We have the technology for data transfer, but what about data security? Carl Weinschenk examines this pressing issue:

For telework proponents, there certainly is good news in CDW Corporation’s latest survey. For instance, it says that 14 percent of private sector employees telecommute and 17 percent of federal folks work at home. Seventy-six percent of private companies offer remote work support – an increase of 27 percentage points from last year – and 56 percent of federal agencies do as well.

Security remains the top concern of 42 percent of federal and 27 percent of private IT pros. Over 80 percent of the professionals in both groups said that they rate their security systems and procedures as effective. More than half in each group – 56 percent of federal and 74 percent of private – authenticate machines and people separately. Almost 70 percent of employers provide the computers and equipment that telecommuters use.

This is all good. The question, however, is whether it is enough.

For a while, it was axiomatic that telecommuting was the wave of the future. Then the common wisdom shifted, and telework became a disappointment. The reality is that telecommuting can find a way through almost all the doubts and obstacles that skeptics throw in its way. People will goof off if they work at home? It’s possible to compare productivity and incentivize people to work at the appropriate level. (Indeed, in this economy, the incentive should be that they keep their job.) Telecommuting hurts team building and cooperative projects? New software alleviates a lot of the problems of a dispersed work force.

The only immovable barrier, it seems, will be security, simply because what is at stake in that discussion is so much greater: A worker not generating as much work at home as at the office or who feels isolated is too bad. The loss of sensitive data because a home computer is poorly protected is a potential crisis. It is important to note that the CDW study focuses on the attitudes of IT professionals. Of course, it is possible for them to say that they feel the organization is adequately protected. The key, however, is how the CEO and CFO feel. (More.)

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CareGroup CIO John Halamka has written a probing, in-depth article about IT telecommuting, identifying problems and devising solutions. Here is an excerpt.

In my 10 years as a CIO, I’ve strongly believed that productivity is optimized when everyone meets and works in close physical proximity. That way, teams get the benefit of being able to brainstorm in person, respond to urgent issues as a group and build trust among one another. I didn’t think telecommuting was right for IT departments.

This article is my official about-face on telecommuting and flexible work arrangements. A variety of factors have changed my opinion on the best way to get work done.

First, the travel required to bring employees together in an office has become burdensome and expensive. Metropolitan areas are clogged with traffic, and gas prices are causing financial hardship. On average, I spend 1.5 hours in my car each day commuting a total of 20 miles to and from my office. Many of my staff members spend as much as four hours a day commuting. That’s almost the equivalent to half their workday. At the same time, people’s awareness of the environmental impact of those long commutes is on the rise. If working flexible hours reduces an employee’s commute by an hour or more each way, productivity and staff satisfaction will rise.

What’s more, face-to-face meetings that take weeks to schedule no longer support the pace of IT change and the level of service demands. Finding all the talented employees I need on staff within a reasonable commuting distance is also challenging. And for some jobs, the interruptions an office brings may actually reduce employee productivity. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts recently piloted a flexible work arrangement and found that productivity for 200 staffers working from home rose 20 percent; only two participants had performance issues.

Given these facts, I believe IT leaders are obligated to explore the entire spectrum of flexible work arrangements including telecommuting, homesourcing (a combination of outsourcing and telecommuting), virtual teams, and replacing travel with teleconferencing. Staffing an office from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. doesn’t make sense if it requires employees to spend hours in traffic.

The article continues.

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Say it isn’t so. What with broadband, WiFi and all manner of mobile commuting why would the telecommuting trend end? Sue Shellenbarger addresses this very question in a recent column.

The call came toward the end of my hour as a recent guest on a Minnesota Public Radio talk show. “Jim from Minneapolis” said he and many of his telecommuting colleagues were being called back to the office.

After years of working productively from home, Jim said he was surprised and disappointed.

Although working from home has been expanding steadily, some chinks are appearing in the trend. A few big promoters of home-based and mobile-office work arrangements, including AT&T, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and parts of the federal government, have called some home-based workers back to the office, causing some to quit. The callbacks are small and don’t reflect a full retrenchment, but the factors at work — a push to consolidate operations, and the notion that teamwork improves when people work face-to-face — suggest other employers might follow suit as recession clouds loom.

The article continues.

Broadband Reports also discusses this new trend of companies calling workers back to the office.

Shellenbarger’s offers tips for retaining your telecommuting job.

• Perform well. In explaining the callbacks at Hewlett-Packard, Chief Information Officer Randy Mott said last year that telecommuting “had gotten applied more broadly than really made sense,” and would be limited to “people who are proficient and who’ve shown they can perform over time.” Make sure measurable objectives are set for your job, then meet them.

• Increase your visibility. One behavior sure to irk managers is to use work-at-home freedom to move to a location so remote, such as Hawaii, that travel costs soar. Although Intel disputes the assertion, people familiar with the callbacks there cite such abuses as a factor. Wherever you’re located, find ways to remain visible.

• Make an effort to collaborate. Elliott Masie, head of the Masie Center, a Saratoga Springs, N.Y., research organization, says many younger managers are comfortable collaborating online. But as pressures mount, older managers may revert to the notion that to build teamwork, “it’s important for everybody to sit around and sing ‘Kumbaya’ together,” he says. It may be wise to join that chorus.

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The Vancouver Sun reports on a recent study that confirms what teleworkers have experienced and what employers are beginning to recognize and acknowledge.

Working from home, or “telecommuting,” is becoming more commonplace and popular among workers as technological advancements allow for it.

But is everyone a fan?

The conventional wisdom is that allowing people to work from home can hurt business. Telecommuters may be less productive, more inclined to quit and perform less well than workers at the office. Employers may be concerned that at-home workers are more easily distracted by family and social obligations and opportunities, perhaps doing less in a day and negatively affecting business results.

Critics also maintain that letting employees work from home should be avoided since it damages staff chances for promotion, undermines supervisor-subordinate relationships and increases family conflict. When staff aren’t in the office, they appear to be less loyal and committed as a result. This damages their reputations as promotion-ready and they are sidelined.

Relationships with supervisors are supposed to suffer under these arrangements as well. Managers rely on observing staff to evaluate their performance. When the manager can’t see what staff are doing, distrust could develop, causing supervisors to monitor employees more closely. They may implicitly suspect that the worker is not pulling his or her weight by hiding out at home.

Families could suffer more under telecommuting arrangements since technology reduces boundaries between work and family. People find their loved one constantly working and unavailable, see no downtime for the telecommuter and as a result conflict increases.

Right?

Not according to a recent study in The Journal of Applied Psychology, which firmly debunks these claims. Ravi Gajendran and David Harrison at the Department of Management and Organization with Pennsylvania State University, conducted an extensive review of 46 studies on the subject featuring 12,883 employees. Their results show that working from home is good for business and for staff.

The article continues, itemizing the key advantages of telecommuting.

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As Carol McAlice Currie points out, the hazards of the winter commute lend strength and poignancy to arguments for telecommuting.

During the recent spate of freezing weather and icy driving conditions, I’ve heard from dozens of readers disgusted with the yahoos (and I’m not talking search engines here) who refuse to slow down and exercise a little caution on slick and slippery roads.

They speed, they tailgate, they drive with their cell phones stuck to their ears in a manner reminiscent of a wet tongue to frozen metal. They don’t give a fig.

Those who care about themselves and others would just as well stay home during this weather, but many employers won’t let them.

I’m among the fortunate. My editor allowed me to reduce my company’s carbon footprint for the snow day because he knows that a virtual office is as effective as one with a water cooler and coat rack.

Unfortunately, he’s in the minority. Telecommuting still is feared by bosses and human-resource workers who cling to the antiquated notion that people working from home will cause the workplace to freeze up. They don’t encourage safety until an emergency is declared.

But snow days should be thought of as emergencies for non-essential workers.

Police, fire, health-care workers — those are employees we need on the job. But many others are not needed, and if a job can be done remotely for a couple of hours or a day, employers should make it so.

In this technologically savvy 21st century, stay-at-home orders are a snap to deliver. Rerouting of calls and remote retrieval of e-mail is a cinch. Appointments can be made, schedules can be updated, faxes can be exchanged.

Give a nod to an employee’s welfare by allowing him or her to boot up the home computer rather than putting on boots to shovel drives and risk fender-benders or worse trying to get into the office.

There are benefits beyond the safety aspect.

The commentary continues and points out — as we agree — that the technology exists that makes telecommuting possible for many. Attitudes are what need to change.

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In a recent commentary in Mother Jones, Kiera Butler examines coworking, the solution telecommuters seek when they find they are missing the social life of the office.

Last October, Rep. Frank Wolf wrote the White House with a radical proposal to promote “environmental stewardship, family values and energy independence.” In asking President Bush to designate a National Telework Week, the Virginia Republican evoked the promise of a nation without two-hour commutes, veal-pen cubicles, petty workplace politics, or disgusting communal coffeepots. “Wouldn’t it be great,” he wrote, “if we could replace the evening rush hour commute with time spent with the family, or coaching little league or other important quality of life matters?”

Yeah, that would be great. Trouble is, when your home is your office, the boundaries between work and personal time dissolve. Distractions (cable, fridge, couch) lurk everywhere. But the biggest problem is social: Without the companionship of office mates—even the Dwight Schrutes of the world—telecommuters and freelancers can feel unmotivated and lonely. Which may explain why the virtual office remains largely hype. The telecommuting lobby claims that 100 million Americans will work remotely by 2010. But in 2004, only 13.7 million did. Of those, only 2 million were working full-time from home.

As shocking as it may sound, we may actually need the office, despite its reputation as a soul-sucking pit of conformity and monotony. In a recent analysis of 40 years of research, Stephen Humphrey, a professor of management at Florida State University’s business school, found a strong correlation between the level of social interaction at work and job satisfaction and productivity. He also found that this correlation has strengthened over time—that now more than ever, the office has become a refuge of sorts. “It used to be that everyone could hang out around the watercooler—now we telecommute or spend two hours in our cars on the way to work,” he says. “We suddenly start to realize, we miss socializing—and we need it.”

So what is the lonesome office-less worker to do? In 2005, Brad Neuberg, a software programmer in San Francisco, hit upon a simple solution: He got a few friends together to share a rental space, as well as printers, fax machines, and wireless Internet, and—like a good start-up founder—branded his creation “coworking.” As the 31-year-old recalls, “I said, ‘Why can’t I have my cake and eat it too? Is there a way that I can have community and independence?’ It’s a false assumption that you can’t have both.”

The commentary continues.

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Telecommuters whose employers are in New York State face an increased tax burden.

MORE than a few commuters from Connecticut and New Jersey have dreamed about skipping the daily slog to their office in New York and working at home.

Unfortunately, this can also turn out to be more costly, thanks to New York’s tax code, which in some cases double-taxes nonresidents who work for companies based in New York but occasionally telecommute.

New York’s “convenience of the employer” rule taxes nonresidents as if they came to the office every day, even if they worked at home part of the week, unless they can prove their employer required them to telecommute. Yet they must also pay income tax in their home states for work they did there.

New York is the only state that aggressively enforces its tax code this way; most states use a “physical presence” test that lets workers pay taxes in proportion to the amount of time spent working in each state.

The rule has critics, because it penalizes some workers from out of state and also dilutes efforts to promote telecommuting that might ease congestion on the highways and trains in the New York City area.

“There’s tremendous inconsistency that’s hard to understand,” said Edward A. Zelinsky, who lives in New Haven and teaches at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in Manhattan. “New York’s position is a day working in Connecticut is a day to pay them tax. But with modern word processing, Lexis-Nexis and broadband, I can do research at my kitchen table that 20 years ago I would have had to drive in to the school’s library to do.”

Frustrated by the perceived inequity, Professor Zelinsky unsuccessfully challenged the rule, which the Tax Appeals Tribunal of New York upheld in 2003. Other legal challenges have failed as well.

“Regardless of how people feel about the rule, it’s been upheld every time,” said Thomas Bergin, a spokesman for the New York State Department of Tax and Finance.

The article continues.

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A recently published study on telecommuting has generated controversy, as Andrew R. McIlvaine reports in Human Resource Executive Online.

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.”

The article continues.

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A new study has been released.

A billion workers around the world will be classed as mobile by 2011, including nearly 75 per cent of the US workforce, according to IDC.

The analyst firm attributes the uptake to growing pressure on companies to provide work/life balance programmes, and advances in mobile technologies.

IDC’s research showed that workers are demanding more flexibility and mobility in their schedules, and have a “higher comfort level” with remote access technologies and mobile devices.

Furthermore, the proliferation of high-speed networks, widespread public Wi-Fi and fixed-mobile convergence allows employees to work effectively from almost anywhere.

The article continues. The IDC press release is here.

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Here is a brief dramatization of a successful telecommuting business. As the creators of this short movie point out:

It is estimated that there are 20 million telecommuters worldwide today helping to save 44 million tons of C02 emissions annually. That number is expected to increase ten times by 2016. Hopefully businesses of all sizes will see that they can save money, have happier more qualified employees available to them and help the environment by embracing this business concept sooner than later.

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