Remote Working and Its History in the United States Research Paper

Introduction

The technological revolution of the 20^th century changed the way people executed work-related duties. By the start of the 1970s, there was a need to revisit commuting to work due to the enactment of the Clean Air Act. This legislation sought to address the increased air pollution by motor vehicles occasioned by the increasing need for people to travel in and out of the city every day. In 1973, Jack Niles published the first book on telecommuting. He recommended that either the “jobs of the employees must be redesigned so that they can still be self-contained at each individual location, or a sufficiently sophisticated telecommunications and information-storage system must be developed to allow the information transfer to occur as effectively as if the employees were centrally collocated” (Niles, 1973, p. 164). The idea of telecommuting continued to gain popularity within the decade.

Main body

In 1979, an article in The Washington Post by the vice president of the Committee for Economic Development (CED), Frank Schiff, popularized the idea that working at home would save gasoline. Schiff (1979) argued that if people started working from home, the demand and prices for gasoline would go down. Additionally, the service industry and information-based jobs were emerging, which allowed people to work at home. Between the mid-1970s and early 1980s, companies like JC Penny, General Electric, Sears Holdings, and American Express started rolling out telecommunicating programs for their employees (Felstead & Henseke, 2017).

However, the idea of telecommuting was not accepted immediately. Several concerns were raised concerning ways to supervise people working remotely. It would even be difficult to establish whether one was actually working. Additionally, at the time, it was believed that employees needed to work together as teams operating from a central place to accomplish a set of goals. Similarly, the critics of this idea pointed that working from home would not produce the desired results as people would face distractions, hence reduced productivity (Felstead & Henseke, 2017). However, despite the cynicism that surrounded telecommuting, companies that had adopted the idea started showing positive results.

The human resources department started measuring workers’ performance by results as opposed to the length of time spent in an office. Additionally, telecommuting was adopted in phases where individuals would be allowed to work partly at home and from the office. This hybrid approach allowed the human resources management to measure the effectiveness of each strategy. In 1987, the Christian Science Monitor reported that telecommuting was becoming a reality with over 300 companies adopting the idea and close to 1.5 million individuals actively using the concept (Knobelsdorff, 1987). In the 1990s, the US government adopted telecommuting in the General Services Administration and the Office of Personnel Management. After assessing the viability of the concept, a Presidential Memorandum was issued in 1996 directing the creation of dynamic family-friendly work programs. The trend continued to grow into the 21^st century where more companies adopted the idea. By the start of the 2010s, telecommuting had transformed into a business strategy that would reduce operational costs. In 2016, the number of individuals working from home in the US was 43 percent, while 56 percent of jobs allowed working remotely (Felstead & Henseke, 2017).

Conclusion

Telecommuting has grown tremendously after companies started using the idea in the 1970s. However, this new concept was met with criticism as organizations were resistant to change. The human resources management responded creatively by adopting the idea in phases through monitoring and evaluation to establish its viability. Currently, working remotely is a business strategy and the majority of companies have adopted it. The barrier to telecommuting has been rigid organizational structures.

References

Felstead, A., & Henseke, G. (2017). Assessing the growth of remote working and its consequences for effort, well‐being and work‐life balance. New Technology, Work and Employment, 32(3), 195-212.

Knobelsdorff, E. (1987). Telecommuting: Reality sets in.The Christian Science Monitor. Web.

Niles, J. (1973). The telecommunications-transportation tradeoff: Options for Tomorrow. New York, NY: Wiley.

Schiff, F. (1979). Working at home can save gasoline. The Washington Post. Web.