Questions and answers about telecommuting programs - survey of human resource managers

Business Horizons,  May-June, 1995  by Robert C. Ford,  Frank McLaughlin

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Most people are fully aware of the impact technological advances are having on how people work. A smaller but growing number are becoming equally aware of the impact of new advances in technology on where people work as well. As the costs of computer memory and telecommunication linkages continue to decline, there is a growing interest in a new category of employee--the telecommuter. Although the basic idea of allowing em- ployees to work at sites other than the main office has been around for a long time, the technological advances of the last decade have made it possible to expand the number and category of employees for which telecommuting might be desirable and feasible.

Telecommuting is the substitution of communications technology for travel to a central work location. A telecommuter is someone who works for an organization either at home or at a satellite work location at least part of the time while connected to the main office through some form of communications technology. This definition includes the typical formal programs created for employees in clerical jobs, such as data entry clerks or telephone order takers, for whom the job focus is on working with information in some corporate data base.

More recently, however, other categories of employees have found telecommuting a useful way to expand their productivity. A variety of new types of informal telecommuting programs have evolved. These include the executive who uses a notebook computer with a built-in modern to do work at home, on the weekend, at a remote job site, or even while traveling. It also includes the traveling sales executive who brings a laptop on the airplane, taps into E-mail on the "airphone" during the flight, downloads work into the corporate communications network at night, or even dials up the corporate data base directly from a customer's location to conduct on-line inquiries about product, cost, and delivery times.

Other types of telecommuting include the independent consultant who may have no formal office. Instead, this person may conduct business entirely at the locations of individual clients or even on the road, retaining the ability to access a particular client's data base as the need arises. Indeed, Caudron (1992) estimates that more than 6.6 million telecommuters operate outside any formal organizational setting and policy control, or work for organizations that are too small to have developed formal policies and procedures on such matters.

This article reports the results of a study undertaken to discover the characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages of formal telecommuting programs. Although there are some proprietary data on the extent to which telecommuting exists, as well as some specific firm examples, there is surprisingly little empirical information available to help practicing managers make decisions about the usefulness of this concept for their organizations. The study was designed to answer important questions that organizations contemplating such a program might ask of those that had actually used telecommuting.

To answer these questions, a letter defining telecommuting was sent to 6,000 human resource managers across the United States. A total of 1,827 individuals replied, and 287 stated that they had such a program. A second letter with a questionnaire asking for more detailed information was sent to these people. A total of 126 usable replies were received. The data reported below represent their responses.

These managers are believed to be knowledgeable sources of information about the extent to which telecommuting programs exist, their characteristics, and the degree to which the companies have found them to be effective. Further, managers in this group are likely to have informed perceptions on the actual advantages and disadvantages of telecommuting programs noted in the largely prescriptive writings on this topic.

1. How widely used are formal telecommuting programs?

According to a 1988 LINK Resources survey, there were 4.9 million telecommuting employees in formal corporate programs and 15.4 million corporate employees working at home on either a part-time or full-time basis in the United States (McGee 1988). Many writers, mostly citing various surveys from the same LINK Resources organization, report a large and growing number of people involved in some form of telecommuting. These estimates range from a low of 100,000 telecommuters (Forester 1988) to 3.4 million workers in formal work-at-home arrangements (Goodrich 1990) to 16 million home workers reported in 1991 (Fattah and Dagan 1993). Because only 15 percent of the responding human resource managers in our study noted that their organizations actually had a formal program, the number of participants reported in these other studies seems comparatively high. A possible explanation for this discrepancy is that many telecommuters are not part of any formal program or work for very small firms that would not have a human resources manager.

2. Are firms satisfied with their telecommuting programs and the productivity of their telecommuters?