Teleworking in the new milleneum

Abstract

The success of telecommuting adoption depends on many factors, including the employee’s openness and readiness for such a work arrangement, the company’s openness and desire to take advantage of such a model, and an information and communication technology infrastructure that can enable its success. Telecommuting, which originated in the 1970s as a response to the oil crisis and concerns over employees’ potential inability to travel to and from the office, has involved employees completing work outside the traditional working office environment. Recent advancements in information and communication technologies enabled this form of employment relationship to become a viable alternative to traditional offices, leading to cost advantages to employees and employers, improving the environment, working motivation and thus leading to increased adoption (Turetken et al., 2011). Yet, despite the potential advantages of telecommuting, the adoption of this working model has been slower than initially predicted due to many mitigating factors (Pyöriä, 2011). These deterrents may include traditional corporate cultures that may not support a non-traditional employment relationship due to risks of relinquishing power, misunderstandings of cost value, personal preferences in terms of work/life balance and work schedule flexibility, regulatory concerns related to liability and intellectual property rights associated with working outside the traditional office (Calvasina, et al. 2012), and overall control over legal liabilities (Genova, 2010). This research, which builds upon earlier work, aims to look at the various factors related to teleworkers’ experience and the effect on teleworkers’ success in terms of satisfaction, performance, and productivity. The theoretical framework adopted for evaluating these relationships is Human Capital Theory, which suggests that direct experience improves employee productivity, thus leading to increased capital value. Evidence for this study is non-experimental and quantitative in nature using the same research instrument used previously for measuring success. A web-based distribution method has been used to gather responses from a wide variety of United States based employees across multiple industries, age groups, and an even mix of genders. Therefore, evidence presented in this paper comes from the collection and analysis of a total of 406 usable survey responses. The finding provides insight into the effect of teleworking experience on employee success. Two factors in particular, gender and technology in particular, were aggregated and may be of interest for future study. This research is the first in terms of evaluating teleworking-specific experience and evaluating the effect of teleworking success by using the framework of human capital.