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446 TELECOMMUTING ANDTELEWORKthe United States is not more than 3%, which is less than
the annual traffic volume growth per year in some major
urban areas in the country.
Responding to their employees’ concerns and the
impacts on local labor markets, businesses have been ef-
fective in opposing regulations, such as parking space
restrictions, that indirectly encourage telecommuting by
making it more difficult for their employees to drive to
work. It is generally not worth the effort to enact strin-
gent regulatory disincentives for alternatives to telecom-
muting.
In an era of tight budgets and increasing demands for
government services, it is also difficult to justify govern-
mental expenditures (direct spending or tax incentives)
that would encourage telecommuting, because in most
cases the benefits will not justify the costs. The best course
of action at the public policy level would be to let organi-
zations and their employees work this issue out on their
own with minimal government intervention. This laissez
faire stance would include avoiding policies that might
have the side effect of discouraging telecommuting. As
an example of unfavorable policies to avoid, the Occupa-
tional Health and Safety Administration proposed stan-
dards that would require employers to inspect conditions
in employees’ homes if they used their home computers
to do any job-related work (Joyce, 2000), but this proposal
was dropped after encountering strong opposition.CONCLUSION
After 30 years of research and experience with the con-
cept, it is evident that classic telecommuting is not,
and is unlikely to ever become, a panacea for problems
in the areas of transportation, the environment, or oil-
related foreign policy. Commonsense analyses of findings
of telecommuting research also indicate that it does not
generate sustained large improvements in organizational
productivity that are noticeable at the bottom line.
Classic telecommuting is and will continue to be one
option within organizational human resources policies.
Even though it has implications for all of the following,
by itself it is not and will not be as important a human
resources issue as recruiting, compensation, or training.
In most organizations, telecommuting will continue to be
implemented on a case-by-case basis in response to the
needs of specific organizational units and individual em-
ployees who may not be typical of the organization.
The continuing development of the Internet and other
information technologies should contribute to increases
in the proportion of work days where employees can
substitute telecommunications for commuting without
creating organizational problems. The huge increases in
information technology capabilities and great reductions
in information and communications technology costs
have had a limited impact on this substitution over the 30
past years, however. It is questionable whether such tech-
nology trends, in the absence of other, more compelling
considerations, are going to have a substantially larger
impact on classic telecommuting over the next 30 years.
On the other hand, other forms of telework will grow
rapidly. This growth should to continue until it ap-
proaches saturation of the employees whose job functionsrequire them to work outside of organizational facili-
ties at least part of the time. One reason for the differ-
ing outcomes is that, in contrast to the effects of classic
telecommuting, this form of telework actually increases
the amount of contact between remote workers and other
members of the organization.GLOSSARY
After-hours telecommuting Using information and
communications technologies to perform organiza-
tional work after (or before) regular working hours.
Classic telecommuting Substituting information and
communications technologies for physical commuting
to a work location.
Free-address workspaces Unassigned organizational
workstations available to employees on a first-come,
first-served basis.
Full-time telecommuting Classic telecommuting on
(usually) every day of the work week.
Home workers Persons who use their homes as the base
for doing most or all of their paid work.
Hoteling Providing organizational workspaces that are
available on a reservation basis.
Mobile worker An employee who primarily works out-
side of organizational offices and uses information and
communications technologies for communications
with supervisors, for scheduling and routing, and so
on.
Moore’s Law (as commonly understood) The doubling
of computer processing power every 18 to 24 months,
without increases in costs.
Part-day telecommuting Telecommuting for part of a
work day and working at organizational offices for the
remainder.
Telecommuting center (sometimes called a satellite
center) An office facility between employees homes and
their regular workplaces, where they can work instead
of driving all the way to their organizational locations.
Telecommuting frequency How often (e.g., how many
days per week) classic telecommuters substitute
telecommunications for physical travel to work.
Telecommuting participation The percentage of em-
ployees (in an organization, region, or throughout a na-
tional economy) who engage in classic telecommuting.
Telework Work at a distance from organizational or
other facilities.
Virtual office A location or workplace that enables a
person, by means of information and telecommunica-
tion technologies, to work together with others who are
not physically nearby.
Virtual organization A (usually short-term) venture
composed of components and personnel from different
organizations that may be widely separated geographi-
cally, and that requires or is enabled by extensive use of
telecommunications capabilities for coordination and
communications.CROSS REFERENCES
See GroupWare; Internet Literacy; Virtual Enterprises;
Virtual Teams.