evolution, but are you adapting to the change?

With Continuity of Operations and Continuity of Government (COOP/COG), environmental initiatives and traffic congestion in major cities driving government agencies and companies to institute telework practices, they must also develop an infrastructure to support employees who may be working from home, a telework center, a satellite office or another location.

Initial planning understandably centers on highly visible IT needs, with a focus on providing remote workers secure access to digital information. The telecommunications infrastructure also receives significant attention, which allows even the highly mobile worker who uses "hotels" to temporarily set up office and have calls automatically routed to their desktop.

But there's a critical piece missing in this planning, which is the routing and distribution of mail and packages to and from these employees. In fact, it is this last component of the communications infrastructure that, if mastered, may increase the number of employees deemed eligible to telework.

Teleworking Is Here to Stay

According to a report by the U.S. Government Office of Personnel Management, imperatives such as COOP, pandemic flu and other emergent issues have made telework an increasingly visible and valuable program for Federal agencies. The report noted that 10% of eligible employees teleworked in 2005, and this has increased through 2007. In fact, on September 12, 2007, the General Services Administration (GSA) announced plans to have 50% of their nearly 11,000 eligible employees working from home or at one of their 14 telework centers by the year 2010. Also this summer, the Department of Defense and the Patent and Trademark Office received awards from the Telework Exchange for their efforts in enabling and promoting telework arrangements in their agencies.

In the private sector, companies of all sizes including Pitney Bowes are promoting the benefits of teleworking to their employees and offering manager training on how best to plan, track and monitor performance of remote workers. With potential savings on real estate and commuting, as well as potential productivity improvements and environmental benefits, the business case for a distributed workforce is significant, and the need to support teleworkers is real.

The eligibility requirements for certain job types to telework are determined by each agency or organization and can include such factors as handling of secure materials, past performance issues, measurable performance criteria and whether they must perform duties on-site.

Employees who interact directly with external customers or constituents and have mandated response times may be deemed ineligible for telework because they also must respond to inquiries, applications, orders or requests sent via the mailstream to the main office. However, if an efficient, cost-effective and practical method for these workers to access their mail at a remote site can be developed, then they too may become eligible to take advantage of the teleworking option.

The Role of the Mailstream

The mailstream, which includes all the mail, packages and paper or digital documents that flow in and out of every business, continues to support daily commerce and communications. Despite predictions that its role would lessen with Internet and email usage, paper-based forms, applications, orders, invoices, statements and any number of mission-critical documents still abound. In fact, paper transactions most likely will never become obsolete until technology that is affordable, easy-to-use and guaranteed secure becomes available to the entire world's population.

For today and the foreseeable future, the mailstream will most likely continue to play a critical role in our daily lives. Your organization, whether public or private sector, must not only accommodate but thrive on leveraging the mailstream in the most efficient and effective way possible. Currently, workers who process or rely on paper mail must remain on-site at the work place. Yet, if they could act on these hard copy documents the same day they are received at the main office, either in-hand or remotely, they would be just as efficient as if they reported to a central location each day.

There's no doubt that inter-office mail and "chair mail" can keep businesses humming along. The question now is, how do you raise something to a very high level of attention if you can't leave it in the intended recipient's office? How will these urgent communications reach them? Will the facsimile make a comeback?

Times are changing, so must our workflows, mail solutions and technologies in order to accommodate a rapidly evolving workforce.

What Are Your Options?

1. Operate as you do today and simply redirect mail and packages as needed. Not only will shipping and courier costs likely skyrocket, but your response times will probably increase and remote workers will be less efficient as they wait for urgent deliveries or travel back and forth to local carrier sites while on the clock.

2. Support telework sites by redesigning your distribution network to include routes to and from these sites. You may also want to consider using lockers to distribute and secure incoming packages and urgent inter-office communications and installing on-site shipping kiosks to send outgoing packages and eliminate costly and time-consuming trips to local shipping companies.

3. Implement a digital mail solution where your team, or a reliable outsourcing vendor with expertise in mail and document management, will scan and code incoming mail into a software application specifically designed to support digitized mail delivery and management. Scanned mail would be uniquely identified, indexed, delivered digitally (not via email attachment) and stored. Since an image of the mail is made available the same day it is received at the main office, this eliminates delays in acting on inbound communications that require immediate responses or processing.

The more sophisticated digital mail solutions can also help meet a critical success factor for telework initiatives: measurable work activities. These programs integrate with existing communications management systems, support image repositories for records management systems and provide tracking, workflow and robust reporting capabilities. Since they track all activities, the resulting reports enable managers, who must monitor the work of their remote employees, to prove the telework arrangement is meeting or exceeding prior productivity levels.

To bolster your business case to implement a digital mail solution, consider these additional benefits: incoming mail distribution is more efficient as you employ automated routing and tracking; original mail can cost-effectively be archived for later retrieval; document indexing enables prioritization of communications based on the needs of the organization, hardcopy mail records management and search capabilities for rapid retrieval; rules-based workflow for recipients enables accountable workload sharing and backup; and lastly, if ever there is a need to shut down operations of a main office, digital mail will still reach workers who must now work remotely, helping to provide continuity of operations.

Once you master mail distribution and management as the last critical communications component that connects the remote worker to their headquarters and customers, your organization can realize the substantial benefits that teleworking can offer and contribute to an even greater rise in the teleworking tide.

Jon Love is President, Pitney Bowes Government Solutions. For more information, contact him via email at jon.love@pb.com.