Controversy Erupts over New Telecommuting Study
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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