Perking up at work
by
Ed Kettler
My July 16th blog on How to shed 10 million cars in four years talked about the societal impacts on rising gas prices and the adjustments people and businesses will have to make in order to adjust to the new reality. Lisa Belkin's article The New Workplace Perk: Gas in the New York Times provides a good cross sectional view of how companies and individuals are accommodating the changes. One of the more interesting sections was on how pizza delivery driver behavior has changed: instead of fighting to get every possible delivery, they are fighting to avoid getting the deliveries that are farther away.
Higher gas prices are starting to cause attrition, and employers have implemented programs to retain key employees through gas cards, variable work weeks, increased communications capabilities and work at home options. Many of these programs have significant ramifications for corporate IT: network, provisioning and security, to name a few. Perhaps some more thought should be given to what happens when an employee leaves: have you recovered all of the company's assets?, including intellectual property? Have you removed all access to corporate systems?; what about third party SaaS providers like Salesforce.com?
We are seeing the economy at work every day: the gas price goes up, the cost impacts usage patterns (large vehicle usage and sales plummet, unnecessary driving is curtailed), temporarily reducing demand, which causes the prices to drop. The price point of $4 per gallon was a major inflection point in consumer awareness and behavior. Now that gas is around $3.65, we'll have to see how long we retain short-term memories and continue to do things to conserve energy, or whether we fall back into bad habits.
