Teleworking

Mike Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135387730
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

From the people who work exclusively from home to the 'portable' manager with no fixed site, the need to communicate is paramount. Mike Johnson's candid appraisal of teleworking, or telecommuting as it is also known, looks at the key benefits: for the individual it provides the opportunity to work from home; for the company it provides major savings on costs. The down side is the lack of human contact and the anxiety of employees who work away from the centre of things. The ...in brief books provide a critical 'snapshot' of the major management fashions and fads influencing business strategy. They cut through the consultants' jargon and steer a practical, common sense course through the theory and hype. They provide managers with a balanced view based on evidence rather than missionary zeal, so that they can be better informed.

1 What is teleworking?

Despite the hype of recent years – culminating in the so-called ‘discovery’ of the Internet by private enterprise in the mid-1990s – teleworking is not new. Any sales representative serving a remote corner of any region or country, selling his or her wares and calling in the orders to a distant production facility, is – by most definitions – a teleworker. For decades, market research firms have used home-based teleinterviewers. Those infamous double-glazing, encyclopaedia and Bordeaux wine sellers are most likely to be home-based.

From the mass commercialization of the telephone in the 1950s, teleworking has been possible. The advent of the personal computer (PC) in the early 1980s gave added impetus to the idea and that was spurred on further by the Group Three fax machine, that gave fast, trouble-free performance at a price that became increasingly affordable. But it has only been with the easy access to cheap, high-speed modems, coupled to falling telephone charges in most countries (as well as price wars between international carriers), that the idea of a totally independent, stand-alone, yet instantly accessible worker has been a complete reality.

Add to those technical breakthroughs several other changes:

The flattening of hierarchies in most Western organizations, where advancement is more likely to be horizontal (what you contribute to the team or group) than the traditional vertical (seniority and tenure) model

The abandonment of the traditional job-for-life relationship between employer and employee to a more flexible form of employment where loyalty is expressed by the organization ensuring employability in the open market-place

The changes in the perception of work and the need and desire for a more rounded career/leisure life equation by an increasing number of people

The need to reduce or eliminate commuting time, use of cars and public transport, particularly in urban environments where traffic pollution is at the top of local government agendas

Corporate commitment to reducing overhead, from company cars to expensive real-estate

The arrival of a new ‘digital generation’, whose values, lifestyle and ‘keyboard’ skills make them natural teleworkers and will create a definite boost for this type of work arrangement … and you have the complete ingredients – a recipe – for a massive work revolution.

…‘the single most antiproductive thing we do is to ship millions of workers back and forth across the landscape every morning and evening.’

– Alvin Toffler

Let’s agree on what teleworking is

Today, there is only one barrier left for teleworking to overcome to be fully legitimized: getting everyone to agree on just what it is! Every book, manual, position paper and case study offers a different definition, and a different view. Others – in a need to be different – find a completely new name or phrase for the process of working away from a central office or group. These include: the electronic cottage, telecommuting, flexiplace and flexiwork, remote and distance work and networking. Add to that the fact that this growing industry’s observers and commentators have spent considerable effort in trying to categorize the different types of telework and the situation becomes even more confusing. What it comes down to is that one person’s teleworking is another person’s flexiwork.

Five myths of teleworking

Gil Gordon, regarded by many as one of the key players in promoting the telework/telecommute phenomenon and editor of the influential Telecommuting Review, warns anyone about to plunge into this great new world to steer clear of several dangerous myths that have grown up around the subject. Here’s an adapted version of his Five Myths of Telecommuting, that should be required reading for anyone embarking on their electronic journey.

Myth Number One: Telecommuting is just for programmers or others using a computer terminal.

Fact Number One: It’s a world for accountants, writers, analysts, sales people, research staff and many, many more. You are limited only by your imagination.

Myth Number Two: Telecommuting is just for parents who want to be at home with young children.

Fact Number Two: It’s almost impossible to be a full-time telecommuter end a full-time parent. Also people of all ages and personal situations are candidates.

Myth Number Three: Telecommuting is a five-days-a-week deal, with no time in the office.

Fact Number Three: The time at the remote site can – and should – range from one to four days a week.

Myth Number Four. Telecommuting means working at home. Feet Number Four. The home is only one possible workplace. Others include satellite offices, neighbourhood work centres, client’s office and so on.

Myth Number Five: The biggest challenges in telecommuting are the technical ones.

Fact Number Five: With few exceptions, the technical aspects are relatively simple. The real challenges are with the human resources employed; selection, supervision, productivity.

Werner Korte, a director of Empirica, a communications consulting group in Bonn, Germany, who carried out a study on telework for the European Union, says that ‘despite the fact that there was quite widespread consensus on what telework meant, a generally acceptable definition never existed and is still surprisingly elusive. In reality, people use the same terms to describe rather different things.’ Those different things can take the form of the initial concept of the teleworker, as one who ploughs a very lonely electronic furrow in some cottage in the wilderness (insert your preferred country here), a salaried worker who spends one or two days a week working from home or another site outside the main company offices, or a group who get together in a telecottage, or local mini-service centre.

This is why the definitions get confusing, particularly that of telecommuting. That, according to most US experts and commentators – where the term ‘telecommuting’ first appeared – really covers workers who do not spend all their time at home, but have some physical access, one, two or three days a week to the organization.

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Make sure that teleworkers have access to technical assistance either through a help-line or on-site visit if required. Downtime for a teleworker can be expensive for the organization.

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In places like California – where Clean Air Acts and a need to get commuters off the roads is driving telework as a very serious alternative to traditional nine-to-five office life – telecommuting has been clearly defined as something different from just simple telework. For anyone seeking a definition like that, the Washington State Energy Office has come up with a very suitable – and widely accepted – definition of the telecommuter:

A part-time work and transportation alternative that substitutes the normal work commute with the choice of working from home or at an office close to home. There are other, broader definitions, some of which include full-time work at home as a telecommuting option.

What seems most prevalent is that telecommuting is a US- coined term, while telework is the preferred, if broader term, used in Europe. Once again it isn’t just the voltage of our PCs, faxes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 What is teleworking?
• 2 What can teleworking do and where is it going?
• 3 Who teleworks and why?
• 4 The do's and don'ts of teleworking
• 5 The management issues of telework for organizations and individuals
• 6 Examining the telework debate so far
• The Teleworking Toolkit
• Index