Telecommuting's Past and Future: A Literature Review and Research Agenda <s> Introduction <s> Remote work refers to organizational work that is performed outside of the normal organizational confines of space and time. The term telecommuting refers to the substitution of communications capabilities for travel to a central work location. Office automation technology permits many office workers to be potential telecommuters in that their work can be performed remotely with computer and communications support. This paper examines some behavioral, organizational, and social issues surrounding remote work, particularly work at home. An exploratory study was conducted of 32 organizational employees who were working at home. Important characteristics of jobs that can be performed at home were: minimum physical requirements, individual control over work pace, defined deliverables, a need for concentration, and a relatively low need for communication. The individuals who worked at home successfully were found to be highly self-motivated and self-disciplined and to have skills which provided them with bargaining power. They also made the arrangement either because of family requirements or because they preferred few social contacts beyond family. <s> BIB001 </s> Telecommuting's Past and Future: A Literature Review and Research Agenda <s> Introduction <s> Some work full-time and others part-time. Some make a lot of money, and others barely scrape by. But home-based workers are beginning to account for more and more of New York State's economy. Mark Levine and Deirdre Martin have commutes most of us would envy. His is about thirty paces, up two flights of stairs, and takes all of fifteen seconds. Hers is even shorter, up just one flight of stairs. While the rest of us are running around looking for the car keys and trying to get the kids out the door, they're already at work at their computers or on the phone with colleagues in New York City. Levine and Martin, freelance writers of books and magazine articles, work in separate rooms of their home in Ithaca, New York he in a third-floor attic office and she in an office on the second floor. The two are among the more than 20 million Americans who spend at least part of the week working in or out of their homes. According to Ramona Heck, an associate professor of consumer economics and housing and the J. Thomas Clark Professor of Entrepreneurship and Personal Enterprise, they're part of a trend that has grown enormously in the last decade. "Home-based work has increased for three reasons," Heck says. "First, many women in the eighties wanted to work and bring in an income and still have time for their children. Second, the availability of technologies such as computers, printers, fax machines, and high-speed moderns has made it possible to do work at home that before could only have been done at the office. And third, employers are realizing that letting employees work at home cuts down on office expenses and other costs." Heck recently completed a multi-year study of 103 home-based workers in New York Stale to determine the value of home-based work to the state's economy. Her study was part of a larger project involving researchers from eight other universities who studied 796 home-based workers in Hawaii, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Vermont. Working with graduate student Likwang Chen, Heck estimated the value of home-based work to New York's economy, developed a profile of the average home-based worker in New York State, and compared it with home-based workers in the eight other states. Home-based workers have been the subject of just a few prior studies, none of which focused on New York State workers. The U.S. Census Bureau included information about home-based work in its 1980 census, and the Department of Labor conducted a study in 1985. A follow-up study was conducted in 1991. "One problem is that the definition of what constitutes home-based work differed in all these studies," Heck says. "For our study, we defined home-based workers as people who worked at the home or from the home at least six hours a week throughout the year. They had to have been involved in the activity at least twelve months, and they had to have had no other office from which the work was conducted. We did not include farmers unless they performed a value-added activity to what they grew, such as producing maple syrup or operating a retail market on the farm." The study divided the subjects into two groups: business owners, who operated their businesses in the home or from the home, and wage workers, who worked at home but were employed by someone else. In the New York portion of the study, Heck interviewed 75 business owners and 28 wage workers. The business owners included contractors, arts and crafts retailers, sales and marketing people, and professional and technical people. Among the wage workers, more than half were involved in sales and marketing and another 20 percent were involved in professional or technical occupations. The results of the study indicate that home-based workers have a significant impact on New York State's economy. Based on the sampling scheme, Heck and Chen estimate there are approximately 250,000 home-based workers in the state, exclusive of New York City, and that around 63,000 of them are in rural areas. … <s> BIB002 </s> Telecommuting's Past and Future: A Literature Review and Research Agenda <s> Introduction <s> Abstract While there are over 7 million telecommuters in the U.S. today, there has been little empirical research and virtually no theoretical work on telecommuting. Drawing from the literatures on contingent employment, job design and social isolation, this article presents a theoretical framework for understanding how different constellations of telecommuting arrangements and job characteristics lead to different patterns of employee attitudes and behaviors. After presenting a series of propositions, the article concludes with suggestions for the empirical testing of these propositions and a discussion of the implications for management practice. <s> BIB003 </s> Telecommuting's Past and Future: A Literature Review and Research Agenda <s> Introduction <s> Today many organizations, including AT&T and IBM, are pioneering the alternative workplace--the combination of nontraditional work practices, settings, and locations that is beginning to supplement traditional offices. This is not a fad. Although estimates vary widely, it is safe to say that some 30 million to 40 million people in the United States are now either telecommuters or home-based workers. What motivates managers to examine how people spend their time at the office and where else they might do their work? Among the potential benefits for companies are reduced costs, increased productivity, and an edge in vying for and keeping talented employees. They can also capture government incentives and avoid costly sanctions. But at the same time, alternative workplace programs are not for everyone. Indeed, such programs can be difficult to adopt, even for those organizations that seem to be most suited to them. Ingrained behaviors and practical hurdles are hard to overcome. And the challenges of managing both the cultural changes and systems improvements required by an alternative workplace initiative are substantial. How should senior managers think about alternative workplace programs? What are the criteria for determining whether the alternative workplace is right for a given organization? What are the most common pitfalls in implementing alternative workplace programs? The author provides the answers to these questions in his examination of this new frontier of where and how people work. <s> BIB004
A study by the Texas Transportation Institute found that the average time spent stuck in traffic in major US cities amounted to 56 hours per year in Los Angeles while Atlanta and Seattle followed closely with a total of 53 hours  ; khttp:// mobility.tamu.eduk May 7, 2001 ). If we combine the traffic jams with the average total length of commute of more than 30 miles each way in those cities the total adds up to well over 400 hours per year. Clearly this is time that could be spent in a more productive fashion. Would not we all like to have ten additional weeks to accomplish more work each year? Telecommuting is precisely the solution that can take many of those commuters out of their vehicles and out of those traffic jams. Workers will be more productive, the roads will be less congested and the air will be less polluted. Those are the promises of telecommuting -some have been realized while others have not. Narrowly defined, telecommuting or "telework"   BIB001 encompasses those opportunities that workers are given to work from home rather than reporting to a centralized office location. Another form of telecommuting is working at a distributed work arrangement such as satellite work centers, neighborhood work center, flexible work arrangement and generic offices (e.g. hotels and telework centers.) The number of workers involved in this form of telecommuting has been estimated at 7 million in the US in the mid 1990s BIB003 and has grown to about 19 million today  . Elsewhere, about one million Canadians BIB002 and somewhat smaller numbers in Britain, New Zealand, Singapore and Finland have availed themselves of these opportunities. An even greater number of workers are utilizing telecommunications technology to extend the workday after they arrive home BIB003 . The people involved with this form of telecommuting are referred to as "occasional home workers" by  . Still another group is considered to be "mobile" workers  and this definition is typically associated with a mobile sales force and other workers that spend a majority of their time out of the office due to the nature of their job. Some of the issues related to the mobile workers are explored further by  . These additional forms of "telecommuting" increase the total number to somewhere between 30 and 40 million workers in the US BIB004 that are working from home or from the road. These distinctions are consistent with definitions offered by  and as  suggested we need to put any discussion involving "telework" into context. The three forms described above apply to different situations and have different benefits and different issues. For our purposes, we will focus primarily on what we see as the true telecommuters or the individuals that represent the form of telecommuting that offers the greatest potential benefits. The telecommuting form in question applies to those workers that work from home for a full day on a weekly or monthly basis or perhaps on a more frequent basis and those who work at a satellite work location. So, "occasional home workers" or workaholics that extend the workday into the weekend hours and the "mobile" workforce will receive minimal coverage in the balance of our discussion.