|
|||
|
|
|
||||||
|
Telecommuting Study Sparks Outcry
Workers left behind in the office had less job satisfaction and were more willing to leave the company than their teleworking colleagues, according to a recent study. A teleworking coalition disputes the findings, but says poor procedures, policies and processes can doom such initiatives.
Teleworking: Good or bad? Depends whom you ask. A recent study that warned of the potentially adverse effects of teleworking on co-workers left behind in the office was hotly disputed by the nation's largest teleworking association. The study, conducted by Prof. Timothy Golden at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Lally School of Management and Technology in Troy, N.Y., and published in Human Relations, queried 240 non-telecommuting professional-level employees at a mid-sized technology firm that allowed some of its workers to telecommute. Golden's findings indicate that the majority of the 240 employees felt less satisfaction with their jobs and were more inclined to leave the company as a direct result of the teleworking policy. "There seemed to be a sense of fraying ties between teleworkers and non-teleworkers in terms of social and emotional bonding," says Golden, who asked the employees to complete a series of questionnaires. "The day-to-day interactions between co-workers -- the exchanges about family and social events -- build camaraderie and cohesion among coworkers and teams. Those things may be adversely affected by teleworking," he says. Golden says he found a correlation between the rates of dissatisfaction among the workers and the amount of time their co-workers telecommuted, with higher rates of dissatisfaction among those whose colleagues teleworked the most. The workers also said they had less job flexibility and autonomy than their teleworking peers, he says. "They indicated that when managers needed immediate responses to questions or problems, they were more likely to be tasked with those than their colleagues," says Golden. "They also felt that because they were uncertain of what their teleworking colleagues were doing or what sort of workload they were facing, they were less likely to ask them for assistance with something." However, Jack Heacock, senior vice president and co-founder of Washington-based The Telework Coalition, sharply disputed Golden's research methods. "This guy studies one medium-sized company and attempts to draw a conclusion about the entirety of teleworking from that?" he asks. "His conclusion is antithetical to everything we know to be true from a decade's worth of study -- and it's a lousy piece of research." By extrapolating his conclusions from such a small sample of workers, Golden undermines the credibility of his study, says Heacock. "The results say far more about the attempt by this one company to design and implement a teleworking program than they do about teleworking itself." Jessica Otitigbe, a spokeswoman for RPI, responded to TelCoa's doubts about the study's validity with a statement that Golden's research was methodologically sound and properly peer-reviewed. Golden himself says his findings warrant further research. "This is the first study to look at the effects of teleworking on the staff that remains in the office --we need to examine this area further," he says. Heacock says Golden's study contrasts with the results of a 2006 TelCoa survey of approximately 70,000 employees from 13 large government and private-sector organizations. "We found there was no resentment of teleworkers in the home office -- if anything, their concerns were about 'Why do others get to telework and not me?' " says Heacock. Friction can arise between teleworkers and their office-based counterparts, he says, but this can be minimized with proper planning by employers to ensure that expectations for both groups are properly communicated. "If you don't set this up right, there can be problems," says Heacock. "You need to pay attention to the 'Three Ps' -- policy, procedures and processes. When those are properly choreographed and orchestrated, and you follow them up with continuous communication to avoid rumor and innuendo, you can avoid those problems." Stephen Fishman, a San Francisco-based attorney and the author of the soon-to-be-published The Work From Home Handbook, describes the results of Golden's study as "logical." "If some people get to work from home and others don't, then I would think that certainly causes unhappiness," he says. "The answer is to let everyone work from home some of the time -- or pay more money to the people who work in the office, who have to pay for gas to drive in every day." Some employers have already put this into practice: Heacock says a large healthcare-services company that operates nursing call centers has a pay differential between nurses who are allowed to telework and those who work from the office. "New hires who telework receive 13 percent less per hour than their counterparts, and yet the company still has a waiting list of nurses wanting to join this program," he says. "They don't begrudge the differential -- they're willing to take less money for the convenience and the money they save by telecommuting." January 17, 2008 Copyright 2008© LRP Publications |
||||||
Print
Email
Write to the Editor
Reprints
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
© Copyright 2010 LRP Publications. All rights reserved.
|
||||