Published by CQ Press, an Imprint of SAGE Publications, Inc.
www.cqresearcher.com
Telecommuting
Is working from home productive?
R
ecent restrictions on telecommuting by tech giant
Yahoo and retailer Best Buy are spurring debate over
the merits of working from home. Some companies
say allowing employees to telecommute reduces
turnover and boosts profits. But Yahoo’s leaders say collaboration
and innovation suffer when everyone isn’t in the office together.
Advocates argue that telework has been crucial for parents and
other caregivers struggling to balance work and family obligations.
Yet, while the advent of mobile working — by smartphones, tablet
Yahoo employee Cheryl Stober telecommuted from
home in Newton, Mass., on Tuesdays, when she
didn’t have child care for her daughter, Hannah. The
company recently renewed debate over telework
when it said all employees would have to
work in the office or leave the company.
computers and laptops — has helped workers remain productive,
it also has led more and more people to labor long hours from
home, often at night and on weekends. Global communication by
email, videoconference and Skype has become so integral to business that some corporate leaders say they no longer see telework
as a distinct form of work.
I
N
THIS REPORT
S
I
D
CQ Researcher • July 19, 2013 • www.cqresearcher.com
Volume 23, Number 26 • Pages 621-644
E
RECIPIENT OF SOCIETY OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS AWARD FOR
EXCELLENCE ◆ AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION SILVER GAVEL AWARD
THE ISSUES ....................623
CHRONOLOGY ................631
BACKGROUND ................633
CURRENT SITUATION ........636
AT ISSUE........................637
OUTLOOK ......................638
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................642
THE NEXT STEP ..............643
TELECOMMUTING
THE ISSUES
623
• Is telecommuting good
for business?
• Is telecommuting good
for employees?
• Does telecommuting
reduce traffic congestion?
SIDEBARS AND GRAPHICS
624
More Employers Allow
Telecommuting
The percentage permitting
telework nearly doubled.
625
Employees Slow to
Embrace Telecommuting
Fewer than 10 percent
worked from home one day
a week in 2010.
BACKGROUND
633
New Technologies
Invention of the home
computer spurred interest
in telework.
626
Boosting Retention by
Allowing Flexibility
Employees at Dallas firm
work “whenever, wherever.”
633
Changing Workforce
More families have two
working parents.
628
634
Federal Flextime
The government advocated
telecommuting to reduce
traffic and auto emissions.
Management, Sales
Dominate Telecommuting
Where physical presence is
not needed, more employees
work at home.
631
Chronology
Key events since 1868.
632
Patent Office Workers
Embrace Telework
Agency says telecommuting
plays “a crucial role in employee retention and morale.”
636
Private Trends
Companies increasingly let
workers telecommute.
CURRENT SITUATION
636
638
638
Comp Time Fight
Congress is debating
whether to let employers
give paid time off in lieu
of overtime pay.
635
Best Buy’s Worker Utopia
Crashes and Burns
‘It’s OK to catch a movie on
a Tuesday afternoon.’
637
At Issue:
Should employers be able to
offer comp time in lieu of
overtime pay?
Punishing Caregivers
Suits against employers
filed by workers with
caregiving obligations rose
nearly 400 percent in a
decade.
641
For More Information
Organizations to contact.
OUTLOOK
642
Bibliography
Selected sources used.
‘Big Brother?’
Electronic monitoring of
workers’ activities could
undermine the appeal of
telecommuting.
643
The Next Step
Additional articles.
643
Citing CQ Researcher
Sample bibliography formats.
FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
Cover: Getty Images/The Boston Globe/Suzanne Kreiter
622
CQ Researcher
July 19, 2013
Volume 23, Number 26
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Telecommuting
BY SARAH GLAZER
THE ISSUES
productive and happier at
home. Has telecommuting
helped workers solve workhen Julianne M.
family conflicts or inserted new
Sloan advises a
invasions into personal time?
client in Europe on
Experts say telecommuting
how to file his tax return
can be a mixed bag — both
under international law, he
for employers and employees.
may think she’s calling from
It can be a blessing for some
the Chicago office of Deloitte,
and a burden for others. And
the global accounting firm
the advent of ubiquitous mowhere she is a senior tax
bile devices means that many
manager.
workers are feeling tethered
But chances are she’s callto their work on a 24/7 basis.
ing from her home an hour’s
In fact, employees have
train ride from downtown
not adopted telecommuting
Chicago. Sloan, who works
as fast or as broadly as some
three days a week and superpredicted after the personal
vises about 20 Deloitte emcomputer became standard
ployees, goes into her
in most homes. Only about
Chicago office only about
2.5 percent of workers cononce a month.
sider home their primary
As the single mother of
workplace, according to the
three adopted children, Sloan
Telework Research Network,
decided three years ago that
a research group in Carlsbad,
she needed to be home as
Calif. It’s far more common for
much as possible during their
employees to work only a few
teenage years. By 4 p.m., when
days a week from home. 2
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer defends the company’s
new no-teleworking policy, arguing workers “are more
her 16-year-old daughter gets
And the percentage of workcollaborative and innovative when they’re together.” But
home from school, Sloan has
ers telecommuting at least one
she concedes that many “people are more productive
already put in a 9 1/2-hour
day a week has risen slowwhen they’re alone.” Experts say telecommuting can be
day. She can turn her full atly — from 7 percent in 1999
a mixed bag for both workers and employers.
tention to chatting with her
to 9.5 percent in 2010. 3 It’s
daughter and making dinner,
far more common for emand can check her emails again later says she got so distracted by the dust ployees to work only a few days a
bunnies under her desk she would week from home.
that evening.
“I’m much more productive when I end up vacuuming in the middle of
Advocates have long cited studies
don’t have to worry about the travel the day and still be in her pajamas at showing that telecommuting improves
back and forth to work,” a commute 7 p.m. She switched to one of the in- worker retention and productivity.
creasingly popular “co-working” sites Flexible work practices such as
that left her “exhausted,” she says.
More than a decade ago, when in Manhattan, which feature open-plan telecommuting “can potentially pay
Sloan first experimented with telecom- offices with other entrepreneurs; she for themselves” by reducing turnover
muting, her colleagues couldn’t imag- made new contacts and doubled her and the associated costs of retraining
ine working at home without person- revenues. 1
new workers, as well as improving
The recent Yahoo announcement recruitment, the White House Counal distractions, she recalls, and some
may have suspected she would carry that it would no longer allow employees cil of Economic Advisers concluded
to telecommute has spurred renewed in 2010. 4
less of the office burden.
Today, even in our era of digital debate about which of those contrastStill, Yahoo complained that allowmultitasking, some workers admit they ing profiles of teleworkers is more ing employees to telecommute was
can’t concentrate at home. A health common: The distracted lonely shirk- causing the company to lose out on
food entrepreneur who worked at home er or the focused laborer who is more two less-studied benefits of face-to-face
Getty Images/Wired/Brad Barket
W
www.cqresearcher.com
July 19, 2013
623
TELECOMMUTING
More Employers Allow Telecommuting
The percentage of employers allowing occasional telecommuting
nearly doubled from 2005 to 2012. But the percentage allowing
some employees to telework regularly during that period rose only
2 percentage points.
63%
34%
31%
Percentage of Employers
Allowing Some Workers to
Telecommute Occasionally
33%
Percentage of Employers
Allowing Some Workers to
Telecommute Regularly
2005
2012
Source: Kenneth Matos and Ellen Galinsky, “2012 National Study of Employers,”
Families and Work Institute and Society for Human Resource Management, 2012
workplace interaction: collaboration and
innovation. “Some of the best decisions
and insights come from hallway and
cafeteria discussions, meeting new people and impromptu team meetings,”
Yahoo’s Human Resources head, Chief
Development Officer Jacqueline (Jackie)
D. Reses, said in a leaked memo.
“Speed and quality are often sacrificed
when we work from home.” 5
Bank of America spokesperson Ferris Morrison also cited lost opportunities for “collaboration” and “teamwork”
to explain why the bank recently decided to re-evaluate its own telecommuting program. And troubled electronics retailer Best Buy, which won
kudos for eight years for its liberal
policy of allowing headquarters employees to work wherever they wanted as long as they met production targets, recently announced that it was
624
CQ Researcher
abandoning the results-based approach.
Workers now must seek permission to
work from home.
“All hands on deck” means “having
employees in the office as much as
possible to collaborate,” a Best Buy
spokesperson said. 6
Some critics blasted Yahoo and Best
Buy for taking a simplistic view of
productivity. “Being together with your
coworkers in the best circumstances
can increase productivity, but why do
the best ideas happen while we’re taking a shower or walking the dog —
or come to us on Saturday mornings?”
asks Ellen Galinsky, president and cofounder of the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit in New York that
promotes flexible work policies. She
spoke by phone while working from
her daughter’s house to help care for
her new grandson.
After the stir caused by the Yahoo
announcement, CEO Marissa Mayer
conceded that while many “people are
more productive when they’re alone
. . . they’re more collaborative and innovative when they’re together.” For
example, she cited Yahoo’s new
weather software application, the brainchild of two software engineers working in the same office. 7
Some studies support Mayer. Computer programmers working in the same
location wrote new software codes faster
than those working from home or from
different locations, according to a study
of IBM programmers. 8 Programming
is a “very collaborative activity” because
computer codes are so interdependent,
explains study author and former MIT
researcher Ben Waber, founder of the
Boston-based consulting firm Sociometric Solutions.
“You need to talk to the people whose
code your code depends on,” Waber says.
“It turns out if I don’t talk to you, it takes
me 32 percent longer to complete my
code, which is very expensive.”
The growing popularity of co-working
sites in cities such as New York and
San Francisco (there are now 800 such
sites nationwide) suggests that at least
some people crave the sociability of
a workplace. Ironically, if any companies should be able to make remote
work successful it should be companies like Google, pioneers of the Internet, mobile technology and cloudcomputing. Instead, Google and Facebook
are investing heavily in open physical
floor plans and providing onsite personal services designed to keep people
interacting and at the office. At Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., campus, employees can get a haircut, see a dentist
and have their clothes dry-cleaned without ever leaving work. 9
The happiest medium may involve
splitting the week between home and
office. After it experimented with fiveday-a-week telecommuting, Solix, a
Parsippany, N.J.-based state and federal contractor, found that its workers
“hated it.” They missed the social interaction and personal contact with
their supervisors, according to CEO
John Parry. The company, which determines eligibility for government benefits, decided to allow employees to
work at home whenever they wish,
as long as they spend at least two
days a week in the office.
Ravi S. Gajendran, who analyzed
42 studies of telecommuting involving
12,000 workers, found that telecommuting damaged workers’ relations with
their colleagues in the office — but
only if they worked at home three days
or more per week. The biggest problem was probably resentment by office co-workers left to handle last-minute
crises, suggests Gajendran, assistant professor of business administration at the
University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana
College of Business.
As technology continues to enable
employees to work in an airport, at
the office or in a cafe, telecommuting
may become the standard. At the consulting firm Deloitte, 193,000 employees work in over 150 countries, often
relying on email and videoconferencing from a smartphone to work in
“virtual teams” — sometimes for months
without ever meeting. 10 When matching the right consultant to a particular client, says Paul Silverglate, worklife fit leader at Deloitte, “where they
live and work doesn’t factor that much
into it.”
As telecommuting continues to be
discussed in the boardroom, the living room, Congress and the press,
here are some of the questions being
debated:
Is telecommuting good for business?
In 2004, a surprisingly high number of employees were quitting their
jobs at Solix, the New Jersey contractor. Since adopting a flexible
telecommuting policy, turnover has
dropped from 13 percent to 6 percent, absenteeism has fallen and prof-
www.cqresearcher.com
Employees Slow to Embrace Telecommuting
Workers have not adopted telecommuting as fast as some experts
expected. Fewer than 10 percent of all workers (including the selfemployed) spent at least one day a week working at home in 2010,
compared with 7 percent in 1997 (top). The largest increase in homebased work between 2000 and 2010 occurred among state and
federal employees (bottom). Governments encourage telecommuting
to reduce real estate costs, traffic congestion and auto emissions and
to keep operations going during bad weather.
Percentage Working at Home at Least Once a Week, 1997-2010
1997
7.0%
2005
7.8%
2010
9.5%
Percent Increase in Home-Based Work, by Type of Employer, 2000-2010
132.5%
88.1%
67.0%
50.3% 56.5%
35.5%
Compa- Nonnies profits
Private Sector
5.6%
Local
State
Federal
Government
Incorporated
Unincorporated
Self-Employed
Source: Peter J. Mateyka, et al., “Home-Based Workers in the United States: 2010,”
U.S. Census Bureau, October 2012, www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p70-132.pdf
its have grown sixfold, according to
CEO Parry.
Parry attributes much of that improvement to telecommuting’s alleviating his employees’ stress over personal matters. About 70 percent of
Solix’s 800 employees telecommute at
least one day a week.
“When something is on your mind
at home — a home repair, a sick child
— and you’re worried that the company will dock your pay, that’s a level
of stress that affects your work. We
don’t have that stress,” says Parry. Workers can decide spontaneously when to
work at home without giving a reason,
July 19, 2013
625
TELECOMMUTING
Boosting Retention by Allowing Flexibility
Employees at Dallas firm work “whenever, wherever” they want.
W
hen manager Kristi Bryant announced in 2007 she
was resigning, it was a scene that had already played
out too many times in the corporate offices of Ryan
LLC, a global tax advice firm headquartered in Dallas.
Newly engaged at 28, Bryant said she was taking a job with
a competitor because she wanted to start a family. The atmosphere at Ryan, which had developed a “sweat shop” reputation with its long hours, was incompatible with that, she
said. 1 “I knew as a married person my future was going to
be different, and I wasn’t willing to give up life for work,”
Bryant explained. 2
That same year the firm had “started experiencing a rapid
loss of talent,” said CEO G. Brint Ryan. “And I’m not talking
about just general talent — I’m talking about the stars.” 3
Bryant’s resignation was the “tipping point” for the CEO, recalls Delta Emerson, Ryan’s executive vice president and chief
of staff, who had urged him to reconsider the company’s rigid,
50-hour-per-week requirements for face time in the office.
Ryan initiated a radical reversal for his salaried professionals, declaring, “You can work whenever you want, wherever
you want,” as long as “you meet financial results” and satisfy
the clients. Now, each employee’s client satisfaction ratings and
other performance measures are maintained on a virtual “dashboard,” accessible on the company website to both the employee and his or her supervisor.
The “results” approach quickly translated into a radical
change in the office culture. Before, Emerson remembered, “If
someone got on an elevator at 2 p.m., people would think,
‘Oh, you’re taking the afternoon off.’ Now people don’t pay
attention anymore to when people come and go; it’s guilt-free.”
There were some bumps along road. “Some employees took
the new system to mean ‘Just let me know when you need
me,’ ” and were hard to reach, Emerson reports. But as a counterweight, supervisors became so focused on results that they
on the condition that they spend two
days a week at the office. “We don’t
care how you structure your hours as
long as you’re providing that excellent
customer service. If you are sick, don’t
come in. If it snows and you want to
work from home, fine. You make the
decision.”
A recent scientifically designed study
by Stanford researchers found telecommuting boosted productivity at CTrip,
China’s largest travel agency, where call
center employees were randomly assigned to work at home or at the of-
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CQ Researcher
“rooted out people hiding behind the number of hours worked”
and got rid of poor performers.
Today, the company doesn’t even bother to track how many
hours employees work outside of the office, Emerson says, although she estimates that 60-70 percent of Ryan’s professionals
spend about half as much time in the office as they once did.
“Our profits are higher than ever,” Emerson says. “That’s
what our CEO cares about: Are we making money? Are we
keeping clients happy? Are we keeping our employees? The
answer to all those is Yes.”
Most dramatically, turnover dropped from 20 percent in 2008
to about 10.5 percent today, according to Emerson, notably low
for an industry that averages a 22 percent “burnout” rate. Ryan
ended up retaining Bryant, who went on to have two children.
Other high-powered employees also stayed after they had children. Kathy Weaver, who joined Ryan as a newlywed in 2006,
is now vice president for training, in charge of training Ryan’s
nearly 1,500 employees. Along the way she gave birth to a son
and a daughter. Last year, she accompanied two preschool field
trips during the workweek, then made up the time by handling
email and other work at home in the evening.
Weaver realizes such flexibility is “a unique privilege” unavailable to many working mothers. “It was something special
for the kids,” she says, and that’s “a culture that would be hard
for a person to walk away from.”
— Sarah Glazer
1
Ellen Galinsky, “Make Results Matter More than Face Time,” Harvard Business Review, HBR Blog Network, Nov. 23, 2012, http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/
2012/11/make_results_matter_more_than.html. Also see, www.workforce.com/
article/20111204/AWARDS/111209998.
2 Jill Coody Smits, “Cash in on Culture,” SW Spirit Magazine, December 2012,
p. 65.
3 Galinsky, op. cit.
fice. Home-based workers were 13 percent more productive than those who
remained in-office, largely measured by
the number of calls and orders completed. Home workers cited the quieter
atmosphere at home. But most of that
performance boost came from telecommuters working longer and taking fewer
breaks and sick days. 11 Some experts
question whether telecommuters in general actually end up working longer hours
— in some cases for no additional pay
— and if that’s what accounts for most
of their higher performance. 12
Call centers are often cited as the
perfect candidate for telecommuting
— a solitary occupation that could be
performed anywhere. But a study by
MIT researchers of a Bank of America call center questions that assumption. It found that call center
employees’ productivity (measured
by calls completed per minute) surged
when workers were allowed to take
group coffee breaks with their colleagues. 13
It’s a stressful job when customers
are yelling at you over the phone all
www.cqresearcher.com
may not be suitable for every type of
business or task.
Although telecommuters get better
job evaluations than office-based workers, “Supervisors could be allowing
only those who are good performers
to telecommute,” Gajendran cautions.
As a result, “It’s hard to say if high
performance is leading to telecommuting or vice versa,” he says.
their productivity than workers at fourperson lunch tables, Waber found.
“It’s not to say there aren’t certain
jobs where it’s effective to telecommute, especially if you interact with a
lot of customers outside the company,”
says Waber. “But especially for these
very highly collaborative things,” such
as computer programming, “where you
rely a lot on the people you work with,
Getty Images/Stephen Brashear
day for mishandling their bank accounts, points out lead author Waber,
now at Sociometric Solutions, who conducted the study while at MIT. During group breaks, employees got social support and picked up tips from
veteran employees about how to handle calls more efficiently, he found.
So how come Chinese call center
workers were more productive working at home than at the office? Perhaps CTrip’s office was not an environment where workers offered one
another much social support, Waber
suggests, so working at home was no
more isolating. (However, some CTrip
workers actually complained of loneliness and chose to return to the office after the experiment ended.)
Moreover, CTrip’s home workers
might have improved their productivity even more if they’d been mentored
informally by experienced colleagues,
he maintains. “There’s no way for them
to improve beyond the initial bounce
they got” from shifting to a quieter atmosphere at home, he says. “If they’re
in the office, they’re going to learn
from other people.”
As for the business benefits from
telecommuting, just as many academic studies find negative results for business — or none at all — as find a
positive boost, according to an international analysis that counted up the
studies on both sides. 14
However, the “meta-analysis” by
Pennsylvania State University researchers
of 46 recent studies tries to quantify
the balance of all the results. It found
“beneficial effects” on workers’ job performance (as measured by supervisors’
ratings), job satisfaction, turnover intent
and family-work conflict. 15
Gajendran, a co-author of the study
and now at the University of Illinois
Champaign-Urbana, is cautious about
the universality of the benefits he found.
“What our meta-analysis shows is it
makes sense for businesses to offer
telecommuting,” but not as a “blanket
prescription,” he says. Telecommuting
Google software engineers work in a room with a view — and a foosball table —
at the firm’s office in Kirkland, Wash., on Oct. 28, 2009. Amenities at the office
include a climbing wall, gym and soda fountain. Google and Facebook are
investing heavily in floor plans and personal services designed to keep
employees interacting and at the office. At Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif.,
campus, employees can get a haircut, see a dentist and have their clothes
dry-cleaned without leaving work.
Few academic studies have looked
at the qualities Yahoo says were lost
through remote working: innovation and
collaboration. But Waber says those are
valid concerns based on several studies he has conducted in which workers wear sensor badges to measure their
“face time” with one another.
Telecommuting may work well for
planned meetings, Waber says, “But a
lot of the value of working with people comes from all those interactions
that you didn’t plan.” 16 Programmers
who sat at lunch tables of 12 people
at an online travel company were far
more likely to talk to their lunchmates
later in the week and to see a boost in
you can measure what the cost is when
you miss one of these interactions.”
Findings like Waber’s suggest that
workers may need to divide their time
between home and office. “It helps
telecommuters to know that during
that collaborative phase they should
come into the office more often,” says
Gavendran, while they may work better at home on more focused tasks.
Most experts caution that a company is more likely to reap the potential benefits of telecommuting if its
managers understand how to monitor
employees from a distance. For example, supervisers at a Dallas tax
advice firm, Ryan LLC, can check an
July 19, 2013
627
TELECOMMUTING
Management, Sales Dominate Telecommuting
Fields such as management and sales accounted for the largest
share of home-based workers in 2010. Occupations in which
employees’ physical presence tends to be needed, such as construction and health care, accounted for a much smaller proportion of
at-home workers.
Share of Home-Based and Total Workforce, by Occupation, 2010
Management,
business, science
Service
Sales
Education, legal,
community service, arts
Office, administrative
support
Computer, engineering
and science
Production and
transportation
Construction, Extraction
Share of Workforce
Share of Home-Based Workers
Installation,
maintenance, repair
Health care
Farming, fishing,
forestry
0%
5
10
15
20
25
Source: Peter J. Mateyka, et al., “Home-Based Workers in the United States: 2010,”
U. S. Census Bureau, October 2012, www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p70-132.pdf
online dashboard that updates the financial performance and customer satisfaction ratings for each of their employees. Yahoo decided to ban
telecommuting after it discovered teleworkers rarely logging onto the company’s secure computer network, according news reports. 17
Gajendran asks, “How can you have
hundreds of employees not logging in
on a day-to-day basis? What was the
company doing that telecommuters
were so turned off?”
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CQ Researcher
The question is not just whether
telework is good for business, he says,
but also, “Can business create systems
so telecommuting can be productive?”
Is telecommuting good for employees?
Since the advent of home computers, working at home has seemed an
ideal scheme to help working parents
ease the conflicts between work and
child-care. And some experts say it
plays that role today.
Telecommuting “does help address
family issues: If a kid is sick; you can
still work; if you need to take a child
to an appointment you can take the
child, come home and can continue
to work,” says Joan Williams, professor of law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law and
director of its Center for WorkLife Law.
“There are huge numbers of women
who would quit their jobs and be
forced into poverty without telecommuting.”
Telework also is crucial for fathers
who otherwise would “not be involved
in their children’s day-to-day life,”
Williams notes, and for adults caring
for aging parents.
But a recent analysis by two sociologists at the University of Texas and
University of Iowa found that “parents
are no more likely than the population as a whole to telecommute, and
mothers do not telecommute more than
fathers.” College-educated workers and
those in managerial and professional
jobs are far more likely to telecommute than other workers. 18
The typical telecommuter, most studies find, is male, white-collar and tends
to have a high-status job. 19
In part that’s because working from
home is just one of many benefits that
are offered most often to the most privileged workers, who are more likely to
be men than women, observes Williams.
According to a 2008 survey by the
Families and Work Institute, employers offer telework on an occasional
basis to male workers more often than
female workers: 19 percent of men
got such an offer vs. 13 percent of
women. Even in managerial jobs, more
men (45 percent) were allowed to telework some of their regular hours than
women (30 percent), the survey found.
While sex-discrimination could explain
the difference, the authors of the study
say, women also are more heavily represented in fields such as nursing and
teaching, where telework is not a viable option.
Williams has coined the term “flexibility stigma” to help explain why workers, especially women, are reluctant to
request flexible work arrangements
such as telecommuting or changing
their starting and quitting times.
Many workers fear that taking advantage of such perks will lead to
fewer promotions and raises, according to Williams and other experts. In
a recent article, Williams and colleagues
note that even though 79 percent of
U.S. firms allow some employees to
change their starting or quitting times
periodically, only 11 percent of fulltime workers have a formal agreement
to vary their work hours. They suggest the reason is fear of negative career repercussions, which they say is
well-founded. Flexibility policies such
as “flextime” and family leave have
been shown to result in wage penalties, lower performance evaluations and
fewer promotions. 20
Telework, by contrast, does not seem
to be as toxic to job advancement,
counters Gajendran, and his data find
more of a stigma for men who telework than for women. Overall, teleworkers received more favorable evaluations from managers than their
office-based colleagues, his meta-analysis
concluded. “The truth is there is some
stigma but to what extent? Our data
finds it doesn’t seem to affect their careers,” he says.
When workers do encounter penalties for requesting flexible work options, Williams and colleagues write,
it’s because many employers believe
ideal workers should make work the
center of their lives. That tends to be
easier for the typical upper-middleclass man, who spends 55 hours a
week at work and commuting and
has a wife to care for the children.
(Only 14 percent of professional mothers work this schedule). A woman
who requests workplace flexibility is
often “sanctioned for her failure to
be (seen as) the ideal worker,” the
authors observe. 21
www.cqresearcher.com
Paradoxically, even though the CTrip
study demonstrated that telecommuters
were more productive than office-based
workers, fewer telecommuters got promoted than their office coworkers. Some
of the home-based workers returned
to the office full-time to avoid this discrimination penalty. 22
Employers are willing to implement
what Williams calls the “best practices”
of flexible work schedules but then
“send informal cultural messages that
you use best practices at your own
peril,” she asserts.
Sociological studies generally find
that workers who have more autonomy about where and when they work
tend to be more satisfied. 23 So in his
study of U.S. workers, University of
Toronto sociology professor Scott Schieman was surprised to find that those
with the most control over their work
hours also reported work intruding
more frequently on their personal
lives. They ended up suffering from
anxiety, insomnia and marital stress. 24
College-educated professionals like
those in Schieman’s study have generally already worked a 40-hour week
away from home so telework comes as
extra hours for them, he notes. They
might be juggling work phone calls
while getting dinner ready or fending
off a child’s plea for homework help.
“People who have full control over
their schedule may have a more difficult time shutting off work when they
want to,” speculates Schiemann. “That
finding went against all the predictions
of how flexibility is such a great thing
that it should buffer against the downsides of work effects; it’s exactly the
opposite.”
That portrait of a teleworker toiling
nights and weekends is becoming typical, according to Jennifer L. Glass, a
sociologist at the University of Texas,
Austin, and co-author of a recent analysis that found most hours spent teleworking are overtime — after the employee has already worked at least
40 hours a week. Rather than helping
to solve family-work conflicts, telework
has allowed employers “to raise expectations” for their employees’ “work
availability during evenings and weekends and foster longer workdays and
workweeks,” she and University of Iowa
sociologist Mary C. Noonan conclude. 25
“We’ve created a workplace culture
where devotion and commitment are
signaled by a continual presence; so
telecommuting, when it occurs, occurs
on the weekends and evenings when
you have to get home,” says Glass.
In surveys, workers say they feel
increasing pressure to work those
extra hours in order to hold onto their
jobs, especially during a recession —
creating a self-driven culture of overwork, Glass notes. One survey found
that 37 percent of employees worked
on vacation in 2010, double the share
in 2006. 26
“Everybody’s worried. So employers can squeeze a lot of work out of
employees,” Glass says.
The extra hours worked actually
don’t garner the pay and promotions
workers expect, according to Glass —
suggesting this overtime without reward may be a new form of exploitation, what one recent commentator
called an “electronic sweatshop.” 27
Other experts acknowledge this trend
is occurring against a general background in which workweeks are getting longer for professional workers.
But is telework to blame? Is telecommuting being used “to push for longer
hours or to make the longer hours that
are clearly expected a little more manageable?” asks University of Minnesota
sociologist Erin Kelly, co-director of the
university’s Flexible Work and Well-Being
Center. “It’s not like if we stopped
telecommuting, employers of professional and managerial workers would
be happy with employees working just
40 hours and walking out the door.”
Some experts say Glass exaggerates
the overtime effect of telecommuting
by counting workers who take work
home after working a full day at the
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TELECOMMUTING
As Nilles recalls, “That got me to
thinking about why we have all these
traffic problems” stemming from commuting and “why we have to get
there” just to sit at desks, talk on the
phone and have too many unproductive meetings.
That conversation launched Nilles
Jennifer Ying
office — which doesn’t really qualify
as teleworking. The Bureau of Labor
Statistics data she cites doesn’t accurately define teleworkers, since it lumps
in self-employed workers running a
business from home and those who
have already driven to the office that
day, objects Gavendran.
An employee works from home for CTrip, China’s largest travel agency. A recent
study at Stanford University found telecommuting boosted productivity at CTrip,
where call-center employees were randomly assigned to work from home or at
the office. Teleworkers were 13 percent more productive than those at the office,
measured largely by the number of calls and orders completed. Home workers
cited the quieter atmosphere at home, but most of their performance boost
came simply from working longer days.
“Is that really telecommuting if you’re
working from home on a weekend or
if you’re working from home because
you’re ambitious?” he asks.
Does telecommuting reduce traffic congestion?
In 1970, rocket scientist Jack Nilles,
who had designed remote sensing
NASA spacecraft, was asked by a regional planner: “If you people can put
a man on the moon, why can’t you
do something about traffic?” 28
630
CQ Researcher
on a career as “the father of telecommuting,” promoting a then-revolutionary
mode of work, a goal he currently
pursues as founder of JALA International, a management consulting firm
in Los Angeles.
For years, Nilles has been predicting that the growth in telecommuting
would take millions of cars off the
road and reduce traffic congestion. In
1998, he predicted that telecommuters
would remove 21 million cars per workday by 2010. 29
So why do traffic jams seem as bad
as they were 15 years ago if not worse?
In fact, the average commuter endured
38 hours of delay in 2011, up from 16
hours in 1982, according to the Texas
A&M Transportation Institute. 30
“It’s still hard to see a difference on
the crowded freeways,” Nilles acknowledges. That’s because the growth in the
number of drivers, constricted on the
same number of roads, has overwhelmed
reductions from workers who stay
home, he says. “Without telecommuting
it would be a whole lot worse,” he
maintains. Instead of lasting only seven
or eight hours, gridlock would expand
to as much as 15 or 20 hours, he estimates, and “it would never clear up.”
Patricia L. Mokhtarian, professor of
civil and environmental engineering at
the University of California-Davis, is a
long-time skeptic of telecommuting as
a solution to congestion. Today, she acknowledges, telework reduces car travel for the individual working at home.
But that individual’s effect on alleviating overall traffic is very modest, she
says, especially since most people telework only a few days a week.
“The question in my mind is: Will
enough people do it long enough to
make a difference at the aggregate
level [of traffic congestion]?” she says.
For example, if 5 percent of the
population telecommutes one day a
week out of the five-day workweek,
that takes only 1 percent of the commuting traffic off the road on any given
workday, she points out. 31 A UC-Davis
study of employers’ efforts to encourage telework found similarly minor effects: reductions of 4-6 percent in commuting miles traveled by employees of
individual companies, but regionwide
reductions of only 1 percent. 32
In addition, advocates and critics
agree that any lessening of traffic due
to telecommuting is subject to the classic “triple convergence” effect any time
road capacity is increased: Once the
roads empty out, commuters who were
Continued on p. 632
Chronology
19th
Century
Science fiction writers envision
videoconferencing; 10-hour day
is common for factory workers.
1868
President Ulysses S. Grant signs eighthour day into law for federal workers.
1899
H. G. Wells’ futuristic novel When
the Sleeper Wakes predicts future
videoconferencing will eliminate
need for meetings.
•
20th
Century
More women join labor force.
. . . Rising gas prices and traffic congestion spur interest in
home-based work; federal workers are urged to telework.
1938
President Franklin D. Roosevelt
signs Fair Labor Standards Act,
requiring overtime pay beyond a
40-hour week.
1950
Less than one-third of women work.
1973
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries declares oil embargo, spurring higher gasoline
prices. . . . American rocket scientist
Jack Nilles coins “telecommuting” as
solution to traffic congestion.
1978
Congress enacts Federal Employees
Flexible and Compressed Work
Schedules Act, allowing workers to
alter schedules to reduce commuting time.
1979
Iranian revolution disrupts oil ex-
www.cqresearcher.com
ports, triggering another round of
surging gasoline prices and renewed interest in telecommuting.
•
1980-1986
Oil prices plummet as new glut
develops in world markets. . . .
Suburban sprawl spawns longer
commutes, worsening traffic.
1982
Congress reauthorizes flextime for
federal workers.
1985
Congress makes flexible schedules
for federal workers permanent.
1997
House passes law allowing private
employers to offer paid time off
instead of wages for overtime
work; bill dies in Senate. . . .
Study of Fortune 500 company finds
few employees use flexible work
options. . . . Seven percent of workers spend at least one workday a
week at home, Census Bureau finds.
1999
Women’s labor force participation
peaks at 60 percent.
•
2000s More employers
offer telework option, and
telecommuting grows in popularity but mostly part-time. . . .
Under-30 workers demand flexible schedule. . . . Recession
causes dip in telework; some big
employers become disenchanted.
2002
Census Bureau finds that 7.5 percent
of employees work from home, about
1 million more than in 1997.
2005
About a third of employers offer
telecommuting on occasional basis;
7.8 percent of workforce telecommutes at least once a week.
2010
Telework Enhancement Act requires
federal agencies to inform employees if they can work at home. . . .
Number of monthly teleworkers
dips during recession. . . . Some
9.5 percent of workforce telecommutes one day a week. . . . Sixtythree percent of employers offer
occasional teleworking. . . . Benefits
of offering flexible work can outweigh costs, says President’s Council of Economic Advisers.
2011
Federal Office of Personnel Management scuttles liberal telework experiment based on employees’ work
“results;” federal agencies must meet
2010 federal mandate to offer telework to eligible workers. . . . Onethird of college students say remote
working is a right; 70 percent believe regular office presence unnecessary, Cisco study finds.
2012
Sixty-three percent of employers
offer telework option; Bank of
America announces it is rethinking
its telecommuting program.
2013
Yahoo bans telecommuting; facing
tough competition, Best Buy restricts telework regime, citing a
need for greater in-office collaboration. . . . House passes controversial Working Families Flexibility
Act to allow private employers to
offer compensatory time off in lieu
of overtime pay (May 8). . . . Vermont gives employees the right to
request flexible work arrangements
and protects them from retaliation
for asking (May 14).
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TELECOMMUTING
Patent Office Workers Embrace Telework
“A crucial role in employee retention and morale.”
T
hat attorney reviewing the patent application for your
latest invention — the one that’s going to make you a
zillion dollars — may indeed be hunched at a desk in
Alexandria, Va., the home of the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office (PTO).
But he’s just as likely to be sitting in his living room in California.
Working at home is the norm at the PTO, which has the
largest share of telecommuters in the federal government. Sixtyfive percent of the agency’s 11,664 employees telework, according to Danette Campbell, the PTO’s senior telework adviser. About a third of them work from home fulltime, many
hundreds of miles from office headquarters.
The agency first experimented with telecommuting in 1997.
Struggling with a mounting backlog of patent and trademark
applications and a shortage of reviewers, the PTO increased its
pool of job candidates by allowing attorneys who lived outside the 50-mile radius of the capital to work at home, according to Campbell.
The office now employs about 4,000 more workers than in
2006, an increase Campbell says was made possible entirely
because home-based workers don’t require expensive new office space. “If I had to bring in 4,000-plus employees, I’d need
$24 million in real estate to house them,” she estimates.
Continued from p. 630
using mass transit switch back to driving, and drivers who were using back
roads or leaving early to beat the rush
return to the highway at the normal
rush hour. “The next day the freeway
is just as congested as it was before
the added capacity,” Mokhtarian says.
Fifteen years ago, some critics, including Mokhtarian, also predicted
that telecommuters would shift their
errands and shopping to the days
they worked at home and therefore
continue to add to local traffic near
their homes. But subsequent studies
have not supported that prediction.
Telecommuters tend to feel “travel
saturated” on work-at-home days, so
many leave their cars in the garage,
and any trips they make tend to be
shorter and off-peak. 33
At the same time, globalized communication facilitated by email and
632
CQ Researcher
Praising the program as a successful business strategy, the
Commerce Department’s inspector general found that the average PTO teleworker spent 66.3 more hours a year examining patents than the average reviewer at headquarters, translating to about 3.5 more patent reviews. 1
“Our folks who work from home have a tendency to work
longer hours because they don’t have [to] commute,” Campbell says. In addition, attorneys who might have considered
retiring are more likely to stay on with the agency, especially if they’re allowed to move back to their home states,
she explains. That saves on expensive training of new hires
— which typically takes at least two years, based at headquarters.
Retaining seasoned employees also helps reduce the application backlog, Campbell notes. “This is an initiative that has
played a crucial role in employee retention and morale.”
The Patent Office has estimated that up to 75 percent of
its workers have jobs suitable for telework. So why do only
65 percent work remotely?
Not everyone wants to telecommute. “A lot of people really enjoy getting out of their home in the morning and going
to a place other than their home to work,” Campbell says, noting that the telework option is voluntary. “Some people feel
that there are too many distractions in the home.”
Skype means workers are more likely
to accept invitations to conferences in
far-flung places, Mokhtarian suggests.
The last three decades, which saw a
sharp rise in email and cell phone use,
also saw a surge in overall transportation, including air travel. 34
“Some people may work at home
three days a week but jet-set off to
Timbuktu six days a month,” thanks
to new telecommunications technology, observes Mokhtarian.
Finally, telecommuters tend to live
farther from work than the average
worker, so some researchers conclude
that the ability to work remotely has
encouraged those workers to move
farther away. 35 But Mokhtarian thinks
most suburban sprawl pre-dated shifts
to telecommuting. One study of California state workers found they took
on telework to avoid the longer commute they already endured. 36
Changing technology may be having the opposite effect — moving work
closer to employees’ homes. Nilles once
envisioned a radical change in the structure of cities, with bedroom communities revitalized by teleworkers who now
had more time to get to know their
neighbors and get involved in community activities and volunteering.
For example, as the technology of
filmmaking becomes more computerbased, some post-production work
can be done closer to home. Some
film studios are moving their operations from Hollywood to Santa Monica, where many employees live. The
11-mile commute can stretch to an
hour on clogged freeways during rush
hour. Those lucky workers “don’t fight
the traffic,” Nilles says. “There’s a nice
park along the ocean where people
can jog and watch sailboats, and it
beats sitting on a freeway.”
BACKGROUND
New Technologies
S
ince the 19th century, the desire to
eliminate the need for physical travel has been one of the main motivations driving the invention of new forms
of electronic communication. When the
telephone was invented in the late 1800s,
newspaper articles speculated about a
time when the telephone could replace
the need for face-to-face meetings. 37
In his 1899 dystopian novel When
the Sleeper Wakes, British science fiction
writer H. G. Wells envisioned a future
in which the “kineto-tele-photograph”
— essentially videoconferencing —
would eliminate the need for people to
meet in person. 38
www.cqresearcher.com
Getty Images/The Washington Post/Jahi Chikwendiu
However, she says, “We emphasize [that] telework is not a
substitute for day care or elder care.” And because of the secure nature of the information, “We don’t allow anyone to work
in a Starbucks or a hotel lobby,” Campbell adds.
In response to the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010, all
federal agencies must notify eligible employees if their jobs are
suitable for telecommuting. According to the Office of Personnel Management, nearly a third of federal employees have
jobs suitable for telecommuting, but only a quarter of those
eligible are actually teleworking. 2
Some critics blame that shortfall on the absence of congressional funding for promoting telework and training employees. But agencies still can tap into the government’s
$80 billion information technology budget, says Cindy Auten,
general manager of the Alexandria, Va.-based Mobile Work
Exchange, a public-private partnership promoting federal
telecommuting.
To encourage a transition to mobile forms of telecommuting, a new White House policy requires federal chief information officers planning to buy new computers, for example, to
consider buying laptops instead of desktops, says Auten. And
some agencies are promoting BYOD, “bring your own device,”
which allows federal workers to use their own smartphones or
laptops on a pilot basis.
Danette Campbell runs the federal government’s
most successful telework program, at the
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
This is transforming how federal officials look at both IT
and teleworking, Auten says.
“We’re not just sitting at a desk anymore,” she says.
— Sarah Glazer
1 “The Patent Hoteling Program is Succeeding as a Business Strategy,” Office
of Inspector General, Department of Commerce, Feb. 1, 2012, www.oig.doc.
gov/Pages/PHP-Is-Succeeding-as-a-Business-Strategy.aspx.
2 “2012 Status of Telework in the Federal Government: Report to the Congress,” United States Office of Personnel Management, June 2012, www.tele
work.gov/reports_and_studies/annual_reports/index.aspx.
In the 1960s, some researchers began
exploring how telecommunications
could reduce travel. The Arab oil embargo and the energy crises of the
1970s gave new impetus to such studies. In 1973, former NASA scientist
Nilles coined the term “telecommuting” as a solution to traffic congestion.
American futurist Alvin Toffler made
popular his utopian visions of telecommuting with his 1980 best-seller The Third
Wave, which predicted a future “Information Age.” Toffler envisioned the
home office as an “electronic cottage”
that would “glue the family together
again.” 39 That idea harked back to preindustrial America, when families of farmers and artisans worked at home, with
women and children pitching in. 40
“Home computers are nurturing
working mothers,” the San Jose Mercury News declared in 1983, echoing
that vision. 41 But current trends,
which show parents no more likely
than other workers to adopt telecommuting, raise questions about that utopian vision.
Citing today’s tendency for telecommuting to stretch beyond the 40-hour
workweek, Slate recently opined that
Toffler’s “ ‘electronic cottage’ has become an ‘electronic sweatshop.’ ” 42
Changing Workforce
I
n the late 19th and early 20th century, many mothers worked grueling hours, often during the night shift
so they could care for their children
during the day. On a typical day at a
factory in Albany, N.Y., in 1914,
women worked from 7 p.m. until midnight, took half an hour for supper,
and then worked another five hours,
five nights a week. 43
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TELECOMMUTING
And analagous to teleworkers
today, many factory workers took garments home to sew, where they were
paid by the piece regardless of how
long the work took. Piecework became infamous as an exploitative sweatshop practice that barely paid a living wage and often required the labor
of everyone in the family, including
young children.
In 1868, President Ulysses S. Grant
limited the work day for federal workers to eight hours a day, but the 10hour day continued for most other
workers for decades. 44
Not until 1938, when President
Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Fair
Labor Standards Act, did the eighthour day became the standard for
hourly workers. The law also required
that any hours worked beyond 40 per
week be paid at an overtime rate of
time and a half.
This New Deal legislation institutionalized the 9-to-5, five-day workweek at a time when the workforce
was composed mostly of men whose
wives were full-time homemakers.
While women were encouraged to
enter the workforce in large numbers
during World War II, by 1950 they
made up less than a third of employees. 45 In 1950 only 12.6 percent
of married mothers with children under
17 were working. 46
Since then the workforce has changed
radically. Women now constitute at
least half the labor force. Women’s rate
of participation in the workforce peaked
in 1999 at 60 percent, falling slightly
to 58 percent in 2011. 47
Unlike in the 1950s, most workers
today do not have a full-time homemaker spouse, and most children are
raised in households where both parents work. Married couples in which
only the husband works have become
a diminishing minority — falling from
36 percent in 1967 to 19 percent in
2010. Sixty-nine percent of married
mothers with children under 18 are in
the workforce. 48
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CQ Researcher
In light of these changes in families, the “one-size-fits-all workplace with
its fulltime, full-year, year-in and yearout jobs” has resulted in “a profound
structural mismatch” to the needs of
employees who care for children and
elder relatives, scholars say in a recent book urging the adoption of flexible work options. 49
In today’s dual-earner families, the
same two adults who were once supported by one paying job “now share
three jobs, two as breadwinners and
one as homemaker,” write the volume’s
editors, Kathleen Christensen, program
director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Barbara Schneider, a professor of education and sociology at Michigan State University. The number of
hours worked in paying jobs has also
risen dramatically, they note, from the
standard 40-hour week that prevailed
for most of the 20th century. 50
Exacerbating this trend of lengthening workweeks, the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act does not protect the 40 percent of workers who are salaried, and
thus exempt from the law. As the pace
of work escalates in a globalized 24hour economy, white collar workers “are
expected to work long hours with no
additional pay,” three University of Minnesota sociologists noted recently. 51
White-collar workweeks have been
lengthening since at least the 1980s.
Between 1989 and 1996, middle-class
married couples increased their annual work hours by the equivalent of
more than three extra 40-hour weeks
— most of these hours added by the
wives. 52
In 1997, in a groundbreaking study
of a Fortune 500 company that was
pioneering family-friendly policies, University of California-Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild described
how the lengthening work days left
many working parents despairing over
how little time they had for their children. 53 So Hochschild was surprised
to discover that only 1 percent of employees took advantage of “flexplace”
— the opportunity to work from home
— and only 3 percent of parents opted
for part-time work. 54
Working mothers told Hochschild
that compared to the workplace, home
was a frenetic environment, where they
shouldered a “second shift” of housework and childcare. Some even sought
out overtime hours. At work they found
a greater sense of identity and selfworth, as well as friendships and recognition from their co-workers.
Men had long considered the office
a haven from screaming children and
dirty dishes. “The news,” Hochschild
declared in her book The Time Bind,
“is that growing numbers of working
women are leery of spending more
time at home, as well.” 55
Federal Flextime
I
n 1978, in response to growing rushhour traffic congestion in the Washington, D.C., area, Congress enacted
the Federal Employees Flexible and
Compressed Work Schedules Act. The
trial program allowed federal workers
to arrange alternative work schedules
to reduce commuting time while meeting their family needs. It also allowed
them the choice of taking overtime
pay either as cash or paid time off. 56
The trial was so successful in reducing absenteeism and increasing productivity that Congress reauthorized it
in 1982. In 1985, Congress made the
program permanent.
In 1997, the House of Representatives passed for the second time a bill
known as the Family-Friendly Workplace Act, to allow private sector workers to take compensatory time off in
lieu of overtime pay — the same privilege legally granted to federal workers. The bill, threatened with a veto
by President Bill Clinton, died in the
Senate amid strong opposition from
unions, which argued that employers
would use the law to deprive hourly
workers of their legal right to time-
Best Buy’s Worker Utopia Crashes and Burns
“It’s OK to catch a movie on a Tuesday afternoon.”
E
very meeting is optional. Arriving at the office at 2 p.m.
is not considered coming in late. It’s OK to catch a
movie on a Tuesday afternoon. 1
Such options for workers might sound like the utopian dream
of a burned-out cubicle worker. But actually they are among
the “13 Guideposts” of a radical approach to work, pioneered
to great plaudits by electronic retailer Best Buy in 2005.
The Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) was developed
by two Best Buy employees to help the company recruit top
talent. Stressing that “Work isn’t a place you go — it’s something you do,” ROWE permitted Best Buy’s corporate headquarters employees to set their own hours and work at home
as much as they wished as long as they met their supervisors’
goals — whether filling a minimum number of orders or completing a certain number of audits a month.
The system appeared to be wildly successful, cutting employee turnover by 45 percent and reducing work-family angst,
leading to improved health and sleeping habits, according to
researchers from the University of Minnesota. 2
In an introduction to “Why Work Sucks,” the manifesto written by ROWE creators Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, former Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson enthused, “We have . . .
embraced this new way of working at Best Buy because it’s
good for business. Engaged employees are more productive,
more innovative, more committed.” 3
In 2010, the President’s Council of Economic Advisers called
ROWE “the ultimate form of workplace flexibility.” 4
So when Best Buy announced in March that it would restrict telecommuting and cancel ROWE, many people were surprised. Unlike Yahoo, which announced the previous week that
it was banning all telecommuting, Best Buy said some of its
4,000 non-store employees might still be allowed to telecommute, but now must get permission from their managers.
Best Buy had been facing tough competition from online
retailers, such as Amazon, and had brought in a new CEO. “In
the context of a business transformation, it makes sense to consider not just what the results are but how the work gets done,”
Best Buy spokesman Matt Furman said, “and that means hav-
and-a-half overtime pay. Repeated efforts by Republicans to revive the bill
since then have also failed, although
the House earlier this year passed a
similar bill. (See “Current Situation,”
p. 634, and “At Issue,” p. 637.)
In the most comprehensive push to
get federal workers teleworking, President Barack Obama in December 2010
signed the Telework Enhancement Act.
www.cqresearcher.com
ing employees in the office as much as possible to collaborate
and connect on ways to improve our business.” 5
Some industry executives who had considered adopting
ROWE found Best Buy’s decision understandable, saying ROWE
didn’t involve enough consultation with managers.
Best Buy wasn’t the only employer to try ROWE and then
abandon it. In another prominent failure, the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) tried the approach from August 2010
to August 2011. OPM Director John Berry had suggested that if
the trial worked, ROWE could transform the federal workplace.
According to a 2011 evaluation of the experiment, however, managers weren’t sure how to evaluate employees according to their work “results” and employees had little idea whether
they were meeting the results expected of them. OPM scuttled
the pilot after one year. 6
Kate Lister, president of the Telework Research Network,
whose research argues in favor of telework, calls ROWE’s 13
tenets “pretty extreme” in their message to the employee that
“You can do whatever you want.” Noting Best Buy’s financial
trouble, she says, ROWE is “not for every company and not
for a company on the ropes.”
— Sarah Glazer
1 Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix it: The
Results-Only Revolution (2008), p. 89.
2 Phyllis Moen, et al., “Does Enhancing Work-Time Control and Flexibility
Reduce Turnover?” Social Problems, 58 (1) 2011, pp. 69-98. And see Erin L. Kelly,
et al., “Changing Workplaces to Reduce Work-Family Conflict,” American Sociological Review, 76 (2) 2011, pp. 265-298, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/
PMC3094103/.
3 Ressler and Thompson, op. cit., p. viii.
4 “Work-Life Balance and the Economics of Workplace Flexibility,” Council
of Economic Advisers, Executive Office of the President, March 2010, p. 12,
www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/03/31/economics-workplace-flexibility.
5 Julianne Pepitone, “Best Buy Ends Work From Home Program,” “CNN
Money,” March 5, 2013, http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/05/technology/bestbuy-work-from-home/index.html.
6 Stephen Losey, “Why You Don’t Have Flex Schedules: OPM’s Failed 1-year
Experiment,” Federal Times, Dec. 16, 2012, www.federaltimes.com/article/
20121216/PERSONNEL03/312160007/Why-you-don-8217-t-flex-schedules-OPM8217-s-failed-1-year-experiment?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE.
It required all federal agencies to determine by June 2011 how many of
their employees had jobs suitable for
telecommuting and to notify those
employees of their eligibility for workat-home status. As in the past, a major
factor was worsening traffic congestion in the Washington, D.C. area, which
has the country’s largest concentration
of federal workers.
Federal agencies also saw telework
as “a great way to stay competitive”
with the private sector, notes Cindy
Auten, general manager of the Mobile
Work Exchange, a public-private sector
partnership promoting telework.
The real tipping point came with
the monster snowstorm, dubbed “Snowmageddon,” that hit Washington in February 2010, closing federal offices for
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635
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CURRENT
SITUATION
AFP/Getty Images/Jewel Samad
Comp Time Fight
A man shovels out his car in Silver Spring, Md., on Feb. 6, 2010, after the
“Snowmageddon” blizzard pounded the Washington, D.C., region, closing
federal offices for five days. The federal government and the states have
encouraged telecommuting to reduce real estate costs, traffic congestion and
auto emissions and to keep operations going during weather-related emergencies.
five days. “That was a game-changer,”
says Auten, demonstrating that telework, where it was used, was critical
to continuing federal operations in an
emergency or disaster such as an
earthquake or fire.
Private Trends
T
eleworking has been gaining in
popularity among private employers eager to retain workers and
attract younger job-seekers.
The share of companies offering
the option on an occasional basis has
risen steadily — from 34 percent in
2005 to 63 percent last year, according to a national study of employers
by the Families and Work Institute. But
only a third of employers offered the
option of regular telecommuting —
and then only to a minority of workers. Even fewer made telecommuting
available to all or most employees —
6 percent on an occasional basis and
only 2 percent on a regular basis. 57
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CQ Researcher
After the 2007-09 recession, some
employees became leery of telecommuting: In 2010, the number who
worked remotely at least once a month
dipped for the first time since 2008,
according to a survey by WorldatWork,
a nonprofit membership association
for human resource professionals. The
drop of about 8 million workers from
2008 still meant that nearly 20 percent
of working adults were telecommuting monthly. 58
In December, Bank of America announced it was scaling back its teleworking program and asking managers to review which jobs were most
suitable for telework. 59 An internal
memo said new employees should
work from an office “whenever possible” and that employees should attend meetings in person. 60
According to The Charlotte Observer,
“The Bank of America said nothing specific precipitated the review.” But a person familiar with the matter said it was
part of a new broad-based program “to
cut costs and improve efficiency.” 61
T
he flexibility employees value most
highly is the ability to handle lastminute personal emergencies, says Families and Work Institute co-founder
Galinsky. A worker’s ability to respond
to the sudden illness of a child by
working at home would be affected
by an array of federal and state laws
under consideration.
The House of Representatives on
May 8 passed legislation supported by
the Republican leadership that would
allow employers to offer paid time off
instead of wages for overtime work.
The vote was 223-204, with all but
three Democrats opposing it. 62 The
Working Families Flexibility Act of
2013 would give private sector hourly
employees the option of asking for
compensatory time off for any hours
worked beyond a 40-hour week, as a
substitute for the “time and a half”
overtime pay that is required by law.
That option is already available to federal employees.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor,
R-Va., has pushed for the bill as part
of a package of measures designed to
help working families, known as “Making Life Work.”
But opponents say the measure is
a cynical ploy aimed at making the
GOP look sympathetic to workers with
a bill that is far more favorable to employers. 63 “It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing — a way for employers to avoid
paying the overtime premium,” says University of California law professor Williams.
Others say it’s an attempt by the
GOP to win back the women’s votes
lost in the last presidential election.
Continued on p. 638
At Issue:
Should employers be able to offer comp time to workers in lieu
of overtime pay?
yes
MICHAEL P. AITKEN
ELLEN BRAVO
VICE PRESIDENT, GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS,
SOCIETY FOR HUMAN RESOURCE
MANAGEMENT
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, FAMILY VALUES @
WORK CONSORTIUM
WRITTEN FOR CQ RESEARCHER, JULY 2013
yes no
WRITTEN FOR CQ RESEARCHER, JULY 2013
i
n today’s hectic society, a growing number of employees
are experiencing a “time famine” — feeling that they lack
enough hours in the day as they juggle work as well as
personal and family demands.
Recently, the House of Representatives passed the Working
Families Flexibility Act, a bill strongly endorsed by the Society
for Human Resource Management (SHRM) because it gives employees more choices in managing their time. It is a step forward for both employers and employees who seek more flexibility — the same option — compensatory (comp) time off —
that has been successful in the public sector for over 25 years.
The measure would allow private-sector employers to give
employees who are paid by the hour the choice to bank paid
time off or receive cash wages for any overtime hours. Privatesector employers are prohibited from offering this option
under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
Under the voluntary comp-time arrangement, employees
would accrue 1 1/2 hours of paid time off for each hour of
overtime worked. Employees could opt out of the program at
any time and receive overtime-rate cash payments for unused
hours.
Not surprisingly, much misinformation surfaced during debate
on the Working Families Flexibility Act. For example, some argued the bill would cut employees’ pay without a guarantee of
paid time off. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Employees who opted for comp time would request the
time off the same way they request leave now, and the employer would have to grant the request in a reasonable time,
unless business operations were unduly disrupted. This “unduly disrupts” standard has been used in the public sector for
years. In practice, it is designed to ensure that a tax firm, for
example, does not have all support staff out of the office
around Tax Day.
And no employee’s wages would be reduced under the
bill. Consider the simple math assuming an employee’s regular
wages are $10/hour. If the employee works one hour of overtime, he or she would receive a straight wage payout at 1.5 x
the hourly wage, or $15. If employees elected for the comptime option, they would receive paid leave of 1.5 hours (at
$10/hour, worth $15).
The Working Families Flexibility Act would empower employees by giving them the choice to opt for cash or paid
time off for overtime. In the 21st century, shouldn’t we give
employees more choice in how they use their time?
no
www.cqresearcher.com
t
he promise of time off to people starved for family time
sounds like a great deal. But beneath the benign-sounding
title — “Working Families Flexibility Act” — lies an ugly
reality: a law that may allow workers to spend more time
with family only after being forced to spend more time away
from family. Employers, not workers, would get to decide
when people can take the extra time. And the law could cost
workers much-needed wages they’d otherwise be owed for
working overtime.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., says he proposed
the bill, which would allow employers to offer comp time in
lieu of overtime pay, to help “make life work,” citing parents’
need to care for a sick child or attend a school play.
But under his plan, employers decide whether being with
that child on the actual day of the illness or play would “unduly disrupt” their businesses.
Though most working parents want more time off, many are
living paycheck to paycheck — working every hour, including
overtime hours, just to keep food on the table for their kids. A
consequence of the Cantor plan would be that those needing
“extra” pay would be less likely to get overtime assignments because their employers could choose to give overtime work to
those who prefer the time off instead of the cash.
The bill may say employees can choose which option to take,
but most workers have no say in their hours or working conditions. Current violations of wage and hour laws are rampant.
There’s nothing stopping an employer right now from letting workers rearrange their schedules to fit in the play or a
doctor appointment. It’s standard practice at many firms.
Workers already have a working-families flexibility bill —
the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. To curtail long hours, the
law imposed a 40-hour-a-week limit on how much employers
can require employees to work and required employers to
pay time and a half for extra hours.
The comp-time bill would remove this deterrent against requiring employees to work excessive hours.
If lawmakers really want to make life work, they should sign
on to legislation guaranteeing that workers can earn paid sick
days so they aren’t fired for being a good parent or following
doctor’s orders. Or Congress could raise the minimum wage so
people don’t have to work extra hours to cover the basics.
Workers desperately want more time with their families and
more control over that time. The comp-time bill would make
it harder for them to have either.
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Continued from p. 636
“It’s a ridiculous attempt to appeal to
working women,” says Ellen Bravo, executive director of the Family Values
@ Work Consortium, a group of state
coalitions working for paid sick days
and family leave legislation. Political
observers say the measure has little
chance in the Democratic-controlled
Senate. “There’s no doubt it would be
an uphill climb,” concedes Lisa Horn,
senior government relations adviser to
the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), an association of
human resource professionals that has
advocated vigorously for the bill. The
measure would provide another “option for employers as they look at the
array of workplace flexibility programs out there,” says Horn, co-leader
of the association’s Workplace Flexibility Initiative.
Unions oppose the bill on the
grounds that employers would likely pressure workers to take comp
time instead of overtime pay when
it served their financial interest. “Republicans contend it would be the
worker’s choice, but in reality bosses foreclose options when they make
it extremely clear they want comp
time selected,” said United Steelworkers President Leo W. Gerard, who
calls the measure the “forced flexibility act.” 64
Opponents especially dislike a provision that would allow employers
to veto an employee’s request for
comp time if it would cause “undue
disruption.” Employers could use this
provision to deny workers’ requests
for comp time when they most need
it — to attend a child’s soccer game
or take a child to a doctor’s appointment — Bravo says.
But Horn says the standard has
“been used in the public sector for
30 years without problems.” The employer veto power makes sense, she
says, because, “You can’t have all the
production line workers leaving the
same week.”
638
CQ Researcher
Punishing Caregivers
S
uppose a young mother leaves
work early one day to care for a
sick child and gets fired the next day.
Or finds herself passed over for promotion in favor of a less qualified father or a woman without children.
Such incidents, dubbed “family responsibilities discrimination” by the UC
Hastings Center for WorkLife Law, have
recently become the subject of a growing number of lawsuits and laws being
considered at the state and local level.
Pregnant women, mothers of young
children and employees caring for elderly parents say they have been rejected for jobs, passed over for promotion, demoted, harassed or fired.
Most of the plaintiffs are women, but
men increasingly are facing such discrimination based on familial status,
the center says.
The human resources trade press
calls the mounting number of such
lawsuits a new “legal minefield.” 65
The number of such suits jumped
nearly 400 percent from 2000 to 2010,
according to the center, with employees prevailing in about half of cases.
Verdicts and settlements have averaged
more than $500,000. 66
While such employment discrimination would technically be illegal
under a variety of federal and state
laws, so far only the District of Columbia and three states — Alaska,
Connecticut and New Jersey — have
prohibited discrimination on the basis
of someone’s family status. 67
A similar bill pending in California
would expand the state’s Fair Employment and Housing Act to outlaw
discrimination based on “familial status” — in other words against anyone
who provides medical or supervisory
care to a family member. The California SHRM chapter opposes the
measure, arguing that “familial status”
is so broadly defined it would include
“every employee in California.” 68
On May 14, Vermont enacted a law
giving employees the right to request
flexible working arrangements and protecting them from retaliation for making the request. 69
OUTLOOK
‘Big Brother?’
T
hree out of 10 college students
believe that once they begin working it will be their right — not a privilege — to work remotely with a flexible schedule, according to a 2011
survey of 2,800 college students and
young professionals in 14 countries. 70
Close to half of workers under 30
would be willing to take a pay cut to
get the kind of flexibility they want,
the survey also found. 71
“To be a next generation company, we have to be one that provides
flexibility,” because young people
“demand it,” says work-life fit leader
Silverglate of Deloitte, whose enticements include one- to six-month sabbaticals so employees can pursue personal goals. Satisfying such demands
is important, because within the next
few years more than half of the global consulting firm’s workforce will be
from the Gen Y generation (born in
the 1980s and early ’90s), Silverglate
estimates.
Gen Y workers are also more focused on having time for their families than their baby boomer parents,
and young males in particular want to
play a bigger role as dads, researchers
are finding. Today, young men tend
to see fatherhood as spending time
with their children — not just bringing home a paycheck.
“We’re seeing a lot of men taking
a much more balanced approach to
how they define themselves as fathers,”
says Brad Harrington, executive director of the Boston College Center for
Work and Family. “The idea of ‘father
equates to breadwinner’ seems to have
gone down in men’s perception as
their primary role in family.”
“As that stereotype starts to diminish,
men’s time in the home would be much
like women’s — and be seen as ‘I’m
interrupting time with my family if I’m
doing work,’ ” Harrington speculates.
Some experts hope that as more
men demand flexible hours and
home-based working, such practices
will carry less of a stigma. In today’s
aging population, with almost half of
the 35- to 50-year-olds expecting to
be caring for an elderly parent soon,
men as well as women will need more
flexibility. 72
In a countervailing trend, tech company offices and startups are trying to
make the office as attractive as possible — from serving food 24/7, as
Facebook does, to installing ping
pong tables like Google — to entice
their youthful workforces to spend long
hours brainstorming about the next
new idea.
“It’s an arms race to show who is
more relaxed in their work environment,” reports one 27-year-old programmer who has been the target of
tech company recruitment efforts.
“Tech companies want to draw people to the office as much as possible,
and they’re using ping-pong tables to
do that,” says Michael Gillman, a web
developer in New York City for Giggle.
com, which sells baby products. “I
think if you have to telecommute,
they’re happy to say, ‘Go do that,’ but
when it’s meeting time, they’d still
rather have you in the office,” he says.
With the growth of remote working on smartphones and tablets, it may
not be long before telecommuting just
becomes part of everyone’s workday,
if that hasn’t already happened. Already most U.S. companies have a
BYOD (bring your own device) workplace, where employees can conduct
their work on their own smartphones,
laptops and tablets, raising the ques-
www.cqresearcher.com
tion of why some workers need an
office at all. Two-thirds of fulltime workers now own smartphones, up from
48 percent just two years ago, and
one-third own tablets. 73 In a recent
survey, nearly half reported they used
their phones at least weekly for work,
while a fifth used their tablets at least
once a week for work. 74
That trend is the precursor of a “100
percent mobile web business world”
where devices like tablets and smartphones will become “central portals to
information and applications that help
people to be productive anywhere,” forecasts Tom Schroeder, a senior product
specialist with the anti-virus company
Symantec. Most documents and computer applications will be stored in the
cloud (on central servers), so businesses will no longer own their own servers,
he predicts. 75 Google has increased cloud
capacity for applications such as Google
Docs, which allows colleagues to share
and edit documents on the web. 76
On the negative side, mobile working, once envisioned as freedom from
the tyranny of the office, may exert its
own form of oppression. A recent survey of 1,600 private sector managers
and professionals, most working at least
50-hour weeks, found the vast majority spent another 20-25 hours a week
monitoring their work via smartphones
on weekends and during vacations. More
than 25 percent confessed to sleeping
with their smartphones. 77
And it’s not just white-collar salaried
workers who feel tyrannized. Chicago
police officer Sgt. Jeffrey Allen has filed
a class action suit against the city of
Chicago for failing to pay overtime for
the extra hours he was required to work
on his Blackberry while off-duty. 78
Future technology for monitoring remote workers more closely could also
undermine one of the reasons people
like to work at a distance — independence. Already some of the same technologies that make remote working easier — such as iPhone’s FaceTime, which
makes video calls possible with a tap
on the phone, or computer programs
that let the boss see your work-in-progress
— allow bosses to intrude more easily
on teleworkers.
That could be a problem because research indicates that when telework improves one’s productivity, “a lot of it has
to do with the ability to control your
time away from the office,” says researcher
Gavendran. “Once you strip that away
with electronic monitoring, some of
these benefits may go away,” he says.
If managers’ prying eyes become
an overbearing Big Brother presence,
Gavendran warns, “Technology may
kill the telecommuting star.”
Notes
1 Alex Williams, “Working Alone Together,”
The New York Times, May 3, 2013, www.ny
times.com/2013/05/05/fashion/solo-workersbond-at-shared-workspaces.html?_r=0.
2 This figure does not include self-employed
workers. Telework Research Network, www.tele
workresearchnetwork.com/telecommuting-sta
tistics.
3 Peter J. Mateyka, et al., “Home-Based Workers
in the United States: 2010,” U.S. Department
of Census, October 2012, p. 3, www.census.
gov/prod/2012pubs/p70-132.pdf. Also see
www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/
employment_occupations/cb12-188.html.
4 “Work-Life Balance and the Economics of
Workplace Flexibility,” Council of Economic
Advisers, Executive Office of the President,
March 2010, p. 17, www.whitehouse.gov/blog/
2010/03/31/economics-workplace-flexibility.
5 Kara Swisher, “Physically Together: Here’s
the Internal Yahoo No-Work-from-Home
Memo for Remote Workers and Maybe More,”
All Things D, Feb. 22, 2013, http://allthings
d.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-theinternal-yahoo-no-work-from-home-memo-whichextends-beyond-remote-workers/.
6 “Best Buy Ends Work from Home Program,”
“CNN Money,” March 5, 2013, http://money.
cnn.com/2013/03/05/technology/best-buy-workfrom-home/index.html.
7 “Marissa Mayer Breaks her Silence on Yahoo’s
Telecommuting Policy,” “CNN Money,” April 19,
2013, http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/04/19/
marissa-mayer-telecommuting/. Note: The Yahoo
weather app uses geolocation technology to
July 19, 2013
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TELECOMMUTING
help users get a more accurate image of local
weather.
8 Ben Waber, People Analytics (2013).
9 George Packer, “Change the World,” The
New Yorker, May 27, 2013, pp. 44-55, www.
newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/27/130527
fa_fact_packer See p. 46.
10 Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd. had 193,359
employees as of May 2012.
11 Nicholas Bloom, et al., “Does Working from
Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment,” Feb. 22, 2013, www.stanford.edu/
~nbloom/WFH.pdf.
12 James Surowiecki, “Video: How Does Telecommuting Work?” The New Yorker, March 28, 2013,
www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/
2013/03/video-how-does-telecommuting-work.
html.
13 Ben Waber, et al., “Productivity through Coffee Breaks,” Social Science Research Network,
Jan. 11, 2010, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.
cfm?abstract_id=1586375.
14 Lilian M. de Menezes and Clare Kelliher,
“Flexible Working and Performance,” International Journal of Management Review, vol. 13,
2011, pp. 452-474, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/
papers.cfm?abstract_id=1955099.
15 Ravi S. Gajendran and David A. Harrison,
“The Good, the Bad and the Unknown about
Telecommuting: Meta-Analysis of Psychological Mediators and Individual Consequences,”
Journal of Applied Psychology, vol. 92, no. 6,
2007, pp. 1524-1541, http://psycnet.apa.org/
?&fa=main.doiLanding&doi=10.1037/0021-9010.
92.6.1524.
16 James Surowiecki, “Face Time,” The New
Yorker, March 18, 2013, www.newyorker.com/
talk/financial/2013/03/18/130318ta_talk_surowi
ecki.
17 “Report: VPN Logs Led to Yahoo Telecommute Ban,” USA Today, March 6, 2013, www.usat
oday.com/story/tech/2013/03/06/report-vpnyahoo-mayer/1967957/.
18 Mary C. Noonan and Jennifer L. Glass,
“The Hard Truth about Telecommuting,”
Monthly Labor Review, June 2012, pp. 38-45,
www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2012/06/art3full.pdf.
19 “Telework 2011,” WorldatWork, p. 6, www.
worldatwork.org/waw/adimLink?id=53034.
20 Joan Williams, et al., “The Flexibility Stigma:
Work Devotion vs. Family Devotion,” Rotman
Magazine, Winter 2013, pp. 35-39, http://work
lifelaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/The
FlexibilityStigma.pdf.
21 Ibid., p. 36.
22 Bloom, et al., op. cit., p. 17.
23 Gajendran, op. cit.
24 “When Work Interferes with Life,” press
release, University of Toronto, Jan. 12, 2010,
on article in December 2009 issue of American
Sociological Review, www.eurekalert.org/pub_
releases/2010-01/uot-wwi011210.php.
25 Noonan and Glass, op. cit., p. 45.
26 “Telework 2011,” op. cit., p. 6.
27 Evgeny Morozov, “Tearing Down the ‘Electronic Cottage,’ ” Slate, Dec. 31, 2012, www.
slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/
12/telecommuting_may_be_terrible_for_your_
work_life_balance.html.
28 See “Why Will Telecommuting Change the
Structure of Cities?” Experts 123, www.experts
123.com/q/why-will-teleworking-change-thestructure-of-cities.html. Also See, Jennifer Mears,
“Father of Telecommuting,” NetworkWorld,
May 15, 2007, www.networkworld.com/news/
2007/051507-telecommuting-nilles-security.html.
29 For background, see Kathy Koch, “Flexible
Work Arrangements,” CQ Researcher, Aug. 14,
1998. See “At Issue,” p. 713.
30 “Fact Sheet,” Texas A&M Transportation Institute, 2013, http://d2dtl5nnlpfr0r.cloudfront.
net/tti.tamu.edu/documents/tti-umr.pdf.
31 Census statistics find that 9.5 percent of
the working population telecommuted at least
one day a week in 2010. At least a quarter
of those telecommuters are self-employed workers who would not be commuting to work
anyway. See Mateyka, op. cit., p. 2.
About the Author
Sarah Glazer contributes to CQ Researcher and was a regular contributor to CQ Global Researcher. Her articles on
health, education and social-policy issues also have appeared
in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Her recent CQ Global Researcher reports include “Future of the
Euro” and “Sharia Controversy.” She graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.A. in American history.
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CQ Researcher
32
Deborah Salon, et al., “How Do Local Actions Affect VMT? A Critical Review of the
Empirical Evidence,” Transportation Research
Part D, 17:7 2012.
33 Patricia L. Mokhtarian, “If Telecommunication Is Such a Good Substitute for Travel,
Why does Congestion Continue to Get Worse?”
Transportation Letters: The International Journal of Transportation Research, 2009, vol. 1,
pp. 1-17, http://trid.trb.org/view.aspx?id=883718.
34 Ibid.
35 Pengyu Zhu, “Telecommuting, Household
Commute and Location Choice,” Urban Studies, March 7, 2013, http://usj.sagepub.com/
content/early/2013/03/07/0042098012474520.
36 Mokhtarian, op. cit., p. 9.
37 Ibid., p. 1.
38 Ibid., p. 1.
39 Quoted in Morozov, op. cit.
40 See for example, “The Impacts of the Industrial Revolution on Families in New England and America,” Myriad, Dec. 7, 2011, www.
articlemyriad.com/impacts-industrial-revolutionfamilies-new-england/.
41 Morozov, op. cit.
42 Ibid.
43 Koch, op. cit., p. 706.
44 Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind:
When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (1997), p. 6.
45 “Women in the Labor Force: A Data Book,”
BLS Reports, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics,
February 2013, www.bls.gov/cps/wlf-data
book-2012.pdf. Note: the bureau describes
the labor force as those who are employed
and looking for work.
46 Hochschild, op. cit., p. 6.
47 “Women in the Labor Force: A Data Book,”
op. cit.
48 Ibid.
49 Kathleen Christensen and Barbara Schneider,
eds., Workplace Flexibility: Realigning 20th Century Jobs for a 21st Century Workforce (2010),
p. 2, www.amazon.com/Workplace-FlexibilityRealigning-20th-century-21st-century/dp/080
1475856.
50 Ibid.
51 Phyllis Moen, et al., “Does Enhancing
Work-Time Control and Flexibility Reduce
Turnover?” Social Problems, Vol. 58, Issue I,
pp. 69-98; see p. 90, www.flexiblework.umn.
edu/publications_docs/SocialProblems-Turnover2011.pdf.
52 Hochschild, op. cit., p. xxi.
53 Ibid., pp. 51-52.
54 Ibid., p. 26.
55
Ibid., p. 246.
Koch, op. cit., p. 708.
57 Kenneth Matos and Ellen Galinsky, “2012
National Study of Employers,” Families and
Work Institute, 2012, http://familiesandwork.
org/site/research/reports/NSE_2012_.pdf.
58 “Telework 2011,” op. cit.
59 Andrew Dunn, “Bank of America is Cutting
Back on At-home Workers,” The Charlotte News
and Observer, Dec. 5, 2012, www.charlotte
observer.com/2012/12/05/v-print/3706260/bankof-america-at-home-work.html.
60 “Bank of America Formalizes Work-fromHome Rules,” The Charlotte News and Observer, Dec. 12, 2012, http://obsbankwatch.blog
spot.co.uk/2012/12/bank-of-america-formalizesnew-work.html.
61 Dunn, op. cit.
62 For bill status see Govtrack.us, “HR 1408
Working Families Flexibility Act of 2013,” www.
govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr1406. Also see
“CompTime Update,” United Steelworkers,
May 15, 2013, www.usw.org/action_center/rr/
news_articles?id=0006.
63 Jonathan Weisman, “Majority Leader’s
Quest to Soften GOP’s Image Hits a Wall
Within,” The New York Times, April 24, 2013,
www.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/us/politics/
majority-leaders-quest-to-soften-gops-imagehits-wall.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
64 Leo W. Gerard, “GOP Forcibly Making Working Families Flexible,” USW Blog, May 7, 2013,
http://blog.usw.org/2013/05/07/gop-forciblymaking-working-families-flexible/.
65 Tim Gould, “Family Responsibility Discrimination: New Legal Minefield for HR,”
HRMorning.com, Sept. 7, 2012, www.hrmorn
ing.com/new-legal-threat-family-responsibilitydiscrimination/.
66 “Cost of Caregiver Discrimination Increasing for Employers,” press release, Center for
WorkLife Law, UC Hastings College of the
Law, Feb. 22, 2010. “Fact Sheet: Family Responsibilities Discrimination,” Center for WorkLife Law, UC Hastings College of the Law,
(undated), www.worklifelaw.org/pubs/WLLPress
Release_2_22_10_Report_FRDupdate.pdf.
67 “Public Policy: Family Responsibilities Legislation (FRD) is Illegal,” Center for WorkLife
Law, UC Hastings College of the Law, 2012,
http://worklifelaw.org/frd/frd-resources/publicpolicy/; also see Dylan Scott, “Family Responsibilities Discrimination Legislation Being
Raised by States,” Governing, May 11, 2012,
www.governing.com/blogs/view/gov-familyresponsibilities-discrimination-laws-being-raisedby-states.html.
56
www.cqresearcher.com
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Center for Work & Family, Boston College, 22 Stone Hill, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467;
617-552-2844; www.bc.edu/cwf. Research center that studies and promotes the integration of work and family life.
Center for WorkLife Law, Hastings College of the Law, University of California,
200 McAllister St., San Francisco, CA 94102; 415-565-4640; http://worklifelaw.org.
Research center that seeks to jump-start the gender revolution, focusing on worklife conflict, including “family responsibilities discrimination.”
Families and Work Institute, 267 Fifth Ave., 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10016;
212-465-2044; www.familiesandwork.org. Research organization that studies changing
families and workplaces.
Mobile Work Exchange, 921 King St., Alexandria, VA 22314; 703-489-1185;
www.mobileworkexchange.com. Public-private partnership that promotes telecommuting and work on mobile devices in the federal government.
Telework Research Network, 6743 Montia Ct., Carlsbad, CA 92011; 760-703-0377;
www.globalworkplaceanalytics.com/about-updated. Consulting and research organization that makes the business case for telework.
Society for Human Resource Management, 1800 Duke St., Alexandria, VA 22314;
800-283-7476; www.shrm.org. Largest association of human resources professionals
— 250,000 members in more than 140 countries — which researches and promotes
workplace flexibility options such as telecommuting.
WorldatWork, 14040 N. Northsight Blvd., Scottsdale, AZ 85260; 877-951-9191;
www.worldatwork.org; Association of human resources professionals; conducts
research and education around workplace benefits such as telecommuting.
68
“2013 Fact Sheet: Familial Status Protection
for the FEHA,” California State Council of SHRM,
www.shrm.org/Advocacy/Issues/Documents/
FINAL%202013%20Fact%20Sheets%20for%20the
%20CA%20Issues%20040913.pdf.
69 Tara Siegel Bernard, “The Unspoken Stigma
of Workplace Flexibility,” The New York Times,
June 14, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/
your-money/the-unspoken-stigma-of-workplaceflexibility.html.
70 “The New Workplace Currency — It’s Not Just
Salary Anymore,” press release, Cisco, Nov. 2,
2011, http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-releasecontent?type=webcontent&articleId=532138.
71 Ibid. Forty percent of college students and
45 percent of young employees under 30 said
they would accept a lower-paying job that had
more flexibility with regard to device choice,
social media access and mobility than a higher-paying job with less flexibility.
72 See “Adult Children Caring for Elderly Parents Need Financial Guidance,” Law Firm
Newswire, March, 2013, www.lawfirmnews
wire.com/2013/03/adult-children-caring-for-
elderly-parents-need-financial-guidance/.
73 “All Work and No Play? Mobile Wipes out
8-hour Day,” USA Today, March 7, 2013, www.
usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/06/
mobile-workforce-all-work/1958673/.
74 “Meet the New Mobile Workers,” The Wall
Street Journal, March 11, 2013, http://online.
wsj.com/article/SB100014241278873240348045
78350852590865198.html.
75 “What will the future working week look
like?” Symantec blog, Jan. 18, 2013, comment
by Tom Schroeder, www.symantec.com/con
nect/blogs/what-will-future-working-week-look.
76 Ofir Nachmani, “Amazon, Microsoft and
Google: The Cloud Leading Trio,” Sys-Con Media,
July 12, 2013, www.sys-con.com/node/2733500.
77 Leslie A. Perlow, Sleeping with Your Smartphone (2012), p. 6.
78 Susanna Kim, “Lawsuit against Chicago
Police for Blackberry Overtime,” ABC News,
Feb. 7, 2013, http://abcnews.go.com/Business/
chicago-police-officer-sues-hoping-overtimepay-blackberry/story?id=18432865#.Ud6711N
gN1Q.
July 19, 2013
641
Bibliography
Selected Sources
Books
Perlow, Leslie A., Sleeping with Your Smartphone: How
to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work,
Harvard Business Review Press, 2012.
A Harvard Business School professor documents the trend
toward longer working hours among white-collar employees.
Ressler, Cali, and Jody Thompson, Why Work Sucks and
How to Fix It: The Results-Only Revolution, Portfolio/
Penguin, 2010.
Two former Best Buy employees describe the liberal policy they created letting workers set their own telecommuting schedules as long as they met work “results.” Best Buy
announced in March it was abandoning the approach.
Waber, Ben, People Analytics: How Social Sensing Technology Will Transform Business and What It Tells Us
about the Future of Work, FT Press, 2013.
A former MIT researcher and founder of the Boston consulting firm Sociometric Solutions describes how sensor badges
worn by workers have detected productivity boosts as a result of in-person interactions at the office. His findings have
been cited to support the collaboration and performance
benefits of working in the office.
Articles
Losey, Stephen, “Why You Don’t Have Flex Schedules:
OPM’s Failed 1-Year Experiment,” Federal Times, Dec. 16,
2012, www.federaltimes.com/article/20121216/PERSON
NEL03/312160007/Why-you-don-8217-t-flex-schedulesOPM-8217-s-failed-1-year-experiment?odyssey=tab|top
news|text|FRONTPAGE.
The author describes how the federal government scuttled
an innovative experiment to let employees work wherever
and whenever they wanted as long as they produced results, the same program recently canceled by Best Buy.
Mateyka, Peter J., et al., “Home-Based Workers in the
United States: 2010,” U.S. Census Bureau, October 2012,
www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p70-132.pdf.
An analysis of census data finds the share of workers who
work at home at least one day a week rose from 7.8 percent in 2005 to 9.5 percent in 2010.
Morozov, Evgeny, “Tearing Down the ‘Electronic Cottage,’ ”
Slate, Dec. 31, 2012, www.slate.com/articles/technology/
future_tense/2012/12/telecommuting_may_be_terrible_
for_your_work_life_balance.html.
The author questions whether telework has fulfilled the hope
that telecommuting would help bind families together.
Noonan, Mary C., and Jennifer L. Glass, “The Hard Truth
about Telecommuting,” Monthly Labor Review, June 2012,
642
CQ Researcher
pp. 38-45. See p. 40, www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2012/06/
art3full.pdf.
Sociologists from the University of Iowa (Noonan) and the
University of Texas (Glass) conclude that most teleworking
occurs on nights and weekends, suggesting that it is lengthening the workweek.
Williams, Joan, et al., “The Flexibility Stigma: Work Devotion vs. Family Devotion,” Rotman Magazine, Winter
2013, pp. 35-39, http://worklifelaw.org/wp-content/uploads/
2012/12/TheFlexibilityStigma.pdf.
A University of California-Hastings law professor and coauthors conclude that workers don’t take advantage of all the
flexible workplace options because they fear it will hurt their
chances of advancement.
Reports and Studies
“Telework 2011: A WorldatWork Special Report,” Worldat
Work, June 2011, www.worldatwork.org/waw/adimLink?
id=48160.
A 2010 survey by an association of human resource professionals found a dip in the number of employees teleworking but that more were working while on vacation.
“Work-Life Balance and the Economics of Workplace
Flexibility,” Executive Office of the President, Council of
Economic Advisers, March 2010, p. 17, www.whitehouse.
gov/blog/2010/03/31/economics-workplace-flexibility.
This report takes a favorable view of the economics of
workplace flexibility, including telecommuting.
Lister, Kate, and Tom Harnish, “The State of Telework
in the U.S.: How Individuals, Business, and Government
Benefit,” Telework Research Network, June 2011, www.
workshifting.com/downloads/downloads/Telework-TrendsUS.pdf.
A research group summarizes recent trends and argues in
favor of telework.
Matos, Kenneth, and Ellen Galinsky, “2012 National Study
of Employers,” Families and Work Institute and Society
for Human Resource Management, 2012, http://families
andwork.org/site/research/reports/NSE_2012_.pdf.
Sixty-three percent of employers offer telecommuting on an occasional basis to some employees, up from 34 percent in 2005.
Matos, Kenneth, and Ellen Galinsky, “Workplace Flexibility
in the United States: A Status Report,” Families and Work
Institute and Society for Human Resource Management, 2011,
http://familiesandwork.org/site/research/reports/www_us_
workflex.pdf.
Flexible workplace options reduce turnover, among other
benefits, but many employees don’t use them for fear it
would jeopardize their careers.
The Next Step:
Additional Articles from Current Periodicals
Business Impact
Dyer, Kelly, “A New Law, New Money and a Pilot Program
Made Telecommuting More Common,” Tampa Bay (Fla.)
Times, Nov. 2, 2012, www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/
promises/obameter/promise/437/educate-business-aboutthe-benefits-of-flexible-wo/.
New laws have allowed businesses to expand telework.
Malcolm, Hadley, “Jobs Get Flexible in Work-Hard, PlayHard World,” USA Today, April 30, 2013, p. B5, www.usa
today.com/story/money/business/2013/04/27/employersadopt-flexible-policies/2010903/.
Some businesses have begun to provide more vacation-like
perks, such as free snowboarding lessons and season passes,
to keep employees excited about working in the office.
Sunnucks, Mike, “Nasty U.S. Flu Season Poised [to] Exact
Big Costs, Headaches for Employers,” The Business Journal (Ariz.), Jan. 10, 2013, www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/
news/2013/01/10/nasty-us-flu-season-poised-exact-big.html.
Business costs associated with the flu season have encouraged employers to use telecommuting.
Employee Impact
Rein, Lisa, “In New Space, Agency Rejects Desk-Jockey
Culture,” The Washington Post, July 16, 2013, p. A1.
A new General Services Administration policy encourages
employees to work at home; if they want to work at the
agency’s renovated headquarters, they must reserve a desk,
a practice called “hoteling.”
Rosenthal, Phil, “Telecommuters Pay Price for Flexibility,”
Chicago Tribune, March 6, 2013, p. C1, www.articles.chi
cagotribune.com/2013-03-06/business/ct-biz-0306-phil20130306_1_work-mary-noonan-office.
Research shows that telecommuters work more hours compared to those who work in the office.
Trinko, Katrina, “Telecommuting Makes Work FamilyFriendly,” The Washington Times, March 6, 2013, p. B4,
www.p.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/mar/3/trinkohow-telecommuting-could-rejuvenate-family-l/.
Telecommuting is good for families but prevents colleagues
from developing relationships, author says.
Federal Employees
Davidson, Joe, “Teleworking: A Good Strategy That’s Not
Used Nearly Enough,” The Washington Post, July 10, 2012,
p. B4, www.articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-07-09/poli
tics/35487939_1_telework-federal-workforce-federal-em
ployees.
www.cqresearcher.com
Many managers refrain from using telecommuting because
they lack training in how to supervise teleworkers.
Fritze, John, “Big Storms Like Sandy Boost Federal Telework,” The Baltimore Sun, Nov. 18, 2012, p. A10, www.
articles.baltimoresun.com/2012-11-17/news/bs-md-sandytelework-20121116_1_hurricane-sandy-telework-exchangefederal-employees.
Telecommuting increases the productivity of federal employees during major storms.
Johnson, Nicole Blake, “How Feds with Smartphones
Cope with 24/7 Link,” Federal Times, Aug. 13, 2012, p. 1,
www.federaltimes.com/print/article/20120812/AGENCY01/
308120005/How-feds-smartphones-cope-24-7-link.
Federal workers who telework using their smartphones
have blurred the line between home and work.
Traffic Congestion
Schmitz, Jon, “Every Year, We Sit in Traffic and Watch
as $826 Goes Out the Tailpipe,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
Feb. 5, 2013, p. B1, www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/
transportation/every-year-pittsburghers-sit-in-traffic-andwatch-as-826-goes-out-the-tailpipe-673455/.
The average commuter nationwide loses $818 annually in
wasted time and fuel due to traffic.
Whitson, Bob, “Telecommuting is More Than an Answer
to Traffic Congestion,” Daily Camera (Colo.), June 5, 2013,
www.dailycamera.com/guest-opinions/ci_23387514/tele
commuting-is-more-than-an-answer-traffic-congestion.
Telecommuting could cut pollution costs and shorten commutes as traffic volume decreases, a columnist says.
CITING CQ RESEARCHER
Sample formats for citing these reports in a bibliography
include the ones listed below. Preferred styles and formats
vary, so please check with your instructor or professor.
MLA STYLE
Jost, Kenneth. “Remembering 9/11.” CQ Researcher 2 Sept.
2011: 701-732.
APA STYLE
Jost, K. (2011, September 2). Remembering 9/11. CQ Researcher, 9, 701-732.
CHICAGO STYLE
Jost, Kenneth. “Remembering 9/11.” CQ Researcher, September
2, 2011, 701-732.
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