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440 TELECOMMUTING ANDTELEWORKespecially limited availability of real estate, may force an
organization to encourage telecommuting as a tempo-
rary expedient. Therefore the participation rate fluctuates
more than the usage rate.
Another limiting factor is that some employees frankly
don’t like to telecommute. In this regard, there is a
“catch-22” consideration. Organizations typically reserve
telecommuting for employees who have demonstrated
good attendance and performance on the job. Having
developed the habit of working hard 5 days of the week
in an office, they may be less interested in—or actually
uncomfortable with—being away from the office for even
1 day per week.
A researcher who has studied telecommuting exten-
sively, and who is respected for the quality of her research,
has developed a model of the participation and usage of
telecommuting (Mokhtarian, 1998) based on analyses of
her own and other published research data. The model
starts with total employment, rather than just information
workers as in other models, because some information
workers are not able to telecommute and some employ-
ees who are not information workers are able to telecom-
mute at least part of the time. This total is then adjusted
for the percent who are able to telecommute (estimated at
16% at the date of the research, based largely on job suit-
ability and manager willingness, and eventually rising to
30%). Of those who are able to telecommute, her analy-
sis of research data indicates that only 50% will want to
telecommute. Even after taking this into account some
people—who could telecommute and would like to do
so—will choose not to do so because of other concerns
(leading to another adjustment of 76%). Multiplying all
these factors together (16%×50%×76%) leads to an es-
timate of only 6% for the participation rate at the time of
the study, and Mokhtarian projects that this will eventu-
ally rise to 11–12%.
As demonstrated in Table 1, the volume reductions gen-
erated by representative participation and usage rates are
low, around 2% or less. This means that in most urban cen-
ters, telecommuting produces at best a hardly noticeable
reduction in the aggregate load on the transportation in-
frastructure. There are concerns that telecommuters tend
to move to locations or live in locations that are more re-
mote, thus offsetting the telecommuting benefits by longer
commutes on days that they do drive to their offices. Al-
though studies on the issue have produced contradictory
findings, the low participation rates mean that the impacts
are negligible even if this is true.
The calculated volume reductions in Table 1 are not big
enough to generate real estate savings for employees en-
gaged in classic telecommuting. Some organizations have
been able to achieve substantial real estate savings for tele-
workers by reconfiguring the office facilities for employ-
ees in the mobile-worker category. Their organizations
provide a limited number of cubicles or offices, which
are used on a reservation basis (“hoteling”), or first-come,
first-served (“free address”). These facilities are used by
employees such as consultants, salespersons, and service
workers who generally spend more of their working hours
on the road or at client facilities than in offices in their own
organizations. Thus the real estate savings do not result
from a shift toward telecommuting; instead the savingsresult from a recognition that such employees do not re-
quire their own permanently assigned office space for 40+
hours per week.TELECOMMUTING PRODUCTIVITY
Despite the enduring popularity of the concept, interest
at the personal and societal level is not enough to lead to
telecommuting at levels high enough to generate signifi-
cant societal and environmental benefits. Telecommuting
is contrary to the general trend of centralization of em-
ployees that started in the industrial revolution. In partic-
ular, it conflicts with the dominant employment pattern
for information workers that has developed and evolved
since the advent of high-rise office buildings more than
100 years ago.
Except for the self-employed, whether a person
telecommutes or not is usually determined by their im-
mediate supervisor or organizational policies (or both).
Therefore, to achieve usage levels that are sufficient to
produce significant environmental benefits, telecommut-
ing needs strong support at the organizational level.
Researchers and writers on this topic point to a po-
tential benefit that could provide a compelling rationale
for the necessary organizational support. They claim that
telecommuting (or telework) results in dramatic increases
productivity.
A literature search on the impacts of telecommuting on
productivity found claims of productivity gains of 30%,
35%, 43%, 50%, 65%, and 144% for groups of employees,
and one statement that “many [employees] recorded 200%
increases in output.” Although some of these items were
in articles by freelance writers in trade publications, the
35% and 50% figures came from aBusiness Weekarticle
(“It’s Rush Hour,” 1984). The claims have been made so
often, from so many different sources, that a group of
European researchers (Huws, Korte, & Robinson, 1990)
noted a “surprising degree of unanimity” on this issue.
The claims of large increases in productivity are not
limited to anecdotal reports. Nilles has made similar
claims. His discussion of the findings of his research on
a major telecommuting implementation in a governmen-
tal organization in the early 1990s included the somewhat
surprising statement: “37% of the work being accomplished
in 18% to 23% of work week; possibly an average 100%
productivity increase per telecommuting day” (Nilles, 1994,
italics in original).
In his economic analyses of the project benefits, Nilles
used a supposedly conservative 22% productivity gain
based on the average of managers’ subjective impressions
of employee productivity gains. Because the employees
were telecommuting approximately 1 day per week, how-
ever, this implies a productivity gain of around 100% on
the telecommuting day to achieve a 20% productivity gain
for the week. Table 2 demonstrates this visually. (An al-
ternate explanation is that telecommuting also increases
productivity on nontelecommuting days, but a rationale
for such gains is not readily apparent.)
As demonstrated in Table 2, even if telecommuting
does dramatically improve productivity, the gains would
be restricted in many cases by the typically low pro-
portion of days per week that telecommuters work at