What 50 years of remote work teaches us BBC

WORKLIFE

By Julian Waters-Lynch 11th April 2020

As workers around the globe transition to working from home full time, we’re reminded that technology
was never a limiting factor.If you’re working from home for the first time, you might be asking
yourself why you didn’t get to do this years ago.

The benefits of remote work have been discussed for nearly half a century. Many thinkers
predicted a near future where work moves to the worker, rather than the worker to the work.

In 1969, Alan Kiron, a staff scientist at the US Patent Office, wrote in The Washington Post
about how computers and new communication tools could change life and work. He called this
“dominetics” – a combination of domicile, connections and electronics. The term never caught
on, but the idea did. Amid the 1973 OPEC oil crisis and skyrocketing fuel prices, a University of
Southern California research group led by Jack Nilles conducted one of the first major studies of
what Nilles would call “telecommuting”.

Satellite work
Still, technology was a factor. This was a time when telephones and telefax machines were the
only telecommunications equipment most people knew. Very few homes had personal
computers, let alone access to the early internet. So the book focused more on redesigning work
to let employees commute to local satellite offices.
The principles were similar to the early architecture of the internet, whose designers were also
interested in system resilience (notably a communications network that could survive nuclear
attack).

Home telecommuting became more viable as the personal computer market exploded in the late
1970s. Apple’s breakthrough Apple II, for example, was released in 1977.

Here comes the internet

Toffler accurately saw technology’s potential, but it would be some time before remote working
became relatively easy. Consider what sending an email involved in 1984:

But with the growth in the internet, management guru Peter Drucker felt confident enough by
1993 to declare commuting to the office obsolete:

It is now infinitely easier, cheaper and faster to do what the 19th century could not do: move
information, and with it office work, to where the people are. The tools to do so are already
here: the telephone, two-way video, electronic mail, the fax machine, the personal computer, the
modem, and so on.

Vision versus reality

Despite the technology, the growth in working from home has been slow. A large survey of
Anglo countries by IBM in 2014 found just 9% of employees teleworked at least some of the
time, with about half of those doing it full-time or most of the time. Data from Australia and US
suggest the proportion was still less than 20% at the end of 2019.
Australian statistics state almost a third of people do some work from home. But this inflates the
number by including all those who work at home to catch up on work from the office.
There are have been two main barriers to greater uptake.

One, as Nilles himself acknowledged, is organisational culture.

How we organise often lags behind what technology permits. Many organisations still cling to
traditional ideas about managing people. If managers can’t see their employees working, they
assume they won’t be.

The second problem is more intractable.

People actually like to be around each other. We’re social creatures. Indeed, a direct
consequence of remote work is the the co-working movement, a response to the psychological
and social challenges of working alone from home.
Even the technology companies that make teleworking and electronic cottages possible remain
wedded to central offices. In 2013 Yahoo’s new chief executive, Marissa Mayer, discouraged
employees from working from home, because “people are more collaborative and innovative
when they’re together face to face”.

Apple founder Steve Jobs was also apparently obsessed with having physical office space that
encouraged staff mingling. This reportedly including stressing over details like bathroom
locations so personal encounters would occur.

What about the future?

These challenges remain. But circumstances should assist at least with the organisational and
cultural barriers. Home working is simply, for now, the new reality. Businesses have no choice
but to make it work.

After at least six months, it’s easy to imagine some of this will stick. The issue of social needs
will be thornier. As Toffler himself said, “it would be a mistake to underestimate the need for
direct face-to-face contact in business, and all the subliminal and nonverbal communication that
accompanies that contact”.

Perhaps the future will look a bit more like Nilles’s idea, with the growth of local co-working
spaces, designed not overcome the limits of technology but to meet our needs as social beings.