Telecommuting, telework, teletension

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira has a good piece over at the Industry Standard wondering about a teleworking stat recently released by WorldatWork. The survey reports “a nearly 40% increase in the number of employers offering telework as a benefit.”

But as Aleo-Carreira points out, there’s no breakdown as to which companies are offering this. Nor is there information on how much time teleworkers are allowed to work from home. And she reports that some workers who are allowed to work from home at least part time might not be using the option.

Why would this be?

To answer that question, Aleo-Carreira links to a story, Most Workers are Afraid to Telecommute by Liz Wolgemuth in U.S. News and World Report. Wolgemuth, citing a study by Steelcase, reports, “Many…fear that telecommuting will rob them of a promotion. Most workers believe their employer wants them in the office.” (For what it’s worth, Steelcase manufactures “office environments,” which sounds a lot like “cubicles” to me.)

I find all of this very interesting. Is there guilt involved on the part of the worker too afraid to work from home? Could it be, for some folks, the whole traditional boss/underling dynamic is too strong to break away from? Or could the trouble be on the higher-up side of the equation, with employees having legitimate reason to fear backlash from a manager who, for whatever reasons, resents employees who don’t show up at the office full time?

A look at the Steelcase survey does suggest some contradiction in workers’ attitudes regarding telecommuting: In an interesting contradiction, a majority of office workers fear that telecommuting might hurt their career prospects. Yet over half believe that it’s beneficial for a company to endorse telecommuting.

Another factor to consider is the morale of workers who don’t have the option of teleworking, which in some companies is offered only as a perk to some, not all employees. According to another Industry Standard article, Teleworkers Can Damage Main Office Work Environment, left-behind workers sometimes harbor resentment.

Professor Timothy Golden, associate professor in the Lally School of Management & Technology at Rensselaer, observes, “it potentially could be due to coworker’s perceptions that they have decreased flexibility and a higher workload, and the ensuing greater frustration that comes with coordinating in an environment with more extensive co-worker telework,”

Sounds to me like maybe a lot of companies are still in that transitional place where change (or its potential,) breeds skepticism. Only time and an increasing number of employees who telecommute and demonstrate the value in this arrangement will prove to the skeptics what some of us already know about the benefits of the non-traditional workplace.