Telecommuting Advisor

Telecommuting Defined and How it Came to Be

August 19, 2008 on 4:04 pm | In Training |

Like most things, telecommuting has been an evolutionary process. Someone just didn’t decide one day to call in and say they were going to work from home. For one thing, the technology didn’t always exist to be able to accomplish as much (or more) from a remote location as at the company site. Secondly, it has taken decades for the concept to be proven successful and to be widely embraced by businesses worldwide. These days, with the cost of transportation skyrocketing, telecommuting is seen as the wave of the future.

Origins

The first documented telecommuter was the president of a bank in 1877, who arranged to have a phone line installed between the bank’s Boston location and his home in Somerville, Massachusetts. While the distance was only about two miles, it was a watershed event. The telephone had only been invented by Dr. Alexander Graham Bell the year before.

The telephone, in fact, changed the way people worked. A nationwide telephone communications system was well established by the end of the second World War, and location started to become less of a factor in the concept of work as it was widely understood. We were starting to become an information-based economy, and less reliant on the old supervisor-must-keep-an-eye-on-employee work model.

By the 1960s, more experimentation was being conducted of using additional phone lines in people’s homes to transmit data. In 1962, AT&T introduced the first modem that could provide full-duplex service at up to 300 baud over normal phone lines.

The telecommuting cause experienced a boost of interest in the form of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, which required the nation’s most polluted regions to reduce the number of single-occupant vehicles by up to 13%. In order to comply with the Act, many companies began experimenting with telecommuting and ridesharing programs.

However, by the mid-1990’s, interest in telecommuting began to wane. According to an American Information User Survey compiled by FIND/SVP, a New York-based research firm, in 1996, the total number of telecommuters in the U.S. actually decreased by 11%, to 8.1 million telecommuters from 9.1 million a year earlier. Two factors attributed to this were increasing challenges by management to show productivity gains and the realization by many employees that they were losing visibility within their organizations. Clearly, the implementations of these programs were not always well thought-out efforts.

Terminology and Definitions

The term “telecommute” was coined by a rocket scientist named Jack Nilles, who worked for NASA in 1973. Stuck in Los Angeles traffic on his way to work one day, he determined that there had to be a better way to commute after seeing an electronic highway sign flash the message, “Maintain Current Speed.” He was at a standstill at the time. This motivated him to mount a crusade to promote the viability of people being able to perform work from home, and today he is one of the world’s foremost authorities on telecommuting. The term was further popularized by futurist Francis Kinsman in his 1987 book, The Telecommuters.

Telecommuting is part of a broader concept known as telework. Whereas telecommuting connotes that a person is working from home, telework means working from a remote location which, in addition to the home, can be a satellite office, a local telework center, a client’s location, a hotel room, or even mobile commuting from the road. The term “telework” has also been popularized in Europe through its use by the European Commission, which has sponsored considerable research in this field, particularly into the use of telework as a means to develop economic activity and create work opportunities in rural areas or places with economic problems. For our purposes, we will use the terms synonymously.

The following are additional terms you will see mentioned in the context of telecommuting:

Telecommuter, teleworker - Generally interpreted to mean someone who works from home at least one day a week. It can also mean someone who commutes a short distance to an intermediate location, such as a telecenter, instead of travelling to a more distant office.