The boom in telecommuting is just a transition toward a future total-workplace system of where work gets accomplished. New sites range from the car, home and home office to hotels, offices of business alliances, neighborhood telebusiness centers, empty warehouses, banks and storefronts, airline clubs and perhaps even local cafes.

That is according to Franklin Becker, an organizational ecologist and Cornell University professor of human- environment relations who will speak on the changing workplace at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management European Symposium, "The Workplace Revolution" in London on March 16.

Becker will present "Organizational Ecology: Integrating People, Place, Process and Technology," at the symposium, which starts at 8:45 a.m. at the Four Seasons Hotel (formerly Inn on the Park) on Park Lane.

"We are seeing an evolution in these new 'placemakers' -- new kinds of alliances arising in who provides workspace," said Becker, director of Cornell's International Workplace Studies Program (IWSP), which sponsors studies in the ecology of new ways of working, in Cornell's College of Human Ecology.

"As organizations face growing competition, they need better, cheaper, and faster ways to conduct business and are taking a fresh look at where and when work occurs," said Becker, who teaches courses in planning and managing the workplace and programming methods in design in Cornell's Department of Design and Environmental Analysis.

"A wealth of new workplace strategies is emerging, such as using non-territorial offices, closing down main offices, taking advantage of satellite or telework centers, and giving employees the technology to work from any place at any time. Now, businesses are beginning to discover the potential for work space through business alliances and the use of underutilized real estate."

In a recent IWSP report, The Hotel as Office, Becker and co- author Carolyn Tennessen, Cornell research support specialist, studied how Pacific Bell Directories built a partnership with a hotel where a sales team was housed for several months. In return for a lower rate on a block of hotel rooms for six months and the use of conference rooms, Pacific Bell wired employee suites to the conference rooms, which were in turn wired to the central office. Both the hotel and Pacific Bell benefited while employees enjoyed greater informal communication.

In another recent IWSP report, Social Connectivity in the Mobile Workplace, Becker and Tennessen looked at how employees felt about a flexible work program instituted by Digital Equipment Corp. in Newmarket, England. The large traditional office was closed and employees became "mobile workers," working from a Digital telecenter with non- territorial offices established in a nearby warehouse, other Digital offices anywhere in the United Kingdom, customers' offices, cars, hotel lobbies and even a nearby cafe in a supermarket.

They found the company saved money by renting less space; performance and customer response improved; employees developed a new appreciation for face-to-face contact and continued to foster new ways of staying socially connected.

"In the fluid work world today, there is no single, irrefutable measure or declaration that 'it worked or it didn't.' Rather, we see businesses and employees in transition, but generally becoming more satisfied over time," Becker said.

He pointed out that the home telecommuting trend was driven by companies' desire to reduce cost, improve contact with customers, and to a lesser extent to comply with government mandates intended to improve air quality by reducing employee commuting. While some workers came to feel socially isolated, they appreciated the increased flexibility mobile work provided.

The challenge for organizations promoting home-based telework in the future is to avoid creating what they had hoped to get out of expensive, low density office space." Because internal organizational demands to reduce costs and use space efficiently are fueling the new trend for a fluid workplace, including but not limited to working at home occasionally, Becker predicts this work style will only grow: "Five years ago, these nontraditional arrangements would have been viewed inappropriate; we are legitimizing them. I think the workplace will continue to evolve, and it is likely to have more elements of mobility than stability," he said.

In addition to Becker, the Johnson School symposium will feature presentations from Michael Chamberlain, founder of Marketing Week, who is currently involved in over 150 electronic publishing projects for United News and Media plc; Peter Schwartz, renowned futurist and business strategist and author of The Art of the Long View; John Suchet, newscaster for Independent Television News; John Thompson, senior adviser to CSC Consulting and CSC Index; and L. Joseph Thomas, professor of manufacturing at Cornell.