GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH PAPER NO. 2012-02

THE DARK SIDE OF TELECOMMUTING IS A TIPPING POINT APPROACHING? Stephen Ruth

George Mason University School of Public Policy

GMU School of Public Policy Research Paper

The Dark Side of TelecommutingIs A Tipping Point Approaching?

Stephen Ruth George Mason University, USA
Abstract This article proposes a cautionary view of the potential challenges that would arise if telecommuting implementation increases significantly beyond its present, popular, highly successful baseline. Current telecommuters are the cream of the cropmature, carefully trained, and mostly from significantly higher-than-average income and education levels. But as more persons are added in telecommuting plans because of workplace pressures, labor unions, federal and state legislation and other factors, there may be serious problems. Several of the challenges associated with greater telecommuting participation are described. They are: difficulties in assessing telecommuting demographics, problems in the evaluation of productivity, the dilemma of determining verifiable costs and benefits, the drawbacks and distractions in home-siting of telework as the levels of education and experience decrease, supervisor-subordinate problems, the imbalance of broadband service, especially for poorer workers, and the reluctance of some organizations to take advantage regional telework centers.

Keywords: telework, telecommuting, distracters, telecenters, digital divide

Introduction The title of this article may be disconcerting, since telecommuting is firmly established as a part of work life in the developed worldmostly a good news story. A quick scan of ABI Inform, Proquest or Google searches with just the descriptors telework or telecommuting yields thousands of mainstream articles, nearly all of them positive, perhaps the better word might be euphoric, about the gains being achieved through telecommuting. A recent report described a group of IT workers who would accept a 10 percent pay cut just to be able to work from home (Erlanger, 2011). And its not just the private sector that is positive about telecommuting. Many of the states in the US have passed telecommuting legislation and last year the US Congress approved a major telecommuting bill, calling on supervisors to increase substantially the participation of the federal work force in telework. The European Union is also moving ahead with significant telecommuting expansion (European Foundation for the Improvement of Working Conditions, 2010) in both the public and private sector. A recent experiment in a large Chinese travel services company reported by Stanford Universitys Professor Jeff Bloom indicated that a random sample of employees who were allowed to work from home had significantly higher productivity with no adverse effects on home life. (Bloom, 2011) And Americas Jet Blue Air as well as Minnesotas Hennepin County Human Resources Department have shown long term benefits from results-only work environment (ROWE) which allows full flexibility to do assigned tasks from home, office, or any other site as long as the work is accomplished on time. (Ludden, 2011). But telecommuting is an elusive topic. A Washington DC reporter wondered a few years ago whether there might even be a dark side of this apparently unstoppable force (Causey, 2009). Once one gets beyond the top 100 Fortune companies and some of the famous public sector successes, like the US Patent and Trademark Office, the National Science Foundation, and Fairfax County, Virginia, there are some interesting issues that emerge about sustaining telecommutings growth. Perhaps there is a tipping point approaching where each incremental telecommuting implementation may yield lower returns. Telecommuting gains so far have been leveraged through a relatively small number of highly capable peoplethe work places most talented and diligent individuals are the ones who are telecommuting several days per week. As more employees clamor to be added, there may be some new challenges. Intuitively telecommuting seems to be all gainemployees approve, supervisors claim productivity gains (although not always rigorously computedsee below), carbon footprints are reduced, etc. What happens when everyone whos eligible for telecommuting works half the week or more from home or from Starbucks or some other off-site location? Incidentally in the Stanford experiment using ROWE with the Chinese company, even though productivity increased at home, half of the subjects requested to be allowed to go back to the old work site.(Fisman, 2011). Currently, in the American work force of over 140 million, only a miniscule number are telecommuting full time. But tens of millions are at least occasional telecommuters and the number is growing. .Is there a limit to telecommuting growth, a level where the practice begins to yield lower returns to the employer? The Challenges

Here are some of the challenges that may affect the continued success of telecommuting.. First, there is the problem of telecommuting demographics. It is very difficult to determine how many people are actually telecommuting or to find the number of telecommuting days per week or month. Other demographic questions concern the venue of telecommuting (home, office, restaurant, teleecenter, etc), working conditions, and the personal profile of the teleworker (age, gender, salary, education, etc.) Second, telecommuting productivity improvements are often taken for granted; yet there is an interesting literature suggesting that benefits may be less than those which are publicized. Third, there is considerable data to suggest that after the best telecommuters are selected and situated, the remainder of the eligible workforce, that is, most of the work force, may not be as qualified to work effectively or efficiently in remote mode. There are hundreds of academic studies of telecommuting implementationclinical experiments, questionnaire-based analyses, in situ studies, etc.-- that look closely into the personal implementation dynamics of telecommuting. While some of them find examples of positive outcomes, in general they are not nearly as enthusiastic as the articles in the popular press. . Fourth, while telecommuting costs are relatively easy to determine and document, the benefits, often expressed as cost-avoidance, are not as clearly assessed in many cases, both with respect to personnel expense and energy savings. Some estimates for the US indicate that adding a large number of telecommuters could sharply curb energy consumption in a nation that consumes one fourth of the worlds daily petroleum output. Are optimistic estimates about telework-related energy savings verifiable? Fifth, what are the potential effects on a supervisors job when more and more of the workers are away from the office? If the best workers are allowed to telecommute regularly, while most of the office force still has to be at the work site, there are changes in the supervisors responsibilities and in office dynamics. Allso, is the satisfied off-site telecommuter going to want to come back to the office for the rest of the week? Will the non-telecommuting-eligible co-workers begrudge the denied chance to work at home? Supervisors have many new challenges in trying to accommodate to the unseen worker Finally, there is a cluster of other issues that could affect the potential success of additional telecommuting--computer security in the home, the digital divide across gender, ethnicity, wealth and location, lessening of telecenter use, etc. Telecommuting Demographics and Statistics Anyone looking for simple, straightforward statistics on telecommuting and telecommuters may be surprised to learn that there is a wide range of estimates. In the United States, is it 5 million or 50 million telecommuters? Depending on the data source or telecommuting definition, either might be correct. Some crucial questions for telecommuting demographic studies are: What are the characteristics of the typical telecommuter? What are the preferred work locations (home, client site, restaurant, car, etc)? How many persons actually are telecommuting?

How many days per month do they telecommute?

A useful study of telecommuting demographics is the recently released The State of Telecommuting in the USHow Individuals, Businesses and Government Benefit, distributed by the Telecommuting Research Network. (Lister & Harnish, 2011) This report is enthusiastically pro-telecommuting, like most similar summaries of its type, but is helpful in giving answers to the four questions above. First of all, it succinctly describes the general characteristics of the telecommuter: The typical telecommuter is a 49-year-old, college educated, salaried, non-union employee in a management or professional role, earning $58,000 a year at a company with more than 100 employees. (Lister & Harnish, 2011, 4) Another study summarized the typical telecommuter as male, a college graduate, under age 55, living in a household earning $75,000 or more per year, and telecommuting at least once per month either from home or other remote site (Dieranger Group, 2009, 8). These summaries could be described in a different way, reflecting instead the potential exclusions from telecommuting. Keeping in mind that the US median household income is in the range of $32,000, less than one-third of Americans have a college degree, and the average age of the American worker is 35, here is an alternate description: The typical telecommuter is male, considerably older than the average worker, earns almost twice the median US household income, is not paid hourly and is one of only 30 percent of American workers who holds a college degree. Todays telecommuter, then, is a person of relatively elite status. Lets examine a few more demographics from the Telecommuting Research Network report. It finds that more than 70 percent of the current telecommuters are in management, sales, professional and office jobs. (Lister & Harnish, 2011, 13), .over three-fourths of them are in the private, for-profit sector with the remainder in private non-profit and federal, state, and local government. As to site of telecommuting most of the workers reported a home work site (86 percent), but there were several other highly desired locations: customer/client site (33 percent), car (28 percent), hotel (29 percent) and caf or restaurant (24 percent). The third demographic issue concerns how many workers are telecommuting. Using the United States data, the upper limit of eligible jobsthat is actual work that can be performed at a remote sitehas been estimated at about 65 million, slightly less than half the jobs in the U.S. A recent study found that 21 percent of that number, about 13 million, do not wish to telecommute, meaning that the actual available telecommuting-eligible population is about 50 million. (Telework Research Network, 2011) That is a helpful nominal figure but is by no means a consensus. Estimates by Gartner Group (Jones, 2005) and Nilles (Nilles, 2000) put the number higher and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics use a lower figure (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2010),

The fourth demographic issue is the most complicated. How many days does a worker actually do paid tasks using telecommuting outside the normal office environment? First, using the 50 million telecommuting-eligible jobs in the US as a basiswhich excludes those eligibles who do not want to telecommute (see above)--the number of potential annual telecommuting hours (TCH) available in a year is about 2,000 (the number of work hours per year) times 50 million workers, or 100 billion TCH. This would be the upper level of telecommuting potential, where everyone who is eligible and willing is working off-site all the timean impossible scenario, of course, but an indicator of the maximum. To get a (very) rough idea of the actual current TCH per year, here is an approach. First, there is general agreement that about 3 million persons work at home nearly all the time (4-5 days per week) so they contribute 3 million times 1800 (work hours per year for 4.5 days per week) or 5.4 billion of the 100 billion available TCH. What about the remaining 47 million workers? They are composed of people anywhere from one day per quarter to several days per week and also a large number who dont telecommuting at all (but would like to). There are dozens of estimates concerning this populations telecommuting use, so Ill simply suggest two scenarios. An upper, highly optimistic estimate for those who do some telecommuting would be 20 million persons, 40 percent of those eligible. Assume that on average this population telecommutes one day every two weeks. That gives total annual TWH annually as 20 million times 200 hours (a years work at one day per two weeks), or 4 billion TCH. My own estimate is much lower. I would use 10 million telecommuters, and, because many of them are in the public sector where less than 20 percent of the eligibles are selected to telework (discussed more below), the allocated time would decrease to one day every four weeks. So for this scenario the annual TCH is 10 million times 100 hours (a years work at one day every four weeks) or 1.0 billion TCH. So if the full time (4-5 days per week) TCHs are 5.4 billion TWH the two scenarios range from 9.4 (5.4 + 4) to 6.8 (5.4 + 1.4) TWH. To summarize, If the entire eligible (and willing) work force of roughly 50 million were to work 2.5 days per week off sitemeaning that every telecommuter in the organization was only on site half the time--the annual TCH would be 50 billion. Current TCH is probably in the range of one-fifth to one-tenth of that, or less, so there would need to be an unprecedented dislocation of the work force to even approach the 50 billion goal. It should be remembered that as a person migrates from a few days per month or quarter to a few days per week there can be some major changes; like suddenly not needing an assigned office (hoteling is a solution, but it is a major dislocation), or beginning to have productivity problems at the office, losing the edge provided by telecommuting, etc.

Productivity Analysis of TelecommutingMaybe Not Needed? Unit output for a given inputproductivityis a driver of a nations economy and an essential benefit attributed to telecommuting, in the private sector, although not as frequently in the public sector (in some state and federal telework sites productivity is not one of the featured advantages). As mentioned, the productivity improvements attributed to telecommuting are widely praised. There seems to be a consensus that dramatic reductions in unit costs and increases in hourly output are available, at least for some applications and in

certain organizations. One researcher summarized over a dozen telecommuting success storiesAmerican Express telecommuters generated 43 percent more business and handled 26 percent more calls than office-bound employees; IBM and Compaq Computer Company generating productivity improvements from 15-40 percent; Anderson Consulting employees spending 25 percent more face-to-face time with their customers once they gave up their permanent office spaces, etc. (Pearce, 2009).. The Telecommuting Research Network report, like many others in the pro-telecommuting movement, is expansive about potential savings in a future environment where most of the workers telecommuting at least half the week: If the 50 million potential telecommuters in the U.S. worked from home 2.4 days a week (the national average for those who already do), companies, communities, and individuals could collectively save over $900 billion a year. (Telecommuting Research Network, 23) Almost a trillion dollars in annual savings from telecommuting? Its an extraordinary number. and obviously depends on some definitions and assumptions about companies, communities, and individuals, and requires a lot of credulity and optimism. Since telecommuting is so popular as a work style, it may be that the productivity issue is no longer really important. Telecommuting has become a motivator, an aid in recruiting and a definite morale component, a significant differentiator in employment, not to mention its claims at reducing the carbon footprint. A study of more than a thousand Chief Financial Officers by Robert Half International a few years ago found that over a third of the respondents felt that availability of telecommuting was the most important inducement for attracting excellent employees and nearly half or the rest felt that it was the second-ranking employment inducement---only salary amount ranked higher (American Electronics Association, 2008). Also, an earlier study by the Gallup Organization found that a large number of workers feel that telecommuters are equal to office workers in terms of productivity (The Gallup Organization, 2006). So it may be better to discuss productivity not as a matter that must be proved, but more in the context of insights from the studies, reports and case analyses. In measuring the actual improvement in unit output for telecommuting verses in-office work, the simplest approach would be to compare selected task accomplishment at the office with that achieved at home or other telecommuting site. But as many studies have found, it is not easy to disaggregate the tasks that are done at home with those at the office. If a particular job has simple elements, like number of sales calls, invoices submitted, reports completed, etc., then the comparisons are relatively straightforward. Work assignments have elements of interaction with office staff and supervisors, attendance at meetings, etc., so evaluations may need to be more subjective. There are some inherent pitfalls in measurement of telecommuting productivity. Professor Ralph Westfalls early contributions to the debate posited several telecommuting productivity concerns that may as pertinent today as over a decade ago. (Westfall, 1999, Westfall, 2004). He suggested first that telecommuting productivity gains may be exaggerated either because of artifacts of the selection process, like placebo effects, the self-selection process (only the best workers are chosen), or the possibility that the particularly creative segments of work (more challenging and interesting) are the ones assigned for telecommuting. Secondly, Westfall says that productivity gains from telecommuting may actually be caused by job site modifications not related to

telecommuting, like special training programs, improved IT capabilities, job reengineering, and so on. Third, he cautioned that productivity increases may be offset by added costs, like dedicated PCs or laptops, greater need for on-site support, security software, added managerial oversight, etc. It may be surprising but there are relatively few formal published studies that actually measure telecommuting productivity using a dollars and cents, return-on-investment analytical approach, like the American Express, IBM and Compaq claims cited earlier. But there are some. Here is an example. A study in 2007 offered an opportunity to consider some of Westfall's criticisms in a real-world case. Using almost five years of longitudinal data for call center employees at Kentucky American Water Company (KAWC), the researchers attempted to evaluate specifically whether placebo effects, absenteeism, and morale issues did in fact operate as Westfall predicted. They focused on Westfall's four factors: amount of work; intensity of work; efficiency of work; and adjustments for additional costs associated with telecommuting (such as expenses for equipment, technology support, training, managerial support, etc.) There were three to four telecommuters involved in the study and six to nine in-office workers, but the productivity results were significant and surprising. The telecommuters productivity increased by 154% in the in-office counterparts productivity fell by 13%. With respect to Westfall's other hypotheses the researchers commented: We found no evidence that productivity gains are an artifact of the process used to select telecommuters and little evidence to suggest that telecommuters negatively impact the performance of other employees. We also found no evidence that telecommuting reduces absenteeism (Butler, Aasheim &Williams, 2007) As mentioned, many of the analytical studies concentrate more on human behavior and satisfaction than dollars and cents. From my perspective the gold standard in meta-analyses of telecommuting, that is, studies of the studies, was published in 2007 by Gajendran and Harrison titled The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown about Telecommuting: Meta-Analysis of Psychological Mediators and Individual Consequences. (Gajendran, & Harrison, 2007). The study was particularly valuable because it examined a total of 46 previous analyses of telecommuting, some careful and statistically rigorous and others less so. Almost 13,000 employees were covered in the 46 studies. Let's examine several of the key insights from this significant summary. First of all, there is a general consensus that telecommuting is a good thing -- a positive opportunity made available to employees. While some variables are more significant than others, the researchers concluded that there were three major components of any analysis of this subject. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Figure 1 about here +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Figure 1 above is the model developed by the researchers to summarize the studies they reviewed. It should be noted that most of the literature delineates levels of telecommuting

intensity, from infrequent (once per month, quarter or year) to frequent, (several days a week or more) The three psychological moderators--perceived autonomy, work-family contact, and quality of the relationship between supervisor and coworkers--lead to these outcomes: variables job satisfaction, performance, turnover intention, role stress and perceived career prospects. Overall, employees registered positive ratings on job satisfaction, low turnover intent and reduced stress. Supervisory ratings and archival records of job performance also showed good results. Surprisingly, the workers themselves were not willing to attribute telecommuting to any increases in their own productivity. As the researchers concluded: Telecommuting has a clear upside: small but favorable effects on perceived autonomy, workfamily conflict, job satisfaction, performance, turnover intent, and stress. Contrary to expectations in both academic and practitioner literatures, telecommuting also has no straightforward, damaging effects on the quality of workplace relationships or perceived career prospects. However, there is a downside of higher intensity telecommuting in that it does seem to send coworker (but not supervisor) relationships in a harmful direction. Some of the complexities of these consequences have yet to be explored, but the evidence and theory reviewed here suggest that they can be managed (Gajendran, & Harrison, 2007, 1538). As mentioned, in the popular press, business journals, management summaries, it is almost impossible to find negative comments about telecommuting. But there are hundreds of studies in the academic literature. While many of these studies show slightly favorable outcomes for telecommuting, few give enthusiastic, unstinting, unreserved approbation. In fact some conclude with a summary similar to that of a meta-analysis by Bailey and Kurland, empirical research to date has been largely unsuccessful in explaining what happens (Bailey & Kurland, 2002, 394). Proper FitEveryone Isnt Competent to Work at Home: Some Studies Telecommuting has become so popular that it is a highly desirable perquisite, something most employees would like to have. Yet, as described above, a relatively small number of workers is doing what could be called extensive telecommuting, two or more days per week. In the public sector its normal for only a small portion of the eligible workers to be selected for telecommuting, say 20 percent at the most, and usually the amount of off-site work permitted by that small group is about one day per week. Fairfax County, Virginia, which has won numerous national awards for IT achievement, has one of the most successful telework programs in the public sector, and normally allows about one-fifth of those eligible for telework to participate in the program and the selected person usually teleworks one per week (Fairfax County Interviews, 2011). That means that 20 percent of the eligibles actually telework and for a period of 20 percent of the work week (one day). But suppose there were none of these restrictions or screening processes? There may be some factorstemperament, life-style, discipline, work focus ability, eating habits, tolerance for ambiguity, and others that limit the effectiveness of additional entrants in that mode of work. Here are a few examples of possible issues that might complicate potential value of a telecommuting candidate.

Children, spouses and other distracters The work-at-home regimen requires self-imposed structure and most organizations require that young children, be excluded from the work environment. In fact, day care arrangements are often stipulated, as during normal work at the office. Not everyone is able to cope with a pseudo-office environment. A British study found that when children and spouses are part of the work-at- home mix there can be significant stresses (Baines and Geller, 2003) There are many other issues that can be potential challenges for the telecommuter. Another study used a five hundred-person sample of workers in a globally dispersed company to test links between a variety of independent variables (called distracters) on single dependent variableperceived productivity. (Jensen, 2007).The independent variables were doorbell/deliveries/visitors/telephone, housekeeping, spousal demands, children and work space. The results were interesting in that there was good corroboration in the cited literature for a negative effect of these variables on productivity but in the actual sample, the effect was noticeable but minimal. Previous Experience A recent study found that employees with previous telecommuting experience would be more successful than those who were doing it for the first time, because their relevant experience elsewhere could make them more successful in telecommuting than working a traditional office job. This is because the physical separation of telecommuters from the other members of their organization possibly reduces the negative effects of experience that are essentially due to a possible mismatch between employees prior work habits and their current organizations culture (Turetken, et al, 2011, 63). Work and Family Balance A 2006 study in the United States aimed at determining the impact of telecommuting on home and family life separated the relationships into these elements: work-to family and family-to-work. It included other variables like the level of job autonomy, scheduling flexibility, household size, etc. The results indicated that as telecommuting intensity increased, work-to family stress decreased but family-to-work stress rose. Also, higher stress from telecommuting intensity correlated with size and lack of task flexibility. As the researchers concluded: We found that the more extensively individuals telecommute, the less work interferes with family and the more family interferes with work (Golden, Veiga,. & Simsek, 2006). A 2003 European study examined the effect of telecommuting on four quality-of-life dimensions--overall satisfaction with life, sense of belonging, sense of becoming and sense of being It found a positive relationship to sense of belonging, but a negative relationship with the partners life satisfaction. Individual interviews with subjects elicited this finding: No simple explanation for the negative effects were found, but our interviews with the group of workers and their families leave us the impression that the problem of overworking and withdrawal was most relevant to the cases, in combination with negative spill-over effects and unclear boundary settings in the home. (Vitterso, J. et al, 2003) Time Banditry A recent study in the United States examined time banditry, the propensity of employees to engage in non-work related activities during work time. (Martin, et al, 2010). While not directly aimed at telecommuters, the time-banditry research presents a perspective that could be particularly appropriate as more of the formerly excluded workers are permitted to work at home. It found that a complex array of factors determine the likelihood of time-wasting behaviors. From the earliest studies of telecommuting, in the

1980s (De Sanctis, 1984), there has been a concern that many workers do not have the discipline to avoid serious lapses once given a free and unfettered off-site work environment Face-to-face vs virtual contact Some telecommuters may be less productive because of a sense of deprivation from the office routine and a loss of face-to-face contact with managers and co-workers. A 2007 study in Japan of a large telecommuting program yielded data that showed differences between the perceived richness of the normal office environments data base and that available at the telecommuting site. The methods of access were found to be varied and there was no difference between the effectiveness of email and phone conversations and the supposedly more effective face-toface approach. As they conclude, According to the media richness theory, the effectiveness of a communication task is reached when the task at hand matches the type of medium used. This may imply that overreliance on face-to-face contacts in central work or on electronic medium (especially email) in telecommuting may be counter-productive. (Lee and Higa, 2007) Difficulties in detaching from work Can a telecommuter put the days work aside at quitting time? Several work life studies have suggested that the other extreme of being dislocated from work is the being unable to cease at the appropriate time and return to other life activities. A 2010 study in Finland examined the effect of telecommuting on work-family balance among professors. It found that while the availability of computers and Internet at home were a convenience, there was another undesirable result: the inability to detach from the workload at the college, thereby extending the work day and increasing tensions at home. As the authors put it: the Internet and work flexibility are found to increase workfamily conflict. The findings suggest that the combination of flexibility and Internet use makes it increasingly difficult for academics to disengage themselves from work (Heijstra & Gudbjorg, 2010). Loneliness/Isolation Working away from the office can be a lonely and socially isolating.. For high-intensity telecommuting, a recent study found that informal communication with co-workers, relationships with co-workers (coworker liking), organizational commitment and job satisfaction all could be adversely affected by the isolated setting. (Fay. & Kline, 2011). A detailed literature review had a similar finding: there is one problem that stands above all others: social relations in the workplace (including customer contacts) are considered more important than the flexibility afforded by telecommuting. People who are physically separated from the workplace community are more than likely to be excluded from social relations, unless there is a conscious effort to organize regular meetings and informal get-togethers. Separation and alienation from the workplace community may also be considered a threat to career advancement. For these reasons, it is important that from the earliest planning stages, special attention is given to creating a systematic feedback system (Pasi, 2011). Security there is a significant literature about the challenges of securing offsite workstations and the dangers of employees allowing them to be compromised. The problem is the need to create an exact replica of the office capability while also being certain that the necessary precautions needed at the work site are preserved at home. Since some of the connections may be wireless the security challenge is greater. FIPS-certified Virtual Private Networks

(VPN) and firewalls at the end point must be provided, along with other equipment. (Ruth & Choudhury, 2008) The National Science Foundation and some other organizations provide workers with a dedicated home-based PC to assure compatibility. And if the individual worker uses a laptop or PDA, there are additional potential dangers of having systems hacked or taken out of service. The worker at home has a variety of special concerns in the maintenance and protection of the system. Some may be unable to cope with the stress of maintaining the home site adequately. Doing the NumbersCost Benefit Analysis of Telecommuting Implementation Many managers implement telecommuting because its simply obvious, a no-brainer that allows a valued employee to work in the comfort of home or some remote site on a regular basis. Nevertheless, its important to rationalize the actual costs and benefits, especially since telecommuting implementation is growing at such a rapid pace There are several online cost benefits computation tools available to quantify costs and benefits. One of the bestknown was developed by telecommuting thought leader, pioneer and researcher Jack Nilles and is available at his centers web site (Jala International, 2008). It describes a cost elements, like selection and training, telecommunications, computers, moving costs, renovation/installation, facilities leasing, furniture purchase/lease, insurance, equipment purchase/rental costs and performance evaluation. In the sample shown, a worker earning $40,000 per year and telecommuting 1.5 days per week would incur $3,135 in one time costs and $1,105 in recurring (annual) costs. The largest recurring cost is $960 for telecommunications services and the largest one time costs are furniture purchase/lease ($900) performance evaluation ($700) and Computers ($500). The benefits ascribed to the telecommuter are these: Increased Employee Effectiveness $6,000 Average 15% relative to non-telecommuters @ 1.5 days/week 2 days per year reduction; 230 work days per year

Decreased Sick Leave

$ 348

Increased Organizational Effectiveness $800 Average about 2% Decreased Turnover Rate $2,000 Equivalent to 5% of salary in search and training costs avoided

Reduced Parking Requirements

$360 30% reduction in $100/month space requirements for non-carpooler

Office Space Savings

$3,240 150 square feet @ $6/month per square foot proportionally reclaimed

The summary net annual benefits comes out to $11,643, a significant saving for the organization. And that is just for one person. But on closer examination the benefits seem to be less easily quantified than the costs. The greatest benefit, $6,000 for increased effectiveness relative to-non telecommuters ($40,000 salary times 15 percent), seems arbitrary. Does every employee achieve this level? If it is based on detailed analysis or is it a general norm? Also is the 15 percent gain sustainable back at the office? If so, perhaps the employee could work all five days and save $20,000. Several other benefits allocations deserve attention. Organizational effectiveness is enhanced by a factor of 2 percent of the employees pay, $800. It would seem very difficult to allocate a balance sheet caption for this saving. Similarly, a major part of the benefits computation is $2,000 for reduced turnover rate. There is no doubt that telecommuting, properly managed, can help improve employee retention rates, and assigning a 5 percent cost avoidance savings is probably reasonable, but where in the companys bottom line is this amount assigned? The office space savings computation is equally interesting because the term proportionately reclaimed probably refers to the spreading out all the savings across many telecommuters. But if most telecommuters are away from their offices only a day or two per week, will they all be using different work stations when they return each week, so as to allow the organization to achieve maximum savings through hoteling? The JALA example brings up several interesting issues concerning computation of telecommuting-related benefits. First, when an average telecommuter achieves a 15 percent premium in output for a half week off-site (home, customer site, etc.) what happens to the other half of the week? Back at the office is there a decline in productivity, or is the 15 percent increase maintained? If the productivity gain is only attainable by working off site, then it seems that fewer and fewer workers should be working on site long term. Also, as telecommuting savings of this magnitude are achieved it is necessary to examine closely what actually happens back at the on-site work station. It is clearly wasteful to have prime office space like a personal work station vacant for half the work week plus vacation and sick time. The space must be made available to other workers, what the JALA example calls proportionately reclaimed. As efficient as this solution may seem, there are relatively few reports of full scale hoteling, where the worker uses a different assigned work station when on site. Certainly this does not take place in the public sector because only a small fraction of those eligible are selected for telecommuting and the average allocation for those selected is just one day per week. Another aspect of costs and benefits analysis might be called underemphasized expenses. In 2008 the National Science Foundation, an elite US government agency, claimed: On average, by not commuting, each NSF telecommuter reclaims 62 hours of their lives back and saves $1,201 a year. Extrapolating those savings across the agency, NSF telecommuters collectively spare the environment over one million pounds of emissions and save more than $700,000 in commuting costs per year (Telework Exchange, 2008) But the report did not mention that NSF provided each of the telecommuters a government-funded work station at the work site, in addition to other telecommuting-related costs. NSF was not being evasive because clearly they are one of the elite government agencies, on a par with the Fortune 100 companies in their ability to take advantage of telecommuting. There were savings in commute time, emissions, work/family balance, etc., (and probably decreased electrical costs

for the home office), but there tends to be a greater emphasis on the benefits than on the costs in many telecommuting analyses. With respect to energy savings I find the claims to be so amazing that they are hard to summarize. At the most optimistic end of the spectrum is this summary, from the popular, pro-telework book, Undress for Success: Currently, only 4 percent of the US workforce works from home, but research shows that about 40 percent have jobs that could be performed at home. Our analysis shows that if they did, these 50 million new teleworkers could annually save 587 million barrels of oil (roughly equivalent to 74 percent of our annual Gulf oil imports), reduce greenhouse gases by 101 million metric tons of CO2, and save almost US$52 billion at the pump. Each worker individually would save 26 work-days and over $1,000 time and money now wasted commuting. Thats the equivalent of an extra 5 weeks vacation a year! (Lister and Harnish, 2008). This summary seems to be extravagantly optimistic, and suggests that telecommuting-related energy savings may be the largest single component of a fuel-saving, energy-leveraging national policy agenda. But other IT savings seem to dwarf those associated with telework. A recent article discussed the overall energy savings due to IT innovations world-wide, concluding that at most IT was responsible for about 3 percent of the overall use of electricity and that a major portion of savings in the IT sector was derive from efficient use of large computer facilities, major reductions in energy consumption by PCs, laptops and servers and extensive deployment of dematerialization strategies. (Ruth, 2011). While telework-related energy savings are probably significant, they are not nearly as large, realizable and welldocumented as other IT infrastructure expense write-offs. Supervising Telecommuters Since the current group of telecommuters is skewed toward higher-paid, educated persons, the future additions to off-site work will include more workers who are closer to the average in the US work force: non-college, earnings nearer to the median salary, etc. There is a varied literature about challenges in supervising teleworkers and many of the insights from that body of study point to greater challenges in managing workers at distance as their diversity in earnings, education, skills, age and telework experience increases. If the best workers are allowed to telecommute regularly, while most of the office force stays at the work site, there are changes in the supervisors responsibilities and in office dynamics. Is the satisfied off-site telecommuter going to want to come back to the office for the rest of the week? Will the nontelecommuting-eligible co-workers begrudge the denied chance to work at home? Supervisors have many new challenges in trying to accommodate to the unseen worker. A 2009 U.S. study examined the effect of telecommuting on a particular age-differentiated group, Millennials , that is, individuals born between 1981 and 1999, as opposed to other age groups like GenXers, Baby Boomers and Traditionalists, etc. but the researchers discovered that Millennials are not greatly different from the other groups and their attitudes toward autonomy, work life balance, perceived computer competence and while they enjoyed

telecommuting, they were more deeply committed to its use than others. While the absence of generational differences in attitudes toward telecommuting use is interesting, the lower interest levels of Millennial women was surprising, . (Nicholas & Guzman, 2010) As the authors concluded .Based on results, Millennials do not seem to prefer telecommutinging ..is surprising that even this newest generation of workforce entrants, particularly Millennial females, do not embrace the concept of telecommutinging. A 2001 Australian report on telecommuting concluded that results could be effective only if the management structure was person-centered, that is, emphasizing that the individual was in control. This variable was directly related to three significant outcomes variables: telecommuter productivity, telecommuter job satisfaction, and telecommuter lifestyle satisfaction. (Meyers, N., & Hearn, 2001). Another meta-study found that telecommuting success has a lot to do with non technical factors, like characteristics of supervisors, employees, tasks and work environments as well as management support and problems encountered (Guimaraes & Dallow. 1999). A study of 90 supervisor-subordinate dyads found that supervisors need to communicate frequently with telecommuting workers but that the tone of the supervision needed to be informative, not normative. It also found that supervisors need to alert their subordinates that family and work need to be kept separate, even though that may cause stresses in roles and productivity (Lautsch, Kossek & Eaton, 2009). When a supervisor is the one who is telecommuting there is a different dynamics. A recent study culled from a data base of over ten thousand persons the researchers found that the off site boss generated several problems: Results suggest that in comparison to subordinates with managers in a traditional work mode, work experiences and outcomes are generally less positive for subordinates with teleworking managers who spend a portion of the week away from the office, and they are lower as well for subordinates with virtual managers who are away from the office full time (Golden & Fromen, 2011, 1451). A recent Washington Post article included frank comments from several sides of the telecommuting/supervision issue. (Washington Post, 2011) . They are shown in the box below. Washington Post Letters About Telecommuting June 9, 2011 I am one of the many federal employees who received a notice this week that my job is eligible for teleworking. I do occasionally telework when Im sick or if I have an emergency that requires me to be at home, but my boss has made it clear that he does not like telework and will not be approving it anytime soon. Please withhold my name. I like my supervisor and do not want to be identified as a complainer. Department of State Yes, I telework on occasion. I am a front-line manager with both collocated employees and several others in three other posts of duty. My manager allows his managers to telework occasionally when it is advantageous to do so. He also encourages his managers to plan ahead when inclement weather is anticipated so we can be ready to work at home when commuting to work is hazardous or impossible Jonathan K. Davis

Internal Revenue Service Denver The hard part is the jealousy that some workers are allowed this privilege and others are not. Some managers have their favorites and will let them work from home, while some people are very good and get the job done but are denied the opportunity to work from home. There should be a basis upon which a decision is made that promises a fair opportunity to everyone. The problem of one employee getting to work at home while others are not can create a lot of acrimony in the workplace. While working at home is a great idea for our environment, reduced stress, and helps people as well as the office save money, no one has figured out how to manage this new workforce. We should start learning what works and what does not. Mark Israel National Park Service Asheville, N.C. As more telecommuters are added to the work force, the supervisors role will be more challenging. In some situations telecommuting is considered a right, and unions are beginning to enter the discussion, insisting on a say in the selection of teleworkers Other Possible Impediments to Telecommuting: Digital Divide and Reluctance to Take Advantage of Telecenters There are other issues that continue to confront organizations that try to add more persons to the telecommuting rolls. In many of the developed nations of the world, including the United States, there is an uneven distribution of broadband service to the home, a disparity that could be called a digital divide differentiated by ethnicity and earning power. The US Federal Communications Commission has made it a major policy goal to reduce the disparity between the broadband haves and have-nots (US Federal Communications Commission, 2010, especially Part II, Inclusion). Here are a few statistics: 65 percent of US families have access to broadband service; fFor African-Americans the number is 59 percent and for Hispanics 49 percent; In terms of income, households where total earnings are over $75,000 have 91 percent in broadband connectivity, while for incomes under $20,000 the figure is 40 percent. Overall connectivity to broadband in America has gradually been tapering off from 2009 to 2010 the percentage increase was 63 to 66 percent (Lubin, 2010). And there's another problem associated with the divide. A recent study by the Pew Foundation determined that over half of Americans feel that the FCC's intention to extend broadband to all citizens is unnecessary. (Smith, 2010) As more and more employees from regions that have poorer broadband service try to telecommute, effectiveness will be diminished. It is relatively easy to compare the US broadband distribution to a large cluster of other countries, those included in the OECD studies conducted by Harvard's Berkman Center last year. With respect to the OECDs 30 nations, the United States rankings on three different metrics are low. Here are some examples: penetration metrics: penetration per 100 (15th), 3g penetration (15th), telegeography household penetration (19th),wi-fi hotspots per 100,000 (9th); speed metrics: maximum advertised speed (9th), average speed (19th), akamai average

advertised speed (11th), median download (11th), median upload (5th), median latency (17 th), 90 percent download (11th), 90 percent upload (7th); price metrics: price for low speeds (9th), combined, price for high speeds (19th), combined price for median speeds (18 th), price for very high speeds, combined (19th). (The Berkman Center for Internet and Society, 2010). Why is this significant for telecommuting? Because it indicates that the United States broadband infrastructure is less effective than that of many other developed nations, and those most likely to be penalized by this will be the broadband have-nots described above the group that might eventually be part of the new entrant pool in telecommuting deployment. Another potential inhibitor for successfully adding many eligible telecommuters is an apparent reluctance on behalf of some workers and employers to take advantage of telecenters. .Recently the General Services Administration closed several of its telecenters due to low utilization. (General Services Administration, 2011) These robustly configured, regionally dispersed sites offer a very high level of services, including computer security protections, usually superior to those of the home-sited system. And they eliminate many of the potential problems of poor (or no) broadband service, distractions from family members, interrupted teleconferencing, and so on. Another plus for telecenters is that they are much more suited for emergency planning, as in Continuity of Operations Plans (COOP). ConclusionFuture Problems and Challenges Everyone seems to like telecommuting. I personally dont know how I would get my work done without it. But there is a possibility that once the most qualified persons are working from their homes, cars, restaurants and customer sites at high levels of morale and productivity, there may be some major problems in welcoming the next large group into the fold. I have suggested that current telecommuters are, to the degree its possible to classify them, from the most highly capable, best-paid, besteducated segments of the work force. Telework is a reward for competence, a morale booster and differentiator. There may be a point, perhaps when the average Telecommuting Hours (TCH) begin to tilt toward a larger segment of the work force being at home a day or two per week, a few years from now, when some adverse effects kick in. These effects would probably be of three types. First, there would be physical dislocation. An employer would not be very wise to preserve good permanent office space for an employee who is using it only sporadically. So hoteling, which has been around for decades, may begin to be used by average companies and agencies, not just the Fortune 100. And the disruption may also be felt in other waysfewer face-to-face links to work colleagues, etc. can sometimes be very disconcerting. Also, unions and other employee rights organizations will begin to become even more involved in telecommuting decisions. Second, there may be some productivity anomalies. If a person is significantly more successful on a work unit basis while telecommuting, what behaviors can be expected when she or he is back at the office? Several studies, including one referenced in this article, show reduced productivity once back in normal space. Third, there may be a need for an intermediate location for telecommuting due to security problems. No matter how skillful the organizations tech staff may be, it will more difficult to replicate the secure, sabotage-proof hardware software/software suite available at the primary location in the home computer or the nomadic device. Many of those who have been working at home will need to migrate to the robust, comfortable confines of a telecenter, where its easier to replicate the full security

protocols that are needed. In her popular telecommuting book, Undress for Success, Kate Lister describes true telecommuting as working all day in ones pajamas. The signs and portents I describe here may mean that many of us may have to get dressed and go to the telecenter, or at least be ready for some changes in the way telecommuting is deployed.

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Figure 1 Theoretical framework for the consequences of telecommuting. (From Gajendran, R., & Harrison, D. (2007) The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown About Telecommuting: Meta-Analysis of Psychological Mediators and Individual Consequences Journal of Applied Psychology 92 (6), 1526