What does telework really do to us?

Presents the results of extensive surveys of about 400 telecommuters in the USA, including transportation impacts, and whether telecommuting is actually related to any net reduction in travel in general and in car use in particular. Gives findings from trip logs completed by driving age household members for an entire week. Concludes also that teleworking also has no severe negative socio-psychological effects on either teleworkers or telemanagers, at least short term and provided all parties are properly selected and trained and do not telework full time. Touches on the differences between teleworkers in the USA and elsewhere. Over the past two decades the topic of telework has become engulfed in a welter of theories about its nature and impacts. I have been aware of, and have been testing, most of the potential benefits and disbenefits of telework since I first began to study it in 1970 (at which time I used the unwieldy appellation: the telecommunications-transportation tradeoff). This article is an attempt to inject reality into some of these theories. The results presented here are not fabricated. They are the product of extensive and detailed surveys of practising teleworkers and their co-workers[1]. Although the information presented here is about a specific group of about 400 telecommuters, the results are quite consonant with – and comparable to – those of thousands of others that we have tested since the mid-1970s in a variety of organizations, both public and private. Having said that, I should also mention that these results are solely of workers in the USA. Most of them, more than 80 per cent, are in mid-level positions in large organizations, placing them in the middle class. They tend to be about evenly split between males and females, although that is probably not the distribution of sexes holding those positions. Hence, there are probably more women teleworkers as a proportion of their representation in the organizational hierarchy. They are not necessarily techno-adepts; about onethird of them do not use computers while teleworking. They represent a great variety of types of jobs, including some that might not immediately seem telework-suitable. Almost all are part-time, home-based teleworkers. That is, although they are full-time employees, they telework from home less than half the time, on average. The rest of the time they commute to their more traditional offices.