...INTRODUCTION 2 WHAT”S IT ALL ABOUT? 2 THE BASICS OF TELECOMMUTING 2 VARIETIES OF TELECOMMUTING 2 TYPES OF TELECOMMUTING 3 THE BENEFITS OF TELEWORK 3 BIGGEST CHALLENGES OF WORKING AT HOME 4 WHAT IN IT FOR EMPLOYEES 6 CONCLUSION 6 INTRODUCTION Telecommuting is a very interesting and complex subject. The pros and cons of this concept are numerous and both sides have excellent arguments. This report will help introduce you to the telecommuting basics; it will help you sort out the benefits and pitfalls so you can decide whether it will work for you; it will help develop and implement a program that meets your individual needs. WHAT”S IT ALL ABOUT? Telecommuting started in California in the 1970’s to reduce traffic and save the earth. It involves working from just about anywhere besides a company’s main office—including workers’ homes, clients’ facilities, and employer-owed satellites offices, and even from a hotel room while on the road. Companies implement these programs for many reasons besides keeping employers happy or saving money in office space. They see it as a way to stay in operation during natural disasters, epidemics, and other emergencies, while others may view it as a key recruiting tool or a way to keep employees closer to customers. THE BASICS OF TELECOMMUTING Telecommuting, as it is referred to in the United States, teleworking, as it is Referred to in Europe, home-working, working-at-a-distance, off-site workers, Or remote...
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...Speaking Notes Title: Telecommuting – Working from Home Name: Leigh Ann Anderson Purpose: To persuade the audience how telecommuting is beneficial to them and try to convince them to consider it for their jobs. I. Introduction a. Imagine an alarm going off, waking you from a deep sleep. It’s 8 am on a Monday morning and, after much reluctance, you stumble out of bed, take a shower, brush your teeth, and trudge to your kitchen for your morning cup of coffee. Realizing it’s time to head off to work, you start your car and start making your way onto the interstate, only to be slowed down by a mile long stretch of heavy traffic. Looks like you might just be late for work and have to hear a long rant about it from your boss. Or maybe your car didn’t start at all this morning. The battery didn’t give you any notice that it was going to die on you. Perhaps you have a sick child and just find it impossible to make it into work or you’re feeling a bit under the weather yourself. b. These are just a few of the many circumstances that make telecommuting, or working from home, an attractive option. c. There will be those days where it may seem unlikely or even impossible that you will be able to make it to your job, but you still need to get work done in order to stay on track or even meet a deadline. d. In the hopes of persuading you to consider telecommuting, I will explain how beneficial it can be for you and provide you with tips with how to go...
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...TELECOMMUTING I. INTRODUCTION My name is Diana Snyder, I am a Graduate Student at the Keller University School of Management with emphasis in Human Resources Management. Because of the slow economy management want to institute telecommuting and my presentation will focus on the advantages and disadvantages of telecommuting All of us some time or another have had the desire to stay at home and work. I would like to know who would be interested in staying home and working in order to save. I know I would love that because at home has advantages like spending time with my family and being my own boss. Furthermore, this is advantageous for the employer as it can boost the company’s productivity. By the end of his presentation you will know all the reasons an employer should initiate the program or if an employee would want to take part in it. II. TELECOMMUTING Now let us discuss what telecommuting is. Telecommuting is an arrangement that is made between employers and employees to perform their job duties outside of the office. For example, an employee can choose to work from their homes or some other business center. III. REASON FOR TELECOMMUTING Employees who wish to telecommute do it mostly because of their career, or for personal or financial reasons. Example include parents who wish to spend more time at home with their children and people with financial problem who want to save on the high prices of gasoline. IV. FOCUS GROUPS PARENTS (Mothers) would not have to pay for child...
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...Running Head: EFFECTS OF TELECOMMUTING Social Effects of Telecommuting: How Society is Changing Abstract Telecommuting is a recent trend that allows individuals to perform their work from home, instead of making their presence at the office essential. The increase in telecommuting increases productivity, the opportunity to retain the needed skilled force, and the ability to be environmentally friendly. However, telecommuting does also negatively effect society since it threatens the collective nature of organized labor. Overall, the increase of telecommuting has impacted everyone’s life and not just the life of those who telecommute. Researchers have predicted that by 2020, 30% of the workforce will be only telecommuters. The workplace has been faced with a multitude of changes in the past couple of decades and most if not all of these changes are encouraged by the advancement in technology. These advancements have allowed individuals to be much more efficient. However, the influence of technology has invaded the offices all around the globe, which has affected the organization and the structure of the workplace. One of the best examples of how extensive use of technology has affected the workplace is telecommuting. Telecommuting is a recent trend that allows individuals to perform their work from home, instead of making their presence at the office essential. The actual definition of telecommuting is “work performed in allocation away from the central facilities wherein...
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...Telecommuting: The New Way of Jobs in the Next Ten Years PHI210 – Critical Thinking March 11, 2012 Telecommuting will be the new way that jobs are performed in the next ten years. Telecommuting can be defined as working from a remote location, usually a home office, by electronically linking to a company. Allowing employees the option of telecommuting whether one or more days is an opportunity that most employees would take advantage. The origins of people telecommuting date as far back as the 19th century. The first person known to work from home or at a remote work site was a Boston Bank President. This Bank President was able to work from home by having a phone line strung from his office to his home, three blocks away. Later, in the year 1963, a computer programmer working on the Arpanet Project (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) withdrew from the project to stay at home with his wife who was experiencing a difficult pregnancy. It was another programmer who suggested an additional phone line be installed in the home of the programmer attending to his ill wife so that he could complete his program from there. The practice of working from home was finally given the term name Telecommuting by Jack Nilles, a scientist working on a NASA satellite communications project in Los Angeles, in 1973. The target audience for this argument would be employees currently working both in the office and telecommuting environments...
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... | Question 1 | 4-5 | 3. | Question 2 | 6-8 | 4. | Conclusion | 9 | 5. | References | 10 | Working from Home: It's in the Details By Rachael King on February 12, 2007 Additional Assets The benefits include lower costs and greater productivity, but figuring out how to communicate with off-site employees is crucial. Traffic surrounding Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash., has become so congested that Washington State Governor Chris Gregoire nearly missed a 9 a.m. speech at the company's main campus one recent morning. Roads leading to the software maker simply weren't designed to handle the 35,000 commuters who report for work there each day. The gridlock that greeted Gregoire was just the latest reminder that Microsoft needs to tackle its commuter crisis—and quick. So Microsoft (MSFT) has embarked on a program aimed at getting more employees to work from home and other off-site locales, joining the growing ranks of companies to catch the virtual-workplace wave. About 14% of the U.S. workforce gets its job done at a home office more than two days per week, says Charlie Grantham, executive producer of consulting firm Work Design Collaborative. That's up from 11% in 2004, and is set to grow to 17% by 2009 (see BW Online, 03/12/07, "Telecommuting Now and Forever"). Pros and Cons Benefits of letting employees work from outside the office include keeping cars off the road, helping a company to bolster its green bona fides. But the practice...
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... Telecommuting is a work arrangement in which employees to not commute to a central place of work. As you may know there are many advantages and disadvantages to this, as there are to many things in life. First, one of the most important advantages is how much money will be saved for both the employer and employee. For the employee, you would save on gas and other car expenses because they would not have to drive to and from there office everyday, and it would add hours to their days by eliminating the commute. Other expenses like clothing, restaurant lunches, parking fees, and tolls would drop. Telecommuting could also reduce stress and health problems because the employee would be able to have greater flexibility to balance work and their personal life. Since no one gets meaningful work done in short periods of time, there will be greater productivity at home because there will be more long stretches of uninterrupted time. The employer would benefit from telecommuting similarly by saving money, but on real estate. They could decrease the amount of office space because don’t need big offices if most employees are working from home. This would also limit equipment costs because when their employees work from home they often use there own computers, papers, faxes and phones. The employer who is trying to withhold talented employees that are trying to manage family and work, telecommuting is the best answer for them. Additionally, communities can benefit from telecommuting as...
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...thousands of times a day throughout the country and is how some people “go” to work every day. Being able to work from home, hotel, or anywhere you can think of, is telecommuting or teleworking. Decades ago you might not have imagined anyone outside the sales staff being able to work from anywhere but the office building. However, with the advances made in technology, specifically that of the internet, people can potentially work from almost anywhere they might wish. The idea of working from home may be viewed as being fundamentally instinctive. William R. Mattox Jr., the vice president of the Family Research Council said, “technologies such as computers and fiber optics could create a ‘neo-agrarian technical revolution’ that would put workers back in their homes, as they were before the 19th century Industrial Revolution lured them away from their farms (Clark).” In essence, telecommuting can be viewed as a natural process by which we have functioned historically and are now in the process of reverting back to our natural ways. Advances in technology have closed the gaps between homes, offices, towns, cities, and continents by building electronic bridges using the information super highway to catapult society into the Information Age. The transition from office to home must be transparent to the customer (Business Plugs into Telecommuting: Bringing Work to People rather than People to Work) and can be completed by ensuring the individual has all the amenities of the...
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...traditional team where everyone works in the same office? Introduction: Virtual teams, or more commonly known as telecommuting, have become a hot talking point in organizations across the world. Telecommuting is a work arrangement in which employees of an organization do not commute to a central location. Instead, they work remotely from their home or off-site office location. Communication with a main office is handled through a computer and/or other source of technology (Amigoni & Gurvis, 2009). The following paper will discuss the repercussions of telecommuting for organizations and why the concept simply deteriorates a company’s productivity level rather than adding value to its employees and organization as a whole. It is our position virtual teams present greater challenges in: Motivation, Work-Life Balance, Management, Personal Interactions, and Performance. Motivation: One disadvantage of telecommuting and perhaps the most challenging factor of the individual participating is motivation, especially those of whom are new to the concept. When implementing telework, emphasis should be placed on recruiting the right people (Snell, 2009). “The telecommuting employee needs to be a self-starter and disciplined enough to get the job done” (Amigoni & Gurvis, 2009). Although this may not be seen as impossible, the “business-like” atmosphere has been found to be an underlying motive to accomplishing daily tasks at work. While at home and away from the office, distractions...
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...TCP1* English Composition II (UG 0214) | | Topic: Work Place Productivity Research Question: are employees more productive when working from home? Thesis Statement: Research suggest that employees are more productive at home because they have less distractions, are more comfortable and are able to achieve work life balance. References: 1. O’Leary, M. B. (Mar 15, 2013). Telecommuting Can Boost Productivity and Job Performance Retrieved from http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2013/03/15/telecommuting-can-boost-productivity-and-job-performance. A. Companies should not require all employees to work on site all the time. While telecommuting is popular, it is not something that's run amok and–when well managed–it boosts productivity, commitment, work-life balance and retention. Presented by Michael Boyer O'Leary is an assistant professor of management, Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business. Relevance based on the authors review of the actualized benefits of some workers working from home B. This article is about the benefits of some employees working from home. The argument is that some not all teleworkers do see a boost in productivity, employee retention and work life balance. Mr. O’Leary an assistant processor at the prestigious Georgetown University, Directly sites Yahoo’s recall of employees back to the office as an example of a mistake. The author uses research from Stanford University, The US census and the Harvard school of business...
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...jobs. Many office workers would rather work from home than be in an office every day, or at least have an option to work from home or go into the office depending on the day. Telecommuting can be beneficial for both employers and employees, because it can help keep the environment clean, it can make employees happier, and telecommuting can be a tactic used by employers to increase productivity. It is understandable that more employees that telecommute within a company, who would normally work together in an office and form a bond from working with each other on a daily basis, would lose some of the camaraderie. Also, it’s important to know that it takes a huge amount of self-discipline to be able to wake up on time, knowing that you don’t have to go into an office, and start working in the comfort of your home when so many potential things are around you to keep you distracted, but with technology the way it is these days, camaraderie could be maintained because of all of the different ways to have video conferences and face time chat sessions with co-workers. When you add in those factors, at the end of the day you are still working on a team and it is human nature when you’re working within a team to form a working camaraderie and or bond with your co-workers. Telecommuting can help promote clean air and benefit the environment by cutting down on traffic and reducing emissions put into the air on a daily basis. The act of telecommuting gained ground in the United States in...
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...Telecommuting: Now-a-days more and more companies are understanding just how important it is to retain their top employees and keep them happy, content and engaged. While it is not feasible to provide 100 percent extrinsic rewards to appreciate the employee’s efforts, companies are tailoring creative ideas to keep employees satisfied without offering direct tangible rewards. Increasingly, companies are tailoring programs to strike work-life balance which leads to higher productivity and greater job satisfaction among the employees. In order to increase the profitability and keep the operating expenses minimum, companies significantly invest in their employees to increase their productivity and reduce employee turnover rate, resulting into lower cost per hire. The few programs that companies commonly offer to promote work life balance and keep employees motivated are telecommuting, flexible scheduling, onsite gym, incentives for regular medical checkups, paid paternity leave and company arranged daycare. Now let us understand two programs in detail. 1) Telecommuting: More and more companies are opting for telecommuting, asserting that telecommuting enhances work-life balance and reduces conflict such that it enables employers to better manage work demands in order to more readily accommodate family needs. Studies have suggested that telecommuting provides individuals with the opportunity to cope with the...
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...critiques about telecommuting. Both company leaders have claimed that telecommuting has led to poorer performance of their company’s employees. Meg Whitman wrote a memo, urging employees to show up at the office more often. Marissa Mayer wrote an article addressing the issue, in opposite favor of telecommuting. Whitman, Mayer as well as some other leaders have assessed that employees that work from home are the cause of poor financial performance and lackluster product innovation. The article I read, “A Better Way for HP to Boost Performance”, by Aubrey C. Daniels, addressed these two company leaders with a critical assessment of their management decisions on this issue. Daniels asserts that the claims of Whitman, Mayer as well as other company leaders and managers are not basing their managerial decisions on accurate assessments. She argues that this approach is misguided and flies in the face of the laws of human behavior. Daniels claims that furthermore, this method is likely to be counterproductive. The basis of the article is saying that leaders that are targeting telecommuting are missing the point that employees that work from home are not the cause of poor financial performance or lackluster product innovation, and policies forcing them back to the office will not solve the issues restraining growth. The article asserts that organizations that forbid working from home are losing opportunities to shape individual behavior and that employees who enjoy working at home will often...
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...TELECOMMUTING RECOMMENDATIONS FOR HERITAGE FURNITURE COMPANY BASED ON A STUDY OF SIMILAR COMPANY EXPERIENCES Prepared for Mr. Jeff Green, President Heritage Furniture Company Street address State Prepared by Nicholas R. Jones Business, Education, Information Technology 336 Scott College of Business 200 North 7th Street Terre Haute, IN 47809-1902 June 30, 2011 TABLE OF CONTENTS Item Page EXECUTIVE SUMMARY OVERVIEW Telecommuting is working from an outside location away from a institution’s facilities through electronic communication with a centralized network database. Telecommuting works best with the companies that are routine and have easy to understand, clear goals. The term “telecommuting” was coined by Jack Nilles. Jack was an aerospace engineer working for the U.S. Air Force and NASA. (Mears, 2007) With the increase in technological advancements, telecommuting has become easier for businesses to implement the telecommuting process. As a result more and more businesses have put telecommuting into practice. In the year 2008 part-time telecommuting jobs rose to 35 percent, an increase of 9 percent from 26 percent in 2006. Full-time telecommuting jobs had only a 2 percent increase from 19 percent to 21 percent during the 2006 to 2008 period. (Claude, 2010) Many companies have seen this as a way to improve sales productivity...
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...Question 12 1. Identify and discuss at least three issues that telecommuting raises for HRM. Include ways that we can manage these issues. Telecommuting allows employees to do their work without leaving their homes by using telecommunication and computer technologies. This means no rush-hour traffic, no time lost in traveling to the office, no expenses for gasoline or lunch or office clothes, and flexible work schedules. Telecommuting also enables employers to minimize office costs, attract and retain skilled workers and ultimately increase productivity. However, there are some significant disadvantages that telecommunicating raises for human resource management that need to be considered. These include lessened employee interaction and involvement, the threat to the security of company data. One obvious disadvantage to the individual employee is the reduced opportunity to get involved with co-workers and the informal communication network at the office. The conversations during tea breaks or coffee after working hours usually provide good opportunities to know more about what is going on within the organization and to feel a part of work group. The lack of such interaction may lead to a feeling of isolation from co-workers as well as a lack of understanding the company’s goals and values. The normal absences of the telecommuting employees could mean that co-workers remaining at the office have a better chance to be known by the supervisors. The telecommuters wish...
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