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Remote work

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Telecommuting, 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. A frequently repeated motto is that "work is something you do, not something you travel to". [1] A successful telecommuting programme 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 term 'telecommuting' was coined by Jack Nilles and was first used in the United States.

History

The first formal tests of telecommuting were held in 1973 and 1974 with the telecommuters working at a satellite office of an insurance company, using dumb terminals connected to a downtown mainframe. The advent of simplified screen navigation, enhanced monitors, graphical user interfaces, the decrease in cost and increase in performance of personal computers, inexpensive printers, and portable laptops have forged the way for the virtual office. Terminal emulation through data communications lines or telephone lines bridged the gap for remote computing. Eventually, connection-dependent remote access solutions emerged towards end of the 1980s. The adoption of local area networks promoted sharing of resources, and client-server computing allowed for balancing applications efficiently and effectively. In the 1980s, employees began to work part-time from so-called 'home offices' with a desktop PC supplied by their company. Today, the telecommuting staff (telecommuters) usually carries laptop PCs around which they can use both at the office and at home (and almost anywhere else). The telecommuting staff are kept together by the company network and other telecommunication channels.

Telecommuting gained more ground 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". [2] 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, due to 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 office overheads and other costs related to the need for a big central office (such as the need for extensive parking facilities). 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". [3]

Today's virtual office includes unified messaging services for voice, fax, and E-mail. It also involves telecommuting via remote networking applications. Virtual offices have changed white-collar employment by enabling complex work processes and creating intensive dependence on information technology. Virtual teams use groupware and browsers to collaborate with team members, and rely on use of telephones and video conferencing to interact with team members. Telecommuting on a virtual team may occur from satellite offices, home, or mobile computers.

Outcomes

Telecommuting options increase the employability of marginalised groups, such as mothers 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 and virtual offices have provided many advantages. Telecommuting has actually forced service providers to increase network performance, improve reliability, improve architecture, and improve their strategies. Telecommuting allows for travel avoidance that saves on time, traffic jams, office space, and parking space; and therefore, results in cost savings for the employer. Also, from an environmental point of view, "If 10 percent of the workforce telecommuted once a week, we'd save more than 1.2 million gallons of fuel, resulting in 12,963 tons of avoided air pollution". [4] 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.

There are drawbacks to telecommuting and virtual offices. Telecommuting has come to be viewed as more a "complement rather than a substitute for work in the workplace". [5] Intranet access for the telecommuter may be slow due to telephone or modem connections and may be blocked for security reasons. Remote use of groupware, browsing, and downloading may be excruciatingly slow; and therefore, the capacity for work over a telephone line is greatly reduced, although the advent of broadband is changing this limitation. As for the life of the home telecommuter, fellow employees in the home office sometimes resent home telecommuters. The home telecommuter becomes socially isolated and further job advancement is more difficult to achieve. Work hours at home can either be not enough or too much, and there may be too many distractions at home. Employers risk loss of data confidentiality and integrity because of the lack of access control in the home office. Certain office functions such as corporate culture, loyalty, communication, access to people, and managerial control have yet to be replaced by the virtual office. Lastly, the cost of computing at the main office is increased.

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 it increasing in importance, distributed work has not yet gained widespread acceptance in Asia. [10]

Virtual offices please management because they reduce overhead, 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.

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". [11] 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". [12] 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.

Old-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" [13] should be adopted.

See also

References

  • Whitten, J., Bentley, L., Dittman, K. (2001). Systems analysis and design methods. (5th ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill Irwin.
  1. ^ Leonhard, Woody, The Underground Guide to Telecommuting, Addison-Wesley 1995, ISBN 0201483432
  2. ^ Siano, M. (1998, March-April). "Merging home and office: telecommuting is a high-tech energy saver" [Electronic version]. E.
  3. ^ Wells, S. (2001, October). "Making telecommuting work" [Electronic version]. HR Magazine.
  4. ^ Siano, 1998, March-April, para. 3
  5. ^ Pliskin, N. (1998, March-April). "Explaining the paradox of telecommuting", para. 5 [Electronic version]. Business Horizons
  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. ^ Gantenbein, D. (1999, December). "All dressed up with no place to go" [Electronic version]. Home Office Computing, para. 21.
  12. ^ Gantenbein, 1999, December, para. 24
  13. ^ Davenport, T. (1998, Summer). "Two cheers for the virtual office" [Electronic version] para. 8. Sloan Management Review
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