Telecommuting, remote work, or telework is a work arrangement in which employees do not commute to a central place of work. A person who telecommutes is known as a "telecommuter", "teleworker", and sometimes as a "home-sourced," or "work-at-home" employee. Many telecommuters work from home, while others, sometimes called "nomad workers", use mobile telecommunications technology to work from coffee shops or other locations. According to a Reuters poll, approximately "one in five workers around the globe, particularly employees in the Middle East, Latin America and Asia, telecommute frequently and nearly 10 percent work from home every day". The terms "telecommuting" and "telework" were coined by Jack Nilles in 1973.
Contents
1 Definition
2 Telecommuting and telework statistics
3 Technology
4 Potential benefits
4.1 Environmental benefits
4.2 Productivity and employee benefits
4.3 Advantages and disadvantages meta-analysis
5 Potential drawbacks and concerns
5.1 Telecommuting and work-at-home scams
6 Current trends
6.1 Virtualization
6.2 U.S. Federal government
6.3 Telework centers
6.4 Remote office centers
7 Related terms and concepts
7.1 Office hoteling
7.2 Coworking
7.3 Distributed work
7.4 Jellies
8 See also
9 References
10 External links
Definition
Although the concepts of "telecommuting" and "telework" are closely related, there is still a difference between the two. All types of technology-assisted work conducted outside of a centrally located work space (including work undertaken in the home, outside sales calls, etc.) are regarded as telework. Telecommuting refers more specifically to work undertaken at a location that reduces commuting time. These locations can be inside the home or at some other remote workplace, which is facilitated through a broadband connection, computer or phone lines.
As a broader concept than telecommuting, telework has four dimensions in its definitional framework: work location, that can be anywhere outside of a centralized organizational work place; usage of ICTs (information and communication technologies) as technical support for telework; time distribution, referring to the amount of time replaced in the traditional workplace; and the diversity of employment relationships between employer and employee, ranging from contract work to traditional full-time employment.
A frequently repeated motto is that "work is something you do, not something you travel to." Variations of this include: "Work is something we DO, not a place that we GO" and "Work is what we do, not where we are."
Telecommuting and telework statistics
As of 2012, estimates suggest that over fifty million U.S. workers (about 40% of the working population) could work from home at least part of the time, but in 2008 only 2.5 million employees, excluding the self-employed, considered their home to be their primary place of business. The number of employees reported to have worked from their home "on their primary job" in 2010 has been reported as 9.4 million (6.6% of the workforce), though, this number might include the self-employed.
Very few companies employ large numbers of home-based full-time staff. The call center industry is one notable exception: several U.S. call centers employ thousands of home-based workers. For many employees, the option to work from home is available as an employee benefit but most participants only do so a fraction of the time.
Top paid among work-from-home sectors are home-based physicians and radiologists in which it is suspected that they earn near the $1,975 median weekly income of physicians, as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, making it a six-figure job. Studies show that at-home workers are willing to earn up to 30% less and experience heightened productivity.
In 2009, the United States Office of Personnel Management reported that approximately 103,000 federal employees were teleworking. However, less than 14,000 were teleworking three or more days per week.
In January 2012, Reuters, drawing from an Ipsos/Reuters poll, predicted that telecommuting was "a trend that has grown and one which looks like it will continue with 34 percent of connected workers saying they would be very likely to telecommute on a full-time basis if they could."
On December 9, 2010, the U.S. Federal Government passed the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010 in order to improve Continuity of Operations and ensure essential Federal functions are maintained during emergency situations; to promote management effectiveness when telework is used to achieve reductions in organizational and transit costs and environmental impacts; and to enhance the work-life balance of workers. For example, telework allows employees to better manage their work and family obligations and thus helps retain a more resilient Federal workforce that is better able to meet agency goals.
Technology
The roots of telecommuting are found in early 1970s technology that linked satellite offices to downtown mainframes through dumb terminals using telephone lines as a network bridge. The ongoing and exponential decreases in cost along with the increases in performance and usability of personal computers, forged the way for moving the office to the home. By the early 1980s, branch offices and home workers were able to connect to organizational mainframes using personal computers and terminal emulation.
Telework is facilitated by tools such as groupware, virtual private networks, conference calling, videoconferencing, virtual call centre and Voice over IP (VOIP). It can be efficient and useful for companies since it allows workers to communicate over long distances, saving significant amounts of travel time and cost. As broadband Internet connections become more commonplace, more and more workers have adequate bandwidth at home to use these tools to link their home to their corporate intranet and internal phone networks.
The adoption of local area networks promoted the sharing of resources, and client–server computing allowed for even greater decentralization. Today, telecommuters can carry laptop PCs which they can use both at the office, at home, and nearly anywhere else. The rise of cloud computing technology and Wi-Fi availability have enabled access to remote servers via a combination of portable hardware and software.
Furthermore, with their improving technology and increasing popularity, smartphones are becoming widely used in telework. They substantially increase the mobility of the worker and the degree of coordination with their organization. The technology of mobile phones and personal digital assistant (PDA) devices allows instant communication through text messages, camera photos, and video clips from anywhere and at any time.
Source: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommuting