Thank technology — or curse it — for the demise of the corporate snow day.
The pervasive use of BlackBerrys, laptops and Skype has made office shutdowns as rare as a Colorado March without snowstorms.
Most Front Range companies weathered Wednesday’s storm with business-as-usual efficiency, even as many employees opted to work from home.
“We’ve come to the point that technology allows us to function normally from just about anywhere,” said Gwinavere Johnston, chief executive of Denver-based JohnstonWells Public Relations. “It’s spring, and it’s going to snow in Colorado, and work goes on.”
Two of Johnston’s nine staff members — one in Boulder and the other in Evergreen — chose to work from home Wednesday because of dicey early-morning highway conditions. By midmorning, Johnston had exchanged about 15 e-mails with the two staffers, with no apparent loss of productivity.
The combination of heavy snow and spring vacations left downtown Denver sidewalks and mall shuttles quieter than usual Wednesday. State government offices opened a little later, at 10 a.m., to give employees extra transportation time.
One downtown worker, Gaëlle Callnin, stayed in her Centennial home Wednesday and used her MacBook Pro laptop and Skype videoconferencing in lieu of physically going to work at Virtual Words Translations.
“My productivity is much greater with this setup because I can continue to work regardless of whether I am able to make it into the office or not,” Callnin said. “It’s certainly helpful on snow days.”
While technology for home telecommuting has existed for decades, the concept has gained momentum in recent years because of the high saturation of smart phones and other Web-enabled communication devices.
Some employers even encourage it, to a degree.
“With this big snowstorm and in a broader context as well, our (corporate) culture is very supportive of people needing to work at home from time to time,” said Colin Wheeler, a spokesman for Denver-based Molson Coors Brewing Co.
Molson Coors uses a virtual private network to enable home-based workers access to company files, and a phone system that converts voice mail messages to e-mail audio attachments.
Vail Resorts, which relocated its headquarters from Avon to Broomfield in 2006, laughs off the idea of a snowstorm keeping workers from work.
“Most of us who work down here came from the mountains, so we’re pretty hardy in terms of getting to work through the snow,” said spokeswoman Kelly Ladyga.
Yet the ski-area operator is heavily reliant on BlackBerrys, virtual private networks and teleconferencing because much of the company’s work takes place on the road while executives travel from one resort to another.
Instant messaging and e-mail enabled Xcel Energy workers to immediately communicate the scope of power outages from the snowstorm Tuesday night and Wednesday.
“We did not declare a snow day, and we rarely do,” said Xcel spokesman Mark Stutz. “We’re open for business. The distribution of power doesn’t stop because of bad weather.”
Stutz said that sending e-mails from line workers to company executives and industrial customers via BlackBerrys and iPhones is far superior to the antiquated system of making individual phone calls about power outages.
“The guys at the distribution center really don’t have time to get on the phone and tell everybody who needs the information,” he said. “When they can send out a message via e-mail, that’s a dozen or two dozen phone calls that they don’t have to worry about.”
Steve Raabe: 303-954-1948 or sraabe@denverpost.com
