OVERVIEW

The September 11 attacks on the United States displaced many corporate offices and their workers. To stay in business, companies temporarily located their corporate offices in other buildings and/or had their employees set up shop in their homes via cell phones, laptops, high-speed access lines, an Internet account and e-mail.

If a company was lucky, it had a teleworking program in place prior to the 9/11 attacks, which served to help everyone in the organization to make the transition logistically, technically, and emotionally to a new environment. Thanks to their forward-thinking approach, businesses found their crisis management chores a little less difficult.

While workers who have had some familiarity with teleworking prior to September 11th will find it relatively easy to make the transition to full-time teleworking in crisis situations, teleworking novices may find it more difficult. Still, there are almost always a sizable number of employees who travel frequently, and are thus accustomed to remote-access working, which definitely helps to gracefully ease them into a teleworking setting.

Though there are a growing number within the business community who have already instituted telework programs, the September tragedy was a wake-up call for everyone to recheck their business-contingency and disaster-recovery plans and re-examine how they could quickly shift, if necessary, dozens or even thousands of employees to a distributed office environment. And since the September terrorist attacks forced hundreds of companies to set up remote offices for their employees just to stay in business, as companies rethink their business-continuity plans, they're often...