Telecommuting: why is not widespread?

Anything to do with the traditional world of get a degree, get a job as well as its alternatives
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Loner
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Telecommuting: why is not widespread?

Post by Loner »

Working in offices is inefficient and wasteful: time lost in traffic, pollution, traffic itself, transport costs like gas, bus tickets and car ownership, time lost to busy work, real estate costs for businesses, etc. I also read someplace that you’re actually more productive working from home. (Being self-employed for some years, I noticed that I’m about 0.35 % more productive working from home – no chit-chat, no useless meetings, no interruption of flow, you can set your schedule to your more productive hours, etc.)

It seems like there is so much to win from telecommuting that it’s hard to understand why 99 % of computer-working people aren’t already working from home (or a café/co-working space nearby if you enjoy having people around).

So: why isn’t 99 % of the workforce working from home?

My guess is that employees are harder (too hard?) to manipulate when they’re away. As they regain 10 hours of their time not lost in traffic, they feel more independent. They are much less ego depleted as well and have more energy to figure out how badly they’re getting done by their employer. It’s also harder for business to make employees dependent on them by replacing their social circle (family, friends, community) with their co-workers. Another thing that comes to mind is that telecommuting effectively kills the meeting, but so doing leaves “paper” traces in emails of all the orders and work specifications, which you don’t want if you’re a manager (it’s easier to blame an employee for badly doing a job when there’s no email to confirm that the work you delivered is what he asked for).

I think the discussion is useful to understand workplace dynamics, which is useful to improve and optimize your ERE strategy.

steelerfan
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Re: Telecommuting: why is not widespread?

Post by steelerfan »

My wife telecommutes part time. She was 100% telecommuting at home a few years ago and it drove her crazy. She goes in for the socialization primarily as her boss is back east and we are MT. To be honest she works much harder at home. In the past she had roles where people were calling her at 9-10 PM - and she usually is at her desk before 6 AM....Not good. I can also remember her working when we were on vacation... If people are offered the "benefit" of telecommuting you can be sure it benefits the the company more than you. I remember when we were given laptops about 15 years ago. I fought it because I wanted a snow day if the weather was bad. Same thing with cellphones, I resisted giving my mobile as long as I could. I always go in as I need to separate from work as much as possible.

Riggerjack
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Re: Telecommuting: why is not widespread?

Post by Riggerjack »

Agency problem.

As a business owner, you hire managers to hire and manage the people needed to generate profits. Those managers are not partners, and improvements beyond a certain threshold do not benefit those managers. Managers are the tool you use to keep an organization going. They aren't paid to innovate. They are paid to talk about innovation, while maintaining the status quo.

These people are protecting their own positions by keeping everyone in the office.

If you can and will do your job from home, how many managers are really needed? That is the question they don't want asked. You commute to ensure it isn't. Lots of employees, toiling away is a strong message that all those managers are necessary.

As you spend time in corporate culture, you can drive yourself crazy wondering why there are so many obstacles to efficiency. Take a step back, and look at why someone would push such destructive policies.

Case in point, today, I spent 8 hours on a defensive driving course. Everyone authorized to drive a company vehicle is required to take it. It is the 5th day I've wasted this way in the last 15 years.

The cost of the course is unknown, but it was online, I assume it was cheap. But my time isn't. The labor cost of all the techs going through the course vastly exceeds the savings in insurance. But the manager in HR who pushed the course is not responsible for the cost of my time. She is responsible for the insurance costs, and education budget. By cutting the half day instructor-lead course, and replacing it with a full day online course, she saved on education costs, and can show more instruction hours when she shops insurance. She's a Rock Star!

Too bad about those guys in the field, they just can't keep their costs down. :roll:

Long story short, you will see many examples of inefficiencies in your hopefully short career. Usually they are caused by the decision being made by one person, who benefits, but isn't affected by the costs. This isn't a corporate thing, this is a large organization thing.

The only way around it is to not be in large organizations, sorry.

bryan
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Location: mostly Bay Area

Re: Telecommuting: why is not widespread?

Post by bryan »

+1 to @scriptbunny, a bit of what @Loner and @Riggerjack said.

I suspect once something like VR (basically teleportation, short for teletransportation) gets better and built out, you will have a big bump up in "telecommuting".

Already some workplaces adopt a partial work-from-home policy (usually majority of days in office) that I think is pretty close to optimal in today's system.

I've done telecommuting for four years or so and generally wish it were more of a hybrid arrangement. One friend telecommuting for a few years is actively looking for a good office environment for his next job. The psychological and social effects of working in an office can be pretty huge, especially depending on the job factors.

Quite clearly a multi-variable optimization problem, else you need to find the one best variable to optimize for (e.g. "the good life")

Game theory/scheduling/coordination/etc problems come into play as well.

Dragline
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Re: Telecommuting: why is not widespread?

Post by Dragline »

You know, much of this is generational, and the change is beginning to accelerate, although it is different in different businesses. In the next decade, there will be way more telecommuting.

As for general face-time and communications issues, I always tell my young employees:

Anyone older than Boomers: Physically go to their location and talk to their assistant if they have one. You may need to provide physical documents or wood block prints.
Boomers: Call them on telephone and be ready to talk business. Make notes on talking points before calling. Leave detailed message if not available. If no call back, then email. Always respond to their email, even if its just "thanks" or "will do". They don't trust email -- they think its an electronic void where stuff disappears "in the net".
Gen-X: Email and schedule a call. This is the new norm, by the way. Gen-X has learned never to answer phones, unless they are bored. If no response, try texting, but apologize for texting and note you tried email first.
Millennials: Email or text. Provide specific time to call or meet if you are the superior. Ask or provide options if you are junior and specify topic.

And for all: Once someone has agreed to meet or call at a specific place and time, send a calendar invite. So they are forced to commit and don't waste your time with no shows. And you get organizational points if you are the junior. Are you listening, Olaz?

Loner
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Re: Telecommuting: why is not widespread?

Post by Loner »

@Riggerjack – Good points. It’s not always easy to understand owners’ and managers’ incentives unless you have much experience in business.

@Scriptbunny – My experience has been that in-person communication often transforms in inefficient brainstorming, i.e. people thinking out loud and running in circles. Email reduces useless blah-blah by ensuring people get their thoughts together before speaking. It depends on the context though, yes. Sometimes email can be a series of miscommunication. When you feel this happens, it’s probably better to pick the phone. +1 to your point about sensitive material.

JasonR
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Re: Telecommuting: why is not widespread?

Post by JasonR »

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Last edited by JasonR on Fri Mar 15, 2019 1:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

jen
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Re: Telecommuting: why is not widespread?

Post by jen »

I just finished up a contract where I went in the first few days (on a 1+ hour commute) then worked 1.5 years from home. Most local people would be in the office Tues-Thurs. At the end of the contract I was begged to be an employee and while the pay reduction would have been ok, the loss of freedom, in being required at the office and many other ways, would be too much for me.

For employees in general, I think they are conditioned to feel obligated to give up any free time when there is some urgent problem, and there is no extra compensation for that. Being in the office probably is thought to contribute to that sense of loyalty.

For me, I found it very distracting to be in a cubical and listen to 5 different conversations of people near me on the phone while I try to focus on a difficult problem. Also when there were meetings, they were always by phone with people overseas, and my boss would be in a cubicle a couple rows over, so what is the point of co-location?

I made an excuse that I needed to work from home all the time and soon they realized it was not a problem. The consultant before me would go AWOL and that was a problem.

One thing that kept my motivation up when the work did not, was that I was always accessible by phone, text, and IM. Otherwise I would have been at the beach a lot more. :lol:

I disagree that managers are useless if people do their work. There are roadblocks that need to be cleared, agreements made and re-negotiated, coordination with other teams which may be challenging, metrics tracked, helping to keep us accountable and motivated, etc. Being free of those types of demands allows for pure focus on what I enjoy doing.

But whether the work is done onsite or offsite, really should not matter if things are done the right way. More freedom and fewer distractions seem stronger factors than face-to-face contact for productivity in the IT world.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Telecommuting: why is not widespread?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I mostly agree with Dragline, except I do think Gen-X, even those of us on the older side, is finally joining the move to text. Also the continuing trend towards almost everybody being an independent contractor/ee rather than an employer/ee will make a number of variants on telecommuting more widespread even in situations where meat-space work is necessary. For instance, I have had approximately 2 hours of direct interaction with the corporation which provides my services as a substitute teacher in the past 3 years, even less with the government entities that license me, and I do not directly report to the administration at any of the actual schools where I work. All 3 of my Gen-X sisters currently have similar terms of employment in the realms of graduate-exam-tutoring, legal contract work, and retail marketing.

There are even a great number of people these-a-days who telecommute to their Friday night dates.

bryan
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Re: Telecommuting: why is not widespread?

Post by bryan »

jen wrote:
Thu Apr 27, 2017 8:12 am
For employees in general, I think they are conditioned to feel obligated to give up any free time when there is some urgent problem, and there is no extra compensation for that. Being in the office probably is thought to contribute to that sense of loyalty.
Yes, but in turn they are paid to fart about when there just isn't much work to do. This has a nice synergy with telecommuting :)

PA Hiker
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Re: Telecommuting: why is not widespread?

Post by PA Hiker »

There are benefits associated with 'face-to-face' interaction which are sometimes under appreciated. People tend to 'go with what they know' and on some level don't really know each other it they never see each other. A study done back in the '70's demonstrated a negative correlation between work station proximity and employee communication.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_curve

Probably this is still true today, at least to some extent, even though we have much more sophisticated forms of remote communication.

Scott 2
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Re: Telecommuting: why is not widespread?

Post by Scott 2 »

My wife telecommutes 100%, I do 90%. Feels widespread to me.

Loner
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Re: Telecommuting: why is not widespread?

Post by Loner »

JasonR wrote:
Wed Apr 26, 2017 8:37 pm
people can't work from home. They fail. As opposed to:
Loner wrote:
Tue Apr 25, 2017 7:22 pm
I also read someplace that you’re actually more productive working from home
True. When I was in an office, I was surprised to find coworkers actually sleeping. Most likely, the difference between those two observations can be accounted fo by a condinationality: people are more productive from home - when they do indeed work ("billable" hours vs hours worked).

@Jasonr, re being "paid to fart about when there just isn't much work": This is nice in the short run, but I find it kills me after two hours or so. The best way to kill a man is to pay him to do nothing "- Félix Leclerc

bryan
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Re: Telecommuting: why is not widespread?

Post by bryan »

"fart about" was mostly tongue-in-cheek. What I really meant is that the business still pays your salary during the down hours, seasons (was a direct response to to the feeling that people feel obligated to put in extra hours for urgent problems).

enigmaT120
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Re: Telecommuting: why is not widespread?

Post by enigmaT120 »

I inspect food for a living, and have to go where it is. The 4 people I'm training are all in their 20s so they can't telecommute either. There is still stuff being made and people have to be present to make it.

BlueNote
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Re: Telecommuting: why is not widespread?

Post by BlueNote »

Where I work nobody who telecommutes gets promoted. My last manager was flying in to mange us (3 time zones) for 4 days then flying home every single week. The closer you physically work to the action the better from an optics POV. I'm almost 40 and am also one of the youngest workers so theres probably a generational bias too.

James_0011
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Re: Telecommuting: why is not widespread?

Post by James_0011 »

@BlueNote

Many people including myself have no interest in being promoted, so it still doesn't explain why telecommuting is not widespread.

JamesR
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Re: Telecommuting: why is not widespread?

Post by JamesR »

Apparently working remotely works much better when the company is 100% remote, or is very experienced with remote working. For example, if it's not a remote company, they need to have the discipline to video conference in people during meetings to keep everyone in the loop and on the same page. Basically you could say that there's likely more setup, discipline, overhead required to deal with remote working - especially in terms of keeping teams sync'd up and motivated etc. I think in the past few years people are getting better at remote working, the tools & processes are improving.

EdithKeeler
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Re: Telecommuting: why is not widespread?

Post by EdithKeeler »

I currently telecommute one day a week. Mostly I try really hard to get everything done the other 4 days in the office so that I can do laundry and catch up on household chores, etc. on my work at home day. We've now been given the option to work at home more days; I have kind of mixed feelings about it. I like the social aspect of coming into the office and seeing people, but with more and more people telecommuting, I rarely see people!

I used to work at a 100% telecommuting job, and got to pretty much hate it. I'm generally an extravert--but I score just over the midpoint between E and I, which means I like my alone time, too. I missed being around people, and I also didn't like the fact that I was pretty much always at work. That was several years ago, and I had a land-line office phone and a fax machine in the spare room I used as an office, and even though I tried to close the door on Friday afternoon and shut it off, the temptation was always there to go in and work and "get caught up," or see what fresh hell that fax machine was delivering on a Saturday and try to get a head start on it.

I'll also say that as someone who has been supervised as a telecommuter and also supervised people who telecommute, the organization loses a lot in terms of culture. There's a synergy that happens when people work together, or hear each other over the cubicle wall, or engage in ad-hoc interactions in the breakroom or a the copier that don't happen when everyone telecommutes. I think that corporate culture can be pretty important in making sure that everyone has a sense of purpose about the entire enterprise, understands the goals and where we're heading, and I think you lose that when everyone is at home on laptop and in their own space.

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