Telecommuting

Telecommuting, remote work,^[1] or telework is a work arrangement in which employees do not commute to a central place of work. A person who telecommutes is known as a "telecommuter", "teleworker", and sometimes as a "home-sourced," or "work-at-home" employee. Many telecommuters work from home, while others, sometimes called "nomad workers", use mobile telecommunications technology to work from coffee shops or other locations. According to a Reuters poll, approximately "one in five workers around the globe, particularly employees in the Middle East, Latin America and Asia, telecommute frequently and nearly 10 percent work from home every day".^[2] Today, as annual leave or vacation is today seen as absence from the workplace rather than ceasing work, telecommuting is used by office employees to work while on vacation.

The terms "telecommuting" and "telework" were coined by Jack Nilles in 1973.The roots of telecommuting are found in early 1970s technology that linked satellite offices to downtown mainframes through dumb terminals using telephone lines as a network bridge. The ongoing and exponential decreases in cost along with the increases in performance and usability of personal computers, forged the way for moving the office to the home. By the early 1980s, branch offices and home workers were able to connect to organizational mainframes using personal computers and terminal emulation.

Telework is facilitated by tools such as groupware, virtual private networks, conference calling, videoconferencing, virtual call centre and Voice over IP (VOIP). It can be efficient and useful for companies since it allows workers to communicate over long distances, saving significant amounts of travel time and cost. As broadband Internet connections become more commonplace, more and more workers have adequate bandwidth at home to use these tools to link their home to their corporate intranet and internal phone networks.

The adoption of local area networks promoted the sharing of resources, and client–server computing allowed for even greater decentralization. Today, telecommuters can carry laptops which they can use both at the office, at home, and nearly anywhere else. The rise of cloud computing technology and Wi-Fi availability have enabled access to remote servers via a combination of portable hardware and software.^[22]

Furthermore, with their improving technology and increasing popularity, smartphones are becoming widely used in telework. They substantially increase the mobility of the worker and the degree of coordination with their organization. The technology of mobile phones and personal digital assistant (PDA) devices allows instant communication through text messages, camera photos, and video clips from anywhere and at any time.