Claudia Perry-Beltrame knows all too well how hard the life of a rail commuter can be.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
For about five years in the late 1990s Ms Perry Beltrame left her husband and two boys - aged three and eight when she began commuting - at 6.45am to catch the train to Central. She wouldn't return until just after 7pm.
That meant she missed so much of the lives of her young sons.
"I wouldn't really see them," Ms Perry-Beltrame said.
"I might just be able to give them a goodnight kiss when I got home, but they were that tired that they would fall asleep.
"It's terrible, it's absolutely shocking. You can't run a family life that way. I personally think that it is really damaging for children. They're really brought up by one parent rather than by two parents.
"It's also a lot of stress on the partner. My husband was raising the kids. It was a new thing for him and it was quite stressful for him, too, at the beginning."
The commuting also led to health problems, with Ms Perry-Beltrame ending up in hospital with anxiety and exhaustion.
After that she quit her Sydney job and found one in Wollongong. These days she runs Cultural Inspirations, a change management company specialising in workplace culture.
Her commuting experience has inspired her to create the Illawarra Commuter Survey, in which she is looking for feedback on the issue of telecommuting.
While she admits her job in Sydney would have been much easier if telecommuting was available in the late 1990s, she said the survey aims to discover whether there is now the "human willingness" to embrace telecommuting.
Ms Perry-Beltrame said that the employers' perspective and the workplace culture's approach to telecommuting is crucial in turning it from a "pipe dream" to reality.
"The idea for doing this survey is probably about two years old," she said.
"With the technology I knew this was changing. The NBN has been touted for a few years and I thought that's going to make a big difference.
"If the businesses have the perceptions of telecommuting, that they are OK about it, then we can go ahead and start making some changes."
Wollongong City Council and RDA Illawarra are both aware of the survey and Ms Perry-Beltrame plans to make the results publicly available.
Ms Perry-Beltrame is looking for people who regularly commute more than 25 minutes one way to fill in her survey.
The survey can be found by clicking on the "commuter survey" button on the www.culturalinspirations.com.au website.
