Telecommuting

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Telecommuting, e-commuting, e-work, telework, or working from home (WFH) is a work arrangement in which employees enjoy limited flexibility in working location and hours. In other words, the daily commute to a central place of work is replaced by telecommunication links. Telework is a broader term, referring to substituting telecommunications for any form of work-related travel, thereby eliminating the distance restrictions of telecommuting.[1] All telecommuters are teleworkers but not all teleworkers are telecommuters. A frequently repeated motto is that "work is something you do, not something you travel to".[2] A successful telecommuting program requires a management style which is based on results and not on close scrutiny of individual employees. This is referred to as 'managing by objective' as opposed to 'managing by observation'. The terms 'telecommuting' and 'telework' were coined by American Jack Nilles in 1973.[3]

Long distance telework is facilitated by such tools as virtual private networks, videoconferencing, and Voice over IP. It can be efficient and useful for companies as it allows staff and workers to communicate over a large distance, saving significant amounts of travel time and cost. As broadband Internet connections become more commonplace, more and more workers have enough bandwidth at home to use these tools to link their home office to their corporate intranet and internal phone networks.

Contents

[edit] Technology

The roots of telecommuting lay early 1970s technology, linking satellite offices to downtown mainframes by dumb terminals using telephone lines as a network bridge. The massive ongoing decrease in cost and increase in performance and usability of personal computers forged the way to decentralize even further, moving the office to the home. By the early 1980s, these branch offices and home workers were able to connect to the company mainframe using personal computers and terminal emulation.

The adoption of local area networks promoted sharing of resources, and client server computing allowed for even greater decentralization. Today, telecommuters can carry laptop PCs around which they can use both at the office and at home (and almost anywhere else). Telecommuters are linked to their home office by use groupware, virtual private networks, and similar technologies to collaborate and interact with team members. As the price of VPN-capable routers, high-speed Internet connections to the home, and VOIP technology has plummeted in recent years, the cost to connect a telecommuter to their employer's intranet and telecommunications system has become negligible when compared with the operating costs of conventional offices.

[edit] Benefits

Telecommuting, options increase the employability of marginalized groups, such as mothers and fathers with small children, the handicapped and people living in remote areas. It can also reduce an individual's carbon footprint, through minimizing daily commuting. The set up also offers possibilities for increased service and internationalisation, since telecommuters in different time zones can ensure that a company is virtually open for business around the clock. Telework has also enabled offshore outsourcing. Telecommuting provides employee flexibility, eases the working parent's burden, increases employee productivity, and reduces absenteeism. Virtual offices allow employers to keep valuable employees, allow employers to hire employees otherwise not available, and have facilitated productive re-engineering of order-management and customer service processes.

[edit] Environmental benefits

Telecommuting gained more ground in the United States in 1996 after "the Clean Air Act amendments were adopted with the expectation of reducing carbon dioxide and ground-level ozone levels by 25 percent".[4] The act required companies with over 100 employees to encourage car pools, public transportation, shortened workweeks, and telecommuting. In 2004, an appropriations bill was enacted by Congress to encourage telecommuting for certain Federal agencies. The bill threatened to withhold money from agencies that failed to provide telecommuting options to all eligible employees.

Telecommuting is seen as a solution to traffic congestion caused by single-car commuting, and the resulting urban air pollution and petroleum use. Initial investments in the network infrastructure and hardware are balanced by an increased productivity and overall greater well-being of telecommuting staff (more quality family time, less travel-related stress), which makes the arrangement attractive to companies, especially those who face large operating costs related to the need for a central office. Even so, telecommuting has not been as widely adopted as expected. "The number of U.S. telecommuters falls somewhere between 9 million and 24 million—far short of the 55 million telecommuters that some forecasters predicted would be in place in the early 2000s. Although the majority of Fortune 1,000 firms offer telecommuting, more than half say that only between 1 percent and 5 percent of employees participate in such programs".[5]

[edit] Current trends

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[edit] Distributed work

Telecommuters need not necessarily work from the home. A more recent extension of telecommuting is distributed work. Distributed work entails the conduct of organizational tasks in places that extends beyond the confines of traditional offices. It can refer to organizational arrangements that permit or require workers to perform work more effectively at any appropriate locations, such as their homes and customers' sites - through the application of information and communication technology. An example is financial planners who meet clients during lunchtime with access to various financial planning tools and offerings on their mobile computers, or publishing executives who recommend and place orders for the latest book offerings to libraries and university professors, among others. These work arrangements are likely to become more popular with current trends towards greater customization of services and virtual organizing. Distributed work offers great potential for firms to reduce costs, enhance competitive advantage and agility, access a greater variety of scarce talents, and improve employee flexibility, effectiveness and productivity (e.g.,[6][7][8][9]). It has gained in popularity in the West, particularly in Europe. While increasing in importance, distributed work has not yet gained widespread acceptance in Asia.[10]

[edit] Virtual offices

Virtual offices please management because they reduce overheads, reduce office space needs, increase productivity, and reduce staff turnover. However, managers (whose roles are varied and not well defined) in telecommuting roles typically receive fewer promotions due to the lack of direct contact they need. From that aspect, telecommuting seems to work best for professionals such as engineers.

[edit] Microjobs

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Telecommunters who begin working from home part time for one company tend to aquire self employed status through agreement or necessity, and from that position it is less of a step to seek a little more work from other sources. Ultimately, The size of the job unit reduces such that many more people are working in small chunks for mutiple clients. These chunks have been named microjobs.

[edit] Potential drawbacks

  • Telecommuting has come to be viewed as more a "complement rather than a substitute for work in the workplace".[11] Thus, some workers may find their work load increased to the point where they are under more stress than before. Distractions at home can have a similar effect, especially among workers that leave the office to be better able to care for small children and the infirm.
  • The home telecommuter becomes socially isolated and further job advancement is more difficult to achieve. Fellow employees in the home office sometimes resent home telecommuters. Corporate culture, loyalty, communication, access to people, and managerial control can be difficult to adapt to the new workplace.
  • Even when a company successfully implements telecommuting practices, increasing productivity and decreasing stress, they face an increased risk of confidential data loss and risks to data integrity resulting from the increased geographical diversity of their network and the loss of direct corporate control over the telecommuter's physical work environment. For instance, a major breach of privacy by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs resulted from a laptop being stolen from a worker who took his work home. The result was described as "potentially the largest loss of Social Security numbers to date."[12]
  • Initially, managers may view the teleworker as experiencing a drop in productivity during the first few months. This drop occurs as "the employee, his peers, and the manager adjust to the new work regimen".[13] The drop could also be accountable to inadequate office setup. Managers need to be patient and let the teleworker adapt. It can be claimed that as much as "70 minutes of each day in a regular office are wasted by interruptions, yakking around the photocopier, and other distractions".[14] Eventually, productivity of the teleworker will climb.
  • Management needs to recognise the communication barriers that telecommuters experience. The feeling of alienation can be very difficult for the teleworker. The job should be clearly defined as well as its objectives. Performance measures should be thorough and apparent.
  • Managers need to be aware that although overhead decreases, the cost of technology becomes greater. Information Technology (IT) managers experience greater demands because of user requirements for remote access through laptops, personal digital assistants, and home computers. Use of non-standard software can create problems. Setting up security and virtual private networks increase the demands for IT.
  • Traditional line managers are accustomed to managing by observation and not necessarily by results. This causes a serious obstacle in organizations attempting to adopt telecommuting. Liability and workers' compensation can become serious issues as well. Companies considering telecommuting should be sure to check on local legal issues, union issues, and zoning laws. Telecommuting should incorporate training and development that includes evaluation, simulation programs, team meetings, written materials, and forums. Information sharing should be considered synchronous in a virtual office and building processes to handle conflicts should be developed. Operational and administrative support should be redesigned to support the virtual office environment. Facilities need to be coordinated properly in order to support the virtual office and technical support should be coordinated properly. The conclusion for managers working within telecommuting organizations is that new approaches to "evaluating, educating, organizing, and informing workers"[15] should be adopted.

[edit] Popular telecommuting jobs

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The proliferation of many smaller Internet companies has resulted in an increase of data entry related telecommuting jobs[citation needed]. The tight budgets of many of these companies make it economically impossible to carry full time staff[citation needed]. Contracting with home based freelancers is a cost effective way of meeting the demands of daily data entry tasks[citation needed]. These tasks may include the preparation of correspondence, reports, spreadsheets, lists, records and databases.

Below are profiles of some of the most popular telecommuting data entry jobs[citation needed]:

  • Litigation Coding: A growing category, litigation coding involves the capture of information from scanned documents to assist legal professionals in not only storing their documents electronically but locating the documents using keyword search criteria.
  • Medical and Legal Transcription: Medical and/or legal transcription requires the entry of information as heard on an audio file. The contractor will listen to a recording and type everything that they hear. There is specialized equipment available such as headphones and even foot pedals that can slow down or speed up what you’re listening to, as well as training courses that can teach and certify you in these types of data entry jobs.
  • Medical Coding: Ensures the proper entry and management of sensitive medical data. There are correspondence courses that can teach you how to do this from home.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  • Whitten, J., Bentley, L., Dittman, K. (2001). Systems analysis and design methods. (5th ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill Irwin.
  1. ^ Nilles, Jack M., Managing Telework: Options for Managing the Virtual Workforce, John Wiley & Sons 1998, ISBN 0-471-29316-4
  2. ^ Leonhard, Woody, The Underground Guide to Telecommuting, Addison-Wesley 1995, ISBN 0-201-48343-2
  3. ^ JALA biography of Jack Nilles Last modified: January 5, 2006 Accessed: March 11, 2007
  4. ^ Siano, M. (1998, March-April). "Merging home and office: telecommuting is a high-tech energy saver" [Electronic version]. E.
  5. ^ Wells, S. (2001, October). "Making telecommuting work" [Electronic version]. HR Magazine.
  6. ^ Venkatesh, A. and Vitalari, N. P., "An Emerging Distributed Work Arrangement: An Investigation of Computer-Based Supplemental Work at Home", Management Science, 1992, 38(12), pp. 1687-1706.
  7. ^ Korte, W. B., "Telework – Potentials, Inceptions, Operations and Likely Future Situations," in W. B. Korte, S. Robinson, and W. J. Steinle (Eds.), Telework: Present Situations and Future Development of A New Form of Work Organization, Elsevier Science Publishers, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1988.
  8. ^ Sieber, P. "Virtuality as a Strategic Approach for Small and Medium Sized IT Companies to Stay Competitive in a Global Market," in J.I. DeGross, S. Jarvenpaa, and A. Srinivasan (Eds.), Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Information Systems, Cleveland, OH, 1996, pp. 468.
  9. ^ Taylor, W. C., "At VeriFone, It's a Dog's Life (And they Love it)," Fast Company, 1995, 1 (Premiere Issue), pp. 115-121. http://www.fastcompany.com/online/01/vfone.html
  10. ^ Sia, C. L., Teo, H. H., Tan, B. C. Y., Wei, K. K., "Effects of Environmental Uncertainty on Organizational Intention to Adopt Distributed Work Arrangements," IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 2004, 51(3), pp. 253-267
  11. ^ Pliskin, N. (1998, March-April). "Explaining the paradox of telecommuting", para. 5 [Electronic version]. Business Horizons
  12. ^ Lemos, Robert: Veterans Affairs warns of massive privacy breach Security Affairs Retrieved 03-11-06
  13. ^ Gantenbein, D. (1999, December). "All dressed up with no place to go" [Electronic version]. Home Office Computing, para. 21.
  14. ^ Gantenbein, 1999, December, para. 24
  15. ^ Davenport, T. (1998, Summer). "Two cheers for the virtual office" [Electronic version] para. 8. Sloan Management Review

[edit] External links

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