by Karen Millard
One dark midwinter morning in 1994, Marie-France Revelin watched the sun rise through the condensation-drenched windows of a crowded bus headed for downtown Montreal. The next time she saw the sun, it would again be through the windows of a crowded bus. Only this time it would be setting.
Life was supposed to have its rhythm, she knew. But surely it wasn't supposed to be like this? She'd been up at five thirty that morning, as she was every morning, to shower, do her hair and get clothes and lunches ready for her two children before heading out on snow-packed streets for the bus-station.
"I was still young," Revelin recalls. "Thirty-eight years old. But I was tired. Hiding hard that I was less and less motivated, ambitious and happy. The year 2000 was approaching with all its promises, we had the technology, but there we were standing like sardines on that bus just like our mothers and fathers had done."
Still, Revelin was in a better position than most of her traveling companions on the bus that morning. Seeking innovative and productive ways to reduce costs, the company she worked for, Bell Canada, was already in the process of implementing a corporate teleworking policy. As a member of Bell's Internal Communication Services group whose mandate was to promote the concept of telework within the company itself, Revelin was a natural choice to give the work-at-home arrangement a trial run.
"My boss believed very much in teleworking and she fought hard to convince management peers that if we were to promote it, we should try it first," Revelin explains. "We needed to demonstrate that it could work. The only way to achieve that was to telework."
Revelin was asked to work at home one to three days a week on a trial basis in 1995. A year later, the experiment deemed a success, she joined a new group within Bell, providing teleworking consulting services to Bell's business customers and began working at home full-time. For Revelin, the opportunity to work from home was a blessing.
