The Industrial Revolution brought people out of cottage industries and into the public workplace. Years of long commutes back and forth to work and the stresses of dealing with heavy traffic and with strange office politics have left much of the workforce in search of a well-deserved break. Many people have discovered a path back to their cottages. They are the telecommuters.
In recent history, technology has opened a door of opportunity to employees that allows them to work from home. These employees are evolving into telecommuters. Modern communications technology and a drastic improvement in computer capabilities now allow workers to perform their jobs from home instead of requiring them to commute to and from the workplace. In years past, if someone wasn't working from home, it meant that they didn't have a home and they were typically labeled a nomad. As time went by and people began congregating in centralized locations to perform their work duties, the idea of working from home became synonymous with being a nomad. It was even rumored that a person working from their home would likely wander from job to job. In present times, it seems that history is repeating itself and workers are making their way back home. (Whitford, 44)
A telecommuter, or "distance worker", as they are often called, is an employee who opens a channel between their place of work and their home to conduct business away from the office. (Wiscombe, 18) This channel may be a telephone line with a modem, a cable line with a broadband modem, or even a T1 line. Using this channel, an employee gains access to files on their computer and other company resources including, but not limited to, internal company servers and mainframes. Some businesses even offer a connection to their servers through a secure website on the Internet. There are many other contributors to the increase in telecommuting. Rick Howell, the vice president of human resources for The Heathman Group, a Portland Oregon based chain of hotels and restaurants, says, "The Internet has certainly helped speed things along, but there are many other forces driving the trend toward telecommuting. Email is a big factor and cell phones, laptops, fax machines, and wide area networks play a big part, too." (Whitford, 44)
Though most telecommuting is done on a part-time basis, a growing number of businesses are beginning to allow their employees to telecommute full-time or at least for several months at a time. Many businesses have found that telecommuting increases productivity, reduces costs, and encourages baby boomer employees nearing retirement to remain in the workforce. A vice president at AT&T, Braden Allenby says that telecommuting has saved his company twenty-five million dollars in real estate costs. "We just sold our corporate headquarters. We don't need it anymore." (Thibodeau, 12)
Joanne Pratt, president of Joanne H. Pratt Associates and director of ITAC's Telework America offers credit to three forces that are influencing telecommuting. The first is the impact that the Internet has had, causing a higher level of universal awareness and creating a demand for home offices and PCs. The second is the mobility of the work force. Employees are able to perform anywhere through the use of cell phones, laptop computers, and many other types of technologies with telecommunications linking them all together. The third is that many Americans have realized that they possess the means to work from home and are making the right choices to do so. (Whitford, 44)
In a recent survey performed by techies.com, forty-six percent of the technology professionals said that they were presently telecommuting. Ninety-six percent said that they would like to telecommute for at least a couple of hours each week, while thirty-nine percent said that they would even take a reduction in pay to have the opportunity to work from home. Of the current telecommuters, over half of them work from home ten or more hours each week. (Techie Telecommute, 20) In 1999 there were roughly 19.6 million employees telecommuting in the United States. It is estimated that by the year 2030, there will be over two hundred million telecommuters according to the Telecommuting Resource Center. (Whitford, 44) "I think more and more people will want to telecommute in the future and will be looking for companies that offer that option." Says Joy Rothschild, a senior vice president of human resources for Dallas-based Omni Hotels. "There are just so many employment options today. Telecommuting is a benefit you almost have to offer if you want to keep all of your star players." (Whitford, 44) At Merrill Lynch's offices in New York City, a telecommuter is required to sign special contracts. They go through specialized training courses and even a simulation conducted in a lab, which isolates them from everyone to determine if they would be more productive working from home.
Telecommuting isn't just for technology professionals, though. Accountants, consultants, marketing professionals, and other information-age workers are finding that working from home makes good sense. (Schulhof and Ramage, 175) There are a growing number of websites on the Internet dedicated to telecommuting. One of these sites in particular, telecommute-jobs.com, is devoted to helping people find telecommuting jobs through their website by offering several different techniques. According to this site, you can "Work at home and discover freedom, flexibility, and family." Upon further examination of the site, a visitor will discover tools for an employer who needs to post a telecommute job and for a potential employee to apply online for a telecommute job. There is a search feature that allows the user to search for high-tech jobs, as well as low-tech jobs. Some of the high-tech jobs include web development, Visual Basic designers, Oracle, C++, networking, and SQL Server. Included also are links to other sites with articles that show home workers how to save money on taxes, earn more money through online auctions, and learn how to better run their home businesses.
Employees are not the only ones benefiting from telecommuting. By offering the option to telecommute, a business may attract a wider range of employees including physically challenged people, parents with children, and those responsible for the care of elderly people. Telecommuting employees often view their freedom to work at home as an "indirect raise" and show an increase in loyalty and job ownership. Studies have shown that people working from home often work longer hours and more workdays than the average employee in the workplace does. Also, disaster recovery is much easier when a company's employees are not completely centralized. Companies with telecommuters may stay productive even in the case that an emergency occurs by letting workers perform their jobs independently from satellite locations. One last benefit of telecommuting is that it may be environmentally friendly. If merely ten percent of America's work force would telecommute just one day per week, they would reduce air pollution by twelve-thousand, nine-hundred and sixty-three tons and conserve 1.2 million gallons of fuel every week. (Telecommuting: A Two-way Benefit, 46)
As great as telecommuting sounds, unfortunately there are some drawbacks. "Telecommuters tend to get lost if they don't show up to the office from time to time", says George Piskurich, a designer of instructional programs and the author of An Organizational Guide to Telecommuting, "and they lose some of the grapevine process that's so important to everyone. There has to be a balance." (Schulhof and Ramage, 175) Another survey was conducted in August 2001 by techies.com that was directed towards technology professionals. The job types surveyed ranged from PC operators to CIO's. They were asked to describe the advantages and disadvantages of telecommuting. In most cases, the advantages far outweighed the disadvantages, but they did show concern that the telecommuter might have a slower rate of career development. (Techie Telecommute, 20)
There are other problems that accompany working from your home. Distractions in the form of children, door-to-door salespersons, and telemarketing phone calls may impact the productivity of a work-at-home professional.
Telecommuting should never be considered a substitute for inadequate childcare arrangements. When necessary, a babysitter or daycare should be used for the supervision of children, as they would be if the telecommuter were in the office. It is also important for boundaries to be set with the telecommuter's family and friends so that they treat work from home time with the same respect that they would give to office-work time. (Lynn, 8) These boundaries should provide privacy, as well as comfortable and functional furniture and the appropriate equipment including a computer, printer, modem, and fax.
As with any socially transforming technology, telecommuting involves several inherent dangers. When home and work are reunited the lines between work life and home life may become blurred. Many telecommuters have reported increased working hours in excess of the time saved on the commute. This lack of distinction between home time and work time often allows work time to take precedence. Some telecommuters say their living rooms have been converted into office space because they were no longer being used for entertaining guests. (Gurstein, 1989) The telecommuter must decide how to conduct business from their home without disrupting their personal life or sacrificing time that should be devoted to work, otherwise the arrangement will not work properly and the results will be poor job performance or family problems.
With the growing trend of people telecommuting, proper attention should be given to training so that people will make appropriate decisions regarding their work. Employees' performance at work will surely mirror their performance at home and employers should be wary of this before sending them back to their cottages.
Conclusion
The idea of working at home is appealing to most people. Knowing that you would have the ability set your own hours and devote more time to your family makes telecommuting seem even more attractive. I have had some experience with telecommuting in my present job. On the occasions that I am too sick to work in the office, I have set up an FTP server to connect from my home to my PC at work. This has proven useful to me because it has allowed me to access files from work, update the company website, and perform at least some of my required duties. My employer has agreed that it is better for me to do some of my work duties at home and take plenty of time to recuperate rather than bring my illness back to the office and share it with others.
In closing, I feel that telecommuting is a benefit to both employers and employees as long as everybody does as they're supposed to do. When workers stay at home, they have more time to devote to their personal life, the air will be a little cleaner, they will be safe from accidents associated with travel, and they won't take up valuable office space. I predict that in the future, with so many processes becoming automated, the majority of the workforce will find their way home.
Works Cited
Wiscombe, Janet. "Far from Unproductive." Workforce: HR Trends & Tools for Business Results 81 (2002): 18.
Thibodeau, Patrick. "Telecommuting Seen as Possible Boon to Economy." Computerworld 36 (2002): 12.
"Techie Telecommute." Training 39 (2002): 20
Whitford, Marly. "Telecommuting on the Superhighway." Hotel & Motel Management 215 (2000): 44.
"Telecommuting: A Two-way Benefit." Hotel & Motel Management 215 (2000): 46.
Schulhof, MarcL; Ramage, James. "Hooked Up and Working at Home." Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine 53 (1999): 175.
Coffee, Peter. "More Time at Home or Less Time at Work?" PC Week 16 (1999): 47
Lynn, Jacquelyn. "Would Telecommuting Work In Your Office?" Commercial Law Bulletin 11 (1996): 8.
Gurstein, Penny. "The Electronic Cottage: Implications for the Meaning of the Home" The Use and Meaning of Home and Neighborhood (1989)
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