occasional telecommuting

TelecommutingIs working from home productive?

Recent 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

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 busi-

ness that some corporate leaders say they no longer see telework

as a distinct form of work.

Yahoo employee Cheryl Stober telecommuted fromhome in Newton, Mass., on Tuesdays, when she

didn’t have child care for her daughter, Hannah. Thecompany recently renewed debate over telework

when it said all employees would have to work in the office or leave the company.

CQ Researcher • July 19, 2013 • www.cqresearcher.comVolume 23, Number 26 • Pages 621-644

RECIPIENT OF SOCIETY OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS AWARD FOR

EXCELLENCE ! AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION SILVER GAVEL AWARD

INSIDE

THE ISSUES ....................623

CHRONOLOGY ................631

BACKGROUND ................633

CURRENT SITUATION ........636

AT ISSUE........................637

OUTLOOK ......................638

BIBLIOGRAPHY ................642

THE NEXT STEP ..............643

THISREPORT

Published by CQ Press, an Imprint of SAGE Publications, Inc. www.cqresearcher.com

622 CQ Researcher

THE ISSUES

623 • Is telecommuting goodfor business?• Is telecommuting goodfor employees?• Does telecommuting reduce traffic congestion?

BACKGROUND

633 New TechnologiesInvention of the homecomputer spurred interestin telework.

633 Changing WorkforceMore families have twoworking parents.

634 Federal FlextimeThe government advocatedtelecommuting to reducetraffic and auto emissions.

636 Private TrendsCompanies increasingly letworkers telecommute.

CURRENT SITUATION

636 Comp Time FightCongress is debatingwhether to let employersgive paid time off in lieuof overtime pay.

638 Punishing CaregiversSuits against employersfiled by workers withcaregiving obligations rosenearly 400 percent in adecade.

OUTLOOK

638 ‘Big Brother?’Electronic monitoring ofworkers’ activities couldundermine the appeal oftelecommuting.

SIDEBARS AND GRAPHICS

624 More Employers AllowTelecommutingThe percentage permittingtelework nearly doubled.

625 Employees Slow to Embrace TelecommutingFewer than 10 percentworked from home one daya week in 2010.

626 Boosting Retention by Allowing FlexibilityEmployees at Dallas firmwork “whenever, wherever.”

628 Management, Sales Dominate TelecommutingWhere physical presence isnot needed, more employeeswork at home.

631 ChronologyKey events since 1868.

632 Patent Office Workers Embrace TeleworkAgency says telecommutingplays “a crucial role in em-ployee retention and morale.”

635 Best Buy’s Worker UtopiaCrashes and Burns‘It’s OK to catch a movie ona Tuesday afternoon.’

637 At Issue:Should employers be able tooffer comp time in lieu ofovertime pay?

FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

641 For More InformationOrganizations to contact.

642 BibliographySelected sources used.

643 The Next StepAdditional articles.

643 Citing CQ ResearcherSample bibliography formats.

TELECOMMUTING

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July 19, 2013 623www.cqresearcher.com

Telecommuting

THE ISSUESWhen Julianne M.

Sloan advises aclient in Europe on

how to file his tax returnunder international law, hemay think she’s calling fromthe Chicago office of Deloitte,the global accounting firmwhere she is a senior taxmanager.

But chances are she’s call-ing from her home an hour’strain ride from downtownChicago. Sloan, who worksthree days a week and super-vises about 20 Deloitte em-ployees, goes into herChicago office only aboutonce a month.

As the single mother ofthree adopted children, Sloandecided three years ago thatshe needed to be home asmuch as possible during theirteenage years. By 4 p.m., whenher 16-year-old daughter getshome from school, Sloan hasalready put in a 9 1/2-hourday. She can turn her full at-tention to chatting with herdaughter and making dinner,and can check her emails again laterthat evening.

“I’m much more productive when Idon’t have to worry about the travelback and forth to work,” a commutethat left her “exhausted,” she says.

More than a decade ago, whenSloan first experimented with telecom-muting, her colleagues couldn’t imag-ine working at home without person-al distractions, she recalls, and somemay have suspected she would carryless of the office burden.

Today, even in our era of digitalmultitasking, some workers admit theycan’t concentrate at home. A healthfood entrepreneur who worked at home

says she got so distracted by the dustbunnies under her desk she wouldend up vacuuming in the middle ofthe day and still be in her pajamas at7 p.m. She switched to one of the in-creasingly popular “co-working” sitesin Manhattan, which feature open-planoffices with other entrepreneurs; shemade new contacts and doubled herrevenues. 1

The recent Yahoo announcementthat it would no longer allow employeesto telecommute has spurred reneweddebate about which of those contrast-ing profiles of teleworkers is morecommon: The distracted lonely shirk-er or the focused laborer who is more

productive and happier athome. Has telecommutinghelped workers solve work-family conflicts or inserted newinvasions into personal time?

Experts say telecommutingcan be a mixed bag — bothfor employers and employees.It can be a blessing for someand a burden for others. Andthe advent of ubiquitous mo-bile devices means that manyworkers are feeling tetheredto their work on a 24/7 basis.

In fact, employees havenot adopted telecommutingas fast or as broadly as somepredicted after the personalcomputer became standardin most homes. Only about2.5 percent of workers con-sider home their primaryworkplace, according to theTelework Research Network,a research group in Carlsbad,Calif. It’s far more common foremployees to work only a fewdays a week from home. 2

And the percentage of work-ers telecommuting at least oneday a week has risen slow-ly — from 7 percent in 1999to 9.5 percent in 2010. 3 It’sfar more common for em-

ployees to work only a few days aweek from home.

Advocates have long cited studiesshowing that telecommuting improvesworker retention and productivity.Flexible work practices such astelecommuting “can potentially payfor themselves” by reducing turnoverand the associated costs of retrainingnew workers, as well as improvingrecruitment, the White House Coun-cil of Economic Advisers concludedin 2010. 4

Still, Yahoo complained that allow-ing employees to telecommute wascausing the company to lose out ontwo less-studied benefits of face-to-face

BY SARAH GLAZER

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Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer defends the company’s new no-teleworking policy, arguing workers “are more

collaborative and innovative when they’re together.” Butshe concedes that many “people are more productive

when they’re alone.” Experts say telecommuting can bea mixed bag for both workers and employers.

624 CQ Researcher

workplace interaction: collaboration andinnovation. “Some of the best decisionsand insights come from hallway andcafeteria discussions, meeting new peo-ple and impromptu team meetings,”Yahoo’s Human Resources head, ChiefDevelopment Officer Jacqueline (Jackie)D. Reses, said in a leaked memo.“Speed and quality are often sacrificedwhen we work from home.” 5

Bank of America spokesperson Fer-ris Morrison also cited lost opportuni-ties for “collaboration” and “teamwork”to explain why the bank recently de-cided to re-evaluate its own telecom-muting program. And troubled elec-tronics retailer Best Buy, which wonkudos for eight years for its liberalpolicy of allowing headquarters em-ployees to work wherever they want-ed as long as they met production tar-gets, recently announced that it was

abandoning the results-based approach.Workers now must seek permission towork from home.

“All hands on deck” means “havingemployees in the office as much aspossible to collaborate,” a Best Buyspokesperson said. 6

Some critics blasted Yahoo and BestBuy for taking a simplistic view ofproductivity. “Being together with yourcoworkers in the best circumstancescan increase productivity, but why dothe best ideas happen while we’re tak-ing a shower or walking the dog —or come to us on Saturday mornings?”asks Ellen Galinsky, president and co-founder of the Families and Work In-stitute, a nonprofit in New York thatpromotes flexible work policies. Shespoke by phone while working fromher daughter’s house to help care forher new grandson.

After the stir caused by the Yahooannouncement, CEO Marissa Mayerconceded that while many “people aremore productive when they’re alone. . . they’re more collaborative and in-novative when they’re together.” Forexample, she cited Yahoo’s newweather software application, the brain-child of two software engineers work-ing in the same office. 7

Some studies support Mayer. Com-puter programmers working in the samelocation wrote new software codes fasterthan those working from home or fromdifferent locations, according to a studyof IBM programmers. 8 Programmingis a “very collaborative activity” becausecomputer codes are so interdependent,explains study author and former MITresearcher Ben Waber, founder of theBoston-based consulting firm Socio-metric Solutions.

“You need to talk to the people whosecode your code depends on,” Waber says.“It turns out if I don’t talk to you, it takesme 32 percent longer to complete mycode, which is very expensive.”

The growing popularity of co-workingsites in cities such as New York andSan Francisco (there are now 800 suchsites nationwide) suggests that at leastsome people crave the sociability ofa workplace. Ironically, if any com-panies should be able to make remotework successful it should be compa-nies like Google, pioneers of the In-ternet, mobile technology and cloud-computing. Instead, Google and Facebookare investing heavily in open physicalfloor plans and providing onsite per-sonal services designed to keep peopleinteracting and at the office. At Face-book’s Menlo Park, Calif., campus, em-ployees can get a haircut, see a dentistand have their clothes dry-cleaned with-out ever leaving work. 9

The happiest medium may involvesplitting the week between home andoffice. After it experimented with five-day-a-week telecommuting, Solix, aParsippany, N.J.-based state and fed-eral contractor, found that its workers

TELECOMMUTING

Source: Kenneth Matos and Ellen Galinsky, “2012 National Study of Employers,” Families and Work Institute and Society for Human Resource Management, 2012

More Employers Allow TelecommutingThe 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.

20052012

Percentage of Employers Allowing Some Workers to Telecommute Occasionally Percentage of Employers

Allowing Some Workers to Telecommute Regularly

34%

33%31%

63%


“hated it.” They missed the social in-teraction and personal contact withtheir supervisors, according to CEOJohn Parry. The company, which de-termines eligibility for government ben-efits, decided to allow employees towork at home whenever they wish,as long as they spend at least twodays a week in the office.

Ravi S. Gajendran, who analyzed42 studies of telecommuting involving12,000 workers, found that telecom-muting damaged workers’ relations withtheir colleagues in the office — butonly if they worked at home three daysor more per week. The biggest prob-lem was probably resentment by of-fice co-workers left to handle last-minutecrises, suggests Gajendran, assistant pro-fessor of business administration at theUniversity of Illinois Champaign-UrbanaCollege of Business.

As technology continues to enableemployees to work in an airport, atthe office or in a cafe, telecommutingmay become the standard. At the con-sulting firm Deloitte, 193,000 employ-ees work in over 150 countries, oftenrelying on email and videoconferenc-ing from a smartphone to work in“virtual teams” — sometimes for monthswithout ever meeting. 10 When match-ing the right consultant to a particu-lar client, says Paul Silverglate, work-life fit leader at Deloitte, “where theylive and work doesn’t factor that muchinto it.”

As telecommuting continues to bediscussed in the boardroom, the liv-ing room, Congress and the press,here are some of the questions beingdebated:

Is telecommuting good for busi-ness?

In 2004, a surprisingly high num-ber of employees were quitting theirjobs at Solix, the New Jersey con-tractor. Since adopting a flexibletelecommuting policy, turnover hasdropped from 13 percent to 6 per-cent, absenteeism has fallen and prof-

its have grown sixfold, according toCEO Parry.

Parry attributes much of that im-provement to telecommuting’s allevi-ating his employees’ stress over per-sonal matters. About 70 percent ofSolix’s 800 employees telecommute atleast one day a week.

“When something is on your mindat home — a home repair, a sick child— and you’re worried that the com-pany will dock your pay, that’s a levelof stress that affects your work. Wedon’t have that stress,” says Parry. Work-ers can decide spontaneously when towork at home without giving a reason,

Employees Slow to Embrace TelecommutingWorkers have not adopted telecommuting as fast as some experts expected. Fewer than 10 percent of all workers (including the self- employed) spent at least one day a week working at home in 2010, compared with 7 percent in 1997 (top). The largest increase in home- based 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.

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

Percentage Working at Home at Least Once a Week, 1997-2010

Percent Increase in Home-Based Work, by Type of Employer, 2000-2010

1997

2005

2010

7.0%

7.8%

9.5%

67.0%

Compa-nies

Non-profits

Local State Federal Incorpo-rated Unincorporated

50.3% 56.5%

132.5%

88.1%

35.5%

5.6%

Private Sector Government Self-Employed

626 CQ Researcher

on the condition that they spend twodays a week at the office. “We don’tcare how you structure your hours aslong as you’re providing that excellentcustomer service. If you are sick, don’tcome in. If it snows and you want towork from home, fine. You make thedecision.”

A recent scientifically designed studyby Stanford researchers found telecom-muting boosted productivity at CTrip,China’s largest travel agency, where callcenter employees were randomly as-signed to work at home or at the of-

fice. Home-based workers were 13 per-cent more productive than those whoremained in-office, largely measured bythe number of calls and orders com-pleted. Home workers cited the quieteratmosphere at home. But most of thatperformance boost came from telecom-muters working longer and taking fewerbreaks and sick days. 11 Some expertsquestion whether telecommuters in gen-eral actually end up working longer hours— in some cases for no additional pay— and if that’s what accounts for mostof their higher performance. 12

Call centers are often cited as theperfect candidate for telecommuting— a solitary occupation that could beperformed anywhere. But a study byMIT researchers of a Bank of Amer-ica call center questions that as-sumption. It found that call centeremployees’ productivity (measuredby calls completed per minute) surgedwhen workers were allowed to takegroup coffee breaks with their col-leagues. 13

It’s a stressful job when customersare yelling at you over the phone all

TELECOMMUTING

When manager Kristi Bryant announced in 2007 shewas resigning, it was a scene that had already playedout 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 at-mosphere at Ryan, which had developed a “sweat shop” rep-utation with its long hours, was incompatible with that, shesaid. 1 “I knew as a married person my future was going tobe different, and I wasn’t willing to give up life for work,”Bryant explained. 2

That same year the firm had “started experiencing a rapidloss of talent,” said CEO G. Brint Ryan. “And I’m not talkingabout just general talent — I’m talking about the stars.” 3

Bryant’s resignation was the “tipping point” for the CEO, re-calls Delta Emerson, Ryan’s executive vice president and chiefof 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 profession-als, declaring, “You can work whenever you want, whereveryou want,” as long as “you meet financial results” and satisfythe clients. Now, each employee’s client satisfaction ratings andother performance measures are maintained on a virtual “dash-board,” accessible on the company website to both the em-ployee and his or her supervisor.

The “results” approach quickly translated into a radicalchange in the office culture. Before, Emerson remembered, “Ifsomeone got on an elevator at 2 p.m., people would think,‘Oh, you’re taking the afternoon off.’ Now people don’t payattention anymore to when people come and go; it’s guilt-free.”

There were some bumps along road. “Some employees tookthe new system to mean ‘Just let me know when you needme,’ ” and were hard to reach, Emerson reports. But as a coun-terweight, supervisors became so focused on results that they

“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 manyhours employees work outside of the office, Emerson says, al-though she estimates that 60-70 percent of Ryan’s professionalsspend about half as much time in the office as they once did.

“Our profits are higher than ever,” Emerson says. “That’swhat our CEO cares about: Are we making money? Are wekeeping clients happy? Are we keeping our employees? Theanswer to all those is Yes.”

Most dramatically, turnover dropped from 20 percent in 2008to about 10.5 percent today, according to Emerson, notably lowfor an industry that averages a 22 percent “burnout” rate. Ryanended up retaining Bryant, who went on to have two children.

Other high-powered employees also stayed after they had chil-dren. Kathy Weaver, who joined Ryan as a newlywed in 2006,is now vice president for training, in charge of training Ryan’snearly 1,500 employees. Along the way she gave birth to a sonand a daughter. Last year, she accompanied two preschool fieldtrips during the workweek, then made up the time by handlingemail and other work at home in the evening.

Weaver realizes such flexibility is “a unique privilege” un-available to many working mothers. “It was something specialfor the kids,” she says, and that’s “a culture that would be hardfor a person to walk away from.”

— Sarah Glazer

1 Ellen Galinsky, “Make Results Matter More than Face Time,” Harvard Busi-ness 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.

Boosting Retention by Allowing FlexibilityEmployees at Dallas firm work “whenever, wherever” they want.


day for mishandling their bank ac-counts, points out lead author Waber,now at Sociometric Solutions, who con-ducted the study while at MIT. Dur-ing group breaks, employees got so-cial support and picked up tips fromveteran employees about how to han-dle calls more efficiently, he found.

So how come Chinese call centerworkers were more productive work-ing at home than at the office? Per-haps CTrip’s office was not an envi-ronment where workers offered oneanother much social support, Wabersuggests, so working at home was nomore isolating. (However, some CTripworkers actually complained of lone-liness and chose to return to the of-fice after the experiment ended.)

Moreover, CTrip’s home workersmight have improved their productiv-ity even more if they’d been mentoredinformally by experienced colleagues,he maintains. “There’s no way for themto improve beyond the initial bouncethey got” from shifting to a quieter at-mosphere at home, he says. “If they’rein the office, they’re going to learnfrom other people.”

As for the business benefits fromtelecommuting, just as many academ-ic studies find negative results for busi-ness — or none at all — as find apositive boost, according to an inter-national analysis that counted up thestudies on both sides. 14

However, the “meta-analysis” byPennsylvania State University researchersof 46 recent studies tries to quantifythe balance of all the results. It found“beneficial effects” on workers’ job per-formance (as measured by supervisors’ratings), job satisfaction, turnover intentand family-work conflict. 15

Gajendran, a co-author of the studyand now at the University of IllinoisChampaign-Urbana, is cautious aboutthe universality of the benefits he found.“What our meta-analysis shows is itmakes sense for businesses to offertelecommuting,” but not as a “blanketprescription,” he says. Telecommuting

may not be suitable for every type ofbusiness or task.

Although telecommuters get betterjob evaluations than office-based work-ers, “Supervisors could be allowingonly those who are good performersto telecommute,” Gajendran cautions.As a result, “It’s hard to say if highperformance is leading to telecom-muting or vice versa,” he says.

Few academic studies have lookedat the qualities Yahoo says were lostthrough remote working: innovation andcollaboration. But Waber says those arevalid concerns based on several stud-ies he has conducted in which work-ers wear sensor badges to measure their“face time” with one another.

Telecommuting may work well forplanned meetings, Waber says, “But alot of the value of working with peo-ple comes from all those interactionsthat you didn’t plan.” 16 Programmerswho sat at lunch tables of 12 peopleat an online travel company were farmore likely to talk to their lunchmateslater in the week and to see a boost in

their productivity than workers at four-person lunch tables, Waber found.

“It’s not to say there aren’t certainjobs where it’s effective to telecom-mute, especially if you interact with alot of customers outside the company,”says Waber. “But especially for thesevery highly collaborative things,” suchas computer programming, “where yourely a lot on the people you work with,

you can measure what the cost is whenyou miss one of these interactions.”

Findings like Waber’s suggest thatworkers may need to divide their timebetween home and office. “It helpstelecommuters to know that duringthat collaborative phase they shouldcome into the office more often,” saysGavendran, while they may work bet-ter at home on more focused tasks.

Most experts caution that a com-pany is more likely to reap the po-tential benefits of telecommuting if itsmanagers understand how to monitoremployees from a distance. For ex-ample, supervisers at a Dallas taxadvice firm, Ryan LLC, can check an

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 areinvesting 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.

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online dashboard that updates the fi-nancial performance and customer sat-isfaction ratings for each of their em-ployees. Yahoo decided to bantelecommuting after it discovered tele-workers rarely logging onto the com-pany’s secure computer network, ac-cording news reports. 17

Gajendran asks, “How can you havehundreds of employees not logging inon a day-to-day basis? What was thecompany doing that telecommuterswere so turned off?”

The question is not just whethertelework is good for business, he says,but also, “Can business create systemsso telecommuting can be productive?”

Is telecommuting good for em-ployees?

Since the advent of home comput-ers, working at home has seemed anideal scheme to help working parentsease the conflicts between work andchild-care. And some experts say itplays that role today.

Telecommuting “does help addressfamily issues: If a kid is sick; you canstill work; if you need to take a childto an appointment you can take thechild, come home and can continueto work,” says Joan Williams, profes-sor of law at the University of Cali-fornia Hastings College of the Law anddirector of its Center for WorkLife Law.“There are huge numbers of womenwho would quit their jobs and beforced into poverty without telecom-muting.”

Telework also is crucial for fatherswho otherwise would “not be involvedin their children’s day-to-day life,”Williams notes, and for adults caringfor aging parents.

But a recent analysis by two soci-ologists at the University of Texas andUniversity of Iowa found that “parentsare no more likely than the popula-tion as a whole to telecommute, andmothers do not telecommute more thanfathers.” College-educated workers andthose in managerial and professionaljobs are far more likely to telecom-mute than other workers. 18

The typical telecommuter, most stud-ies find, is male, white-collar and tendsto have a high-status job. 19

In part that’s because working fromhome is just one of many benefits thatare offered most often to the most priv-ileged workers, who are more likely tobe men than women, observes Williams.

According to a 2008 survey by theFamilies and Work Institute, employ-ers offer telework on an occasionalbasis to male workers more often thanfemale workers: 19 percent of mengot such an offer vs. 13 percent ofwomen. Even in managerial jobs, moremen (45 percent) were allowed to tele-work some of their regular hours thanwomen (30 percent), the survey found.While sex-discrimination could explainthe difference, the authors of the studysay, women also are more heavily rep-resented in fields such as nursing andteaching, where telework is not a vi-able option.

TELECOMMUTING

Management, Sales Dominate TelecommutingFields 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 construc-tion and health care, accounted for a much smaller proportion of at-home workers.

Share of Home-Based and Total Workforce, by Occupation, 2010

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

Share of WorkforceShare of Home-Based Workers

0% 5 10 15 20 25

Farming, fishing,forestry

Health care

Installation,maintenance, repair

Construction, Extraction

Production andtransportation

Computer, engineeringand science

Office, administrativesupport

Education, legal,community service, arts

Sales

Service

Management,business, science


Williams has coined the term “flexi-bility stigma” to help explain why work-ers, especially women, are reluctant torequest flexible work arrangementssuch as telecommuting or changingtheir starting and quitting times.

Many workers fear that taking ad-vantage of such perks will lead tofewer promotions and raises, accord-ing to Williams and other experts. Ina recent article, Williams and colleaguesnote that even though 79 percent ofU.S. firms allow some employees tochange their starting or quitting timesperiodically, only 11 percent of full-time workers have a formal agreementto vary their work hours. They sug-gest the reason is fear of negative ca-reer repercussions, which they say iswell-founded. Flexibility policies suchas “flextime” and family leave havebeen shown to result in wage penal-ties, lower performance evaluations andfewer promotions. 20

Telework, by contrast, does not seemto be as toxic to job advancement,counters Gajendran, and his data findmore of a stigma for men who tele-work than for women. Overall, tele-workers received more favorable eval-uations from managers than theiroffice-based colleagues, his meta-analysisconcluded. “The truth is there is somestigma but to what extent? Our datafinds it doesn’t seem to affect their ca-reers,” he says.

When workers do encounter penal-ties for requesting flexible work op-tions, Williams and colleagues write,it’s because many employers believeideal workers should make work thecenter of their lives. That tends to beeasier for the typical upper-middle-class man, who spends 55 hours aweek at work and commuting andhas a wife to care for the children.(Only 14 percent of professional moth-ers work this schedule). A womanwho requests workplace flexibility isoften “sanctioned for her failure tobe (seen as) the ideal worker,” theauthors observe. 21

Paradoxically, even though the CTripstudy demonstrated that telecommuterswere more productive than office-basedworkers, fewer telecommuters got pro-moted than their office coworkers. Someof the home-based workers returnedto the office full-time to avoid this dis-crimination penalty. 22

Employers are willing to implementwhat Williams calls the “best practices”of flexible work schedules but then“send informal cultural messages thatyou use best practices at your ownperil,” she asserts.

Sociological studies generally findthat workers who have more autono-my about where and when they worktend to be more satisfied. 23 So in hisstudy of U.S. workers, University ofToronto sociology professor Scott Schie-man was surprised to find that thosewith the most control over their workhours also reported work intrudingmore frequently on their personallives. They ended up suffering fromanxiety, insomnia and marital stress. 24

College-educated professionals likethose in Schieman’s study have gener-ally already worked a 40-hour weekaway from home so telework comes asextra hours for them, he notes. Theymight be juggling work phone callswhile getting dinner ready or fendingoff a child’s plea for homework help.

“People who have full control overtheir schedule may have a more diffi-cult time shutting off work when theywant to,” speculates Schiemann. “Thatfinding went against all the predictionsof how flexibility is such a great thingthat it should buffer against the down-sides of work effects; it’s exactly theopposite.”

That portrait of a teleworker toilingnights and weekends is becoming typ-ical, according to Jennifer L. Glass, asociologist at the University of Texas,Austin, and co-author of a recent analy-sis that found most hours spent tele-working are overtime — after the em-ployee has already worked at least40 hours a week. Rather than helping

to solve family-work conflicts, teleworkhas allowed employers “to raise ex-pectations” for their employees’ “workavailability during evenings and week-ends and foster longer workdays andworkweeks,” she and University of Iowasociologist Mary C. Noonan conclude. 25

“We’ve created a workplace culturewhere devotion and commitment aresignaled by a continual presence; sotelecommuting, when it occurs, occurson the weekends and evenings whenyou have to get home,” says Glass.

In surveys, workers say they feelincreasing pressure to work thoseextra hours in order to hold onto theirjobs, especially during a recession —creating a self-driven culture of over-work, Glass notes. One survey foundthat 37 percent of employees workedon vacation in 2010, double the sharein 2006. 26

“Everybody’s worried. So employ-ers can squeeze a lot of work out ofemployees,” Glass says.

The extra hours worked actuallydon’t garner the pay and promotionsworkers expect, according to Glass —suggesting this overtime without re-ward may be a new form of exploita-tion, what one recent commentatorcalled an “electronic sweatshop.” 27

Other experts acknowledge this trendis occurring against a general back-ground in which workweeks are get-ting longer for professional workers.

But is telework to blame? Is telecom-muting being used “to push for longerhours or to make the longer hours thatare clearly expected a little more man-ageable?” asks University of Minnesotasociologist Erin Kelly, co-director of theuniversity’s Flexible Work and Well-BeingCenter. “It’s not like if we stoppedtelecommuting, employers of profes-sional and managerial workers wouldbe happy with employees working just40 hours and walking out the door.”

Some experts say Glass exaggeratesthe overtime effect of telecommutingby counting workers who take workhome after working a full day at the

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office — which doesn’t really qualifyas teleworking. The Bureau of LaborStatistics data she cites doesn’t accu-rately define teleworkers, since it lumpsin self-employed workers running abusiness from home and those whohave already driven to the office thatday, objects Gavendran.

“Is that really telecommuting if you’reworking from home on a weekend orif you’re working from home becauseyou’re ambitious?” he asks.

Does telecommuting reduce traf-fic congestion?

In 1970, rocket scientist Jack Nilles,who had designed remote sensingNASA spacecraft, was asked by a re-gional planner: “If you people can puta man on the moon, why can’t youdo something about traffic?” 28

As Nilles recalls, “That got me tothinking about why we have all thesetraffic problems” stemming from com-muting and “why we have to getthere” just to sit at desks, talk on thephone and have too many unpro-ductive meetings.

That conversation launched Nilles

on a career as “the father of telecom-muting,” promoting a then-revolutionarymode of work, a goal he currentlypursues as founder of JALA Interna-tional, a management consulting firmin Los Angeles.

For years, Nilles has been predict-ing that the growth in telecommutingwould take millions of cars off theroad and reduce traffic congestion. In1998, he predicted that telecommuterswould remove 21 million cars per work-day by 2010. 29

So why do traffic jams seem as badas they were 15 years ago if not worse?In fact, the average commuter endured38 hours of delay in 2011, up from 16hours in 1982, according to the TexasA&M Transportation Institute. 30

“It’s still hard to see a difference onthe crowded freeways,” Nilles acknowl-edges. That’s because the growth in thenumber of drivers, constricted on thesame number of roads, has overwhelmedreductions from workers who stayhome, he says. “Without telecommutingit would be a whole lot worse,” hemaintains. Instead of lasting only sevenor eight hours, gridlock would expandto as much as 15 or 20 hours, he es-timates, and “it would never clear up.”

Patricia L. Mokhtarian, professor ofcivil and environmental engineering atthe University of California-Davis, is along-time skeptic of telecommuting asa solution to congestion. Today, she ac-knowledges, telework reduces car trav-el for the individual working at home.But that individual’s effect on alleviat-ing overall traffic is very modest, shesays, especially since most people tele-work only a few days a week.

“The question in my mind is: Willenough people do it long enough tomake a difference at the aggregatelevel [of traffic congestion]?” she says.

For example, if 5 percent of thepopulation telecommutes one day aweek out of the five-day workweek,that takes only 1 percent of the com-muting traffic off the road on any givenworkday, she points out. 31 A UC-Davisstudy of employers’ efforts to encour-age telework found similarly minor ef-fects: reductions of 4-6 percent in com-muting miles traveled by employees ofindividual companies, but regionwidereductions of only 1 percent. 32

In addition, advocates and criticsagree that any lessening of traffic dueto telecommuting is subject to the clas-sic “triple convergence” effect any timeroad capacity is increased: Once theroads empty out, commuters who were

Continued on p. 632

An employee works from home for CTrip, China’s largest travel agency. A recentstudy 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.

Jenn

ifer Y

ing


Chronology19th CenturyScience fiction writers envisionvideoconferencing; 10-hour dayis common for factory workers.

1868President Ulysses S. Grant signs eight-hour day into law for federal workers.

1899H. G. Wells’ futuristic novel Whenthe Sleeper Wakes predicts futurevideoconferencing will eliminateneed for meetings.

•

20th CenturyMore women join labor force.. . . Rising gas prices and traf-fic congestion spur interest inhome-based work; federal work-ers are urged to telework.

1938President Franklin D. Rooseveltsigns Fair Labor Standards Act,requiring overtime pay beyond a40-hour week.

1950Less than one-third of women work.

1973Organization of the Petroleum Ex-porting Countries declares oil em-bargo, spurring higher gasolineprices. . . . American rocket scientistJack Nilles coins “telecommuting” assolution to traffic congestion.

1978Congress enacts Federal EmployeesFlexible and Compressed WorkSchedules Act, allowing workers toalter schedules to reduce commut-ing time.

1979Iranian revolution disrupts oil ex-

ports, triggering another round ofsurging gasoline prices and re-newed interest in telecommuting.

•

1980-1986Oil prices plummet as new glutdevelops in world markets. . . .Suburban sprawl spawns longercommutes, worsening traffic.

1982Congress reauthorizes flextime forfederal workers.

1985Congress makes flexible schedulesfor federal workers permanent.

1997House passes law allowing privateemployers to offer paid time offinstead of wages for overtimework; bill dies in Senate. . . .Study of Fortune 500 company findsfew employees use flexible workoptions. . . . Seven percent of work-ers spend at least one workday aweek at home, Census Bureau finds.

1999Women’s labor force participationpeaks at 60 percent.

•

2000s More employersoffer telework option, andtelecommuting grows in popu-larity but mostly part-time. . . .Under-30 workers demand flexi-ble schedule. . . . Recessioncauses dip in telework; some bigemployers become disenchanted.

2002Census Bureau finds that 7.5 percentof employees work from home, about1 million more than in 1997.

2005About a third of employers offertelecommuting on occasional basis;7.8 percent of workforce telecom-mutes at least once a week.

2010Telework Enhancement Act requiresfederal agencies to inform employ-ees if they can work at home. . . .Number of monthly teleworkersdips during recession. . . . Some9.5 percent of workforce telecom-mutes one day a week. . . . Sixty-three percent of employers offeroccasional teleworking. . . . Benefitsof offering flexible work can out-weigh costs, says President’s Coun-cil of Economic Advisers.

2011Federal Office of Personnel Manage-ment scuttles liberal telework experi-ment based on employees’ work“results;” federal agencies must meet2010 federal mandate to offer tele-work to eligible workers. . . . One-third of college students say remoteworking is a right; 70 percent be-lieve regular office presence unnec-essary, Cisco study finds.

2012Sixty-three percent of employersoffer telework option; Bank ofAmerica announces it is rethinkingits telecommuting program.

2013Yahoo bans telecommuting; facingtough competition, Best Buy re-stricts telework regime, citing aneed for greater in-office collabo-ration. . . . House passes contro-versial Working Families FlexibilityAct to allow private employers tooffer compensatory time off in lieuof overtime pay (May 8). . . . Ver-mont gives employees the right torequest flexible work arrangementsand protects them from retaliationfor asking (May 14).

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using mass transit switch back to dri-ving, and drivers who were using backroads or leaving early to beat the rushreturn to the highway at the normalrush hour. “The next day the freewayis just as congested as it was beforethe added capacity,” Mokhtarian says.

Fifteen years ago, some critics, in-cluding Mokhtarian, also predictedthat telecommuters would shift theirerrands and shopping to the daysthey worked at home and thereforecontinue to add to local traffic neartheir homes. But subsequent studieshave not supported that prediction.Telecommuters tend to feel “travelsaturated” on work-at-home days, somany leave their cars in the garage,and any trips they make tend to beshorter and off-peak. 33

At the same time, globalized com-munication facilitated by email and

Skype means workers are more likelyto accept invitations to conferences infar-flung places, Mokhtarian suggests.The last three decades, which saw asharp rise in email and cell phone use,also saw a surge in overall transporta-tion, including air travel. 34

“Some people may work at homethree days a week but jet-set off toTimbuktu six days a month,” thanksto new telecommunications technolo-gy, observes Mokhtarian.

Finally, telecommuters tend to livefarther from work than the averageworker, so some researchers concludethat the ability to work remotely hasencouraged those workers to movefarther away. 35 But Mokhtarian thinksmost suburban sprawl pre-dated shiftsto telecommuting. One study of Cali-fornia state workers found they tookon telework to avoid the longer com-mute they already endured. 36

Changing technology may be hav-ing the opposite effect — moving workcloser to employees’ homes. Nilles onceenvisioned a radical change in the struc-ture of cities, with bedroom communi-ties revitalized by teleworkers who nowhad more time to get to know theirneighbors and get involved in com-munity activities and volunteering.

For example, as the technology offilmmaking becomes more computer-based, some post-production workcan be done closer to home. Somefilm studios are moving their opera-tions from Hollywood to Santa Mon-ica, where many employees live. The11-mile commute can stretch to anhour on clogged freeways during rushhour. Those lucky workers “don’t fightthe traffic,” Nilles says. “There’s a nicepark along the ocean where peoplecan jog and watch sailboats, and itbeats sitting on a freeway.”

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Continued from p. 630

That attorney reviewing the patent application for yourlatest invention — the one that’s going to make you azillion dollars — may indeed be hunched at a desk in

Alexandria, Va., the home of the U.S. Patent and TrademarkOffice (PTO).

But he’s just as likely to be sitting in his living room in Cal-ifornia.

Working at home is the norm at the PTO, which has thelargest share of telecommuters in the federal government. Sixty-five percent of the agency’s 11,664 employees telework, ac-cording to Danette Campbell, the PTO’s senior telework ad-viser. About a third of them work from home fulltime, manyhundreds of miles from office headquarters.

The agency first experimented with telecommuting in 1997.Struggling with a mounting backlog of patent and trademarkapplications and a shortage of reviewers, the PTO increased itspool of job candidates by allowing attorneys who lived out-side the 50-mile radius of the capital to work at home, ac-cording to Campbell.

The office now employs about 4,000 more workers than in2006, an increase Campbell says was made possible entirelybecause home-based workers don’t require expensive new of-fice space. “If I had to bring in 4,000-plus employees, I’d need$24 million in real estate to house them,” she estimates.

Praising the program as a successful business strategy, theCommerce Department’s inspector general found that the av-erage PTO teleworker spent 66.3 more hours a year examin-ing patents than the average reviewer at headquarters, trans-lating to about 3.5 more patent reviews. 1

“Our folks who work from home have a tendency to worklonger hours because they don’t have [to] commute,” Camp-bell says. In addition, attorneys who might have consideredretiring are more likely to stay on with the agency, espe-cially 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 head-quarters.

Retaining seasoned employees also helps reduce the appli-cation backlog, Campbell notes. “This is an initiative that hasplayed a crucial role in employee retention and morale.”

The Patent Office has estimated that up to 75 percent ofits workers have jobs suitable for telework. So why do only65 percent work remotely?

Not everyone wants to telecommute. “A lot of people real-ly enjoy getting out of their home in the morning and goingto a place other than their home to work,” Campbell says, not-ing that the telework option is voluntary. “Some people feelthat there are too many distractions in the home.”

Patent Office Workers Embrace Telework“A crucial role in employee retention and morale.”


BACKGROUNDNew Technologies

S ince the 19th century, the desire toeliminate the need for physical trav-

el has been one of the main motiva-tions driving the invention of new formsof electronic communication. When thetelephone was invented in the late 1800s,newspaper articles speculated about atime when the telephone could replacethe need for face-to-face meetings. 37

In his 1899 dystopian novel Whenthe Sleeper Wakes, British science fictionwriter H. G. Wells envisioned a futurein which the “kineto-tele-photograph”— essentially videoconferencing —would eliminate the need for people tomeet in person. 38

In the 1960s, some researchers beganexploring how telecommunicationscould reduce travel. The Arab oil em-bargo and the energy crises of the1970s gave new impetus to such stud-ies. In 1973, former NASA scientistNilles coined the term “telecommut-ing” as a solution to traffic congestion.

American futurist Alvin Toffler madepopular his utopian visions of telecom-muting with his 1980 best-seller The ThirdWave, which predicted a future “Infor-mation Age.” Toffler envisioned thehome office as an “electronic cottage”that would “glue the family togetheragain.” 39 That idea harked back to pre-industrial America, when families of farm-ers and artisans worked at home, withwomen and children pitching in. 40

“Home computers are nurturingworking mothers,” the San Jose Mer-cury News declared in 1983, echoingthat vision. 41 But current trends,

which show parents no more likelythan other workers to adopt telecom-muting, raise questions about that utopi-an vision.

Citing today’s tendency for telecom-muting to stretch beyond the 40-hourworkweek, Slate recently opined thatToffler’s “ ‘electronic cottage’ has be-come an ‘electronic sweatshop.’ ” 42

Changing Workforce

I n the late 19th and early 20th cen-tury, many mothers worked gruel-

ing hours, often during the night shiftso they could care for their childrenduring the day. On a typical day at afactory in Albany, N.Y., in 1914,women worked from 7 p.m. until mid-night, took half an hour for supper,and then worked another five hours,five nights a week. 43

However, she says, “We emphasize [that] telework is not asubstitute for day care or elder care.” And because of the se-cure nature of the information, “We don’t allow anyone to workin a Starbucks or a hotel lobby,” Campbell adds.

In response to the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010, allfederal agencies must notify eligible employees if their jobs aresuitable for telecommuting. According to the Office of Person-nel Management, nearly a third of federal employees havejobs suitable for telecommuting, but only a quarter of thoseeligible are actually teleworking. 2

Some critics blame that shortfall on the absence of con-gressional funding for promoting telework and training em-ployees. 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 WorkExchange, a public-private partnership promoting federaltelecommuting.

To encourage a transition to mobile forms of telecommut-ing, a new White House policy requires federal chief informa-tion officers planning to buy new computers, for example, toconsider buying laptops instead of desktops, says Auten. Andsome agencies are promoting BYOD, “bring your own device,”which allows federal workers to use their own smartphones orlaptops on a pilot basis.

This is transforming how federal officials look at both ITand 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,” Officeof 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 Con-gress,” United States Office of Personnel Management, June 2012, www.telework.gov/reports_and_studies/annual_reports/index.aspx.

Danette Campbell runs the federal government’s most successful telework program, at the

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

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634 CQ Researcher

And analagous to teleworkerstoday, many factory workers took gar-ments home to sew, where they werepaid by the piece regardless of howlong the work took. Piecework be-came infamous as an exploitative sweat-shop practice that barely paid a liv-ing wage and often required the laborof everyone in the family, includingyoung children.

In 1868, President Ulysses S. Grantlimited the work day for federal work-ers to eight hours a day, but the 10-hour day continued for most otherworkers for decades. 44

Not until 1938, when PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt signed the FairLabor Standards Act, did the eight-hour day became the standard forhourly workers. The law also requiredthat any hours worked beyond 40 perweek be paid at an overtime rate oftime and a half.

This New Deal legislation institu-tionalized the 9-to-5, five-day work-week at a time when the workforcewas composed mostly of men whosewives were full-time homemakers.While women were encouraged toenter the workforce in large numbersduring World War II, by 1950 theymade up less than a third of em-ployees. 45 In 1950 only 12.6 percentof married mothers with children under17 were working. 46

Since then the workforce has changedradically. Women now constitute atleast half the labor force. Women’s rateof participation in the workforce peakedin 1999 at 60 percent, falling slightlyto 58 percent in 2011. 47

Unlike in the 1950s, most workerstoday do not have a full-time home-maker spouse, and most children areraised in households where both par-ents work. Married couples in whichonly the husband works have becomea diminishing minority — falling from36 percent in 1967 to 19 percent in2010. Sixty-nine percent of marriedmothers with children under 18 are inthe workforce. 48

In light of these changes in fami-lies, the “one-size-fits-all workplace withits fulltime, full-year, year-in and year-out jobs” has resulted in “a profoundstructural mismatch” to the needs ofemployees who care for children andelder relatives, scholars say in a re-cent book urging the adoption of flex-ible work options. 49

In today’s dual-earner families, thesame two adults who were once sup-ported by one paying job “now sharethree jobs, two as breadwinners andone as homemaker,” write the volume’seditors, Kathleen Christensen, programdirector at the Alfred P. Sloan Founda-tion, and Barbara Schneider, a profes-sor of education and sociology at Michi-gan State University. The number ofhours worked in paying jobs has alsorisen dramatically, they note, from thestandard 40-hour week that prevailedfor most of the 20th century. 50

Exacerbating this trend of lengthen-ing workweeks, the 1938 Fair Labor Stan-dards Act does not protect the 40 per-cent of workers who are salaried, andthus exempt from the law. As the paceof work escalates in a globalized 24-hour economy, white collar workers “areexpected to work long hours with noadditional pay,” three University of Min-nesota sociologists noted recently. 51

White-collar workweeks have beenlengthening since at least the 1980s.Between 1989 and 1996, middle-classmarried couples increased their annu-al work hours by the equivalent ofmore than three extra 40-hour weeks— most of these hours added by thewives. 52

In 1997, in a groundbreaking studyof a Fortune 500 company that waspioneering family-friendly policies, Uni-versity of California-Berkeley sociolo-gist Arlie Russell Hochschild describedhow the lengthening work days leftmany working parents despairing overhow little time they had for their chil-dren. 53 So Hochschild was surprisedto discover that only 1 percent of em-ployees took advantage of “flexplace”

— the opportunity to work from home— and only 3 percent of parents optedfor part-time work. 54

Working mothers told Hochschildthat compared to the workplace, homewas a frenetic environment, where theyshouldered a “second shift” of house-work and childcare. Some even soughtout overtime hours. At work they founda greater sense of identity and self-worth, as well as friendships and recog-nition from their co-workers.

Men had long considered the officea haven from screaming children anddirty dishes. “The news,” Hochschilddeclared in her book The Time Bind,“is that growing numbers of workingwomen are leery of spending moretime at home, as well.” 55

Federal Flextime

I n 1978, in response to growing rush-hour traffic congestion in the Wash-

ington, D.C., area, Congress enactedthe Federal Employees Flexible andCompressed Work Schedules Act. Thetrial program allowed federal workersto arrange alternative work schedulesto reduce commuting time while meet-ing their family needs. It also allowedthem the choice of taking overtimepay either as cash or paid time off. 56

The trial was so successful in re-ducing absenteeism and increasing pro-ductivity that Congress reauthorized itin 1982. In 1985, Congress made theprogram permanent.

In 1997, the House of Representa-tives passed for the second time a billknown as the Family-Friendly Work-place Act, to allow private sector work-ers to take compensatory time off inlieu of overtime pay — the same priv-ilege legally granted to federal work-ers. The bill, threatened with a vetoby President Bill Clinton, died in theSenate amid strong opposition fromunions, which argued that employerswould use the law to deprive hourlyworkers of their legal right to time-

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and-a-half overtime pay. Repeated ef-forts by Republicans to revive the billsince then have also failed, althoughthe House earlier this year passed asimilar bill. (See “Current Situation,”p. 634, and “At Issue,” p. 637.)

In the most comprehensive push toget federal workers teleworking, Pres-ident Barack Obama in December 2010signed the Telework Enhancement Act.

It required all federal agencies to de-termine by June 2011 how many oftheir employees had jobs suitable fortelecommuting and to notify thoseemployees of their eligibility for work-at-home status. As in the past, a majorfactor was worsening traffic conges-tion in the Washington, D.C. area, whichhas the country’s largest concentrationof federal workers.

Federal agencies also saw teleworkas “a great way to stay competitive”with the private sector, notes CindyAuten, general manager of the MobileWork Exchange, a public-private sectorpartnership promoting telework.

The real tipping point came withthe monster snowstorm, dubbed “Snow-mageddon,” that hit Washington in Feb-ruary 2010, closing federal offices for

E very meeting is optional. Arriving at the office at 2 p.m.is not considered coming in late. It’s OK to catch amovie on a Tuesday afternoon. 1

Such options for workers might sound like the utopian dreamof a burned-out cubicle worker. But actually they are amongthe “13 Guideposts” of a radical approach to work, pioneeredto great plaudits by electronic retailer Best Buy in 2005.

The Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) was developedby two Best Buy employees to help the company recruit toptalent. Stressing that “Work isn’t a place you go — it’s some-thing you do,” ROWE permitted Best Buy’s corporate head-quarters employees to set their own hours and work at homeas much as they wished as long as they met their supervisors’goals — whether filling a minimum number of orders or com-pleting a certain number of audits a month.

The system appeared to be wildly successful, cutting em-ployee turnover by 45 percent and reducing work-family angst,leading to improved health and sleeping habits, according toresearchers from the University of Minnesota. 2

In an introduction to “Why Work Sucks,” the manifesto writ-ten by ROWE creators Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, for-mer Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson enthused, “We have . . .embraced this new way of working at Best Buy because it’sgood for business. Engaged employees are more productive,more innovative, more committed.” 3

In 2010, the President’s Council of Economic Advisers calledROWE “the ultimate form of workplace flexibility.” 4

So when Best Buy announced in March that it would re-strict telecommuting and cancel ROWE, many people were sur-prised. Unlike Yahoo, which announced the previous week thatit was banning all telecommuting, Best Buy said some of its4,000 non-store employees might still be allowed to telecom-mute, but now must get permission from their managers.

Best Buy had been facing tough competition from onlineretailers, such as Amazon, and had brought in a new CEO. “Inthe context of a business transformation, it makes sense to con-sider not just what the results are but how the work gets done,”Best Buy spokesman Matt Furman said, “and that means hav-

ing employees in the office as much as possible to collaborateand connect on ways to improve our business.” 5

Some industry executives who had considered adoptingROWE found Best Buy’s decision understandable, saying ROWEdidn’t involve enough consultation with managers.

Best Buy wasn’t the only employer to try ROWE and thenabandon it. In another prominent failure, the federal Office of Per-sonnel Management (OPM) tried the approach from August 2010to August 2011. OPM Director John Berry had suggested that ifthe trial worked, ROWE could transform the federal workplace.

According to a 2011 evaluation of the experiment, howev-er, managers weren’t sure how to evaluate employees accord-ing to their work “results” and employees had little idea whetherthey were meeting the results expected of them. OPM scuttledthe pilot after one year. 6

Kate Lister, president of the Telework Research Network,whose research argues in favor of telework, calls ROWE’s 13tenets “pretty extreme” in their message to the employee that“You can do whatever you want.” Noting Best Buy’s financialtrouble, she says, ROWE is “not for every company and notfor a company on the ropes.”

— Sarah Glazer

1 Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix it: TheResults-Only Revolution (2008), p. 89.2 Phyllis Moen, et al., “Does Enhancing Work-Time Control and FlexibilityReduce Turnover?” Social Problems, 58 (1) 2011, pp. 69-98. And see Erin L. Kelly,et al., “Changing Workplaces to Reduce Work-Family Conflict,” American Socio-logical 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,” Councilof 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,” “CNNMoney,” March 5, 2013, http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/05/technology/best-buy-work-from-home/index.html.6 Stephen Losey, “Why You Don’t Have Flex Schedules: OPM’s Failed 1-yearExperiment,” Federal Times, Dec. 16, 2012, www.federaltimes.com/article/20121216/PERSONNEL03/312160007/Why-you-don-8217-t-flex-schedules-OPM-8217-s-failed-1-year-experiment?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE.

Best Buy’s Worker Utopia Crashes and Burns“It’s OK to catch a movie on a Tuesday afternoon.”

636 CQ Researcher

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five days. “That was a game-changer,”says Auten, demonstrating that tele-work, where it was used, was criticalto continuing federal operations in anemergency or disaster such as anearthquake or fire.

Private Trends

T eleworking has been gaining inpopularity among private em-

ployers eager to retain workers andattract younger job-seekers.

The share of companies offeringthe option on an occasional basis hasrisen steadily — from 34 percent in2005 to 63 percent last year, accord-ing to a national study of employersby the Families and Work Institute. Butonly a third of employers offered theoption of regular telecommuting —and then only to a minority of work-ers. Even fewer made telecommutingavailable to all or most employees —6 percent on an occasional basis andonly 2 percent on a regular basis. 57

After the 2007-09 recession, someemployees became leery of telecom-muting: In 2010, the number whoworked remotely at least once a monthdipped for the first time since 2008,according to a survey by WorldatWork,a nonprofit membership associationfor human resource professionals. Thedrop of about 8 million workers from2008 still meant that nearly 20 percentof working adults were telecommut-ing monthly. 58

In December, Bank of America an-nounced it was scaling back its tele-working program and asking man-agers to review which jobs were mostsuitable for telework. 59 An internalmemo said new employees shouldwork from an office “whenever pos-sible” and that employees should at-tend meetings in person. 60

According to The Charlotte Observer,“The Bank of America said nothing spe-cific precipitated the review.” But a per-son familiar with the matter said it waspart of a new broad-based program “tocut costs and improve efficiency.” 61

CURRENTSITUATION

Comp Time Fight

T he flexibility employees value mosthighly is the ability to handle last-

minute personal emergencies, says Fam-ilies and Work Institute co-founderGalinsky. A worker’s ability to respondto the sudden illness of a child byworking at home would be affectedby an array of federal and state lawsunder consideration.

The House of Representatives onMay 8 passed legislation supported bythe Republican leadership that wouldallow employers to offer paid time offinstead of wages for overtime work.The vote was 223-204, with all butthree Democrats opposing it. 62 TheWorking Families Flexibility Act of2013 would give private sector hourlyemployees the option of asking forcompensatory time off for any hoursworked beyond a 40-hour week, as asubstitute for the “time and a half”overtime pay that is required by law.That option is already available to fed-eral employees.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor,R-Va., has pushed for the bill as partof a package of measures designed tohelp working families, known as “Mak-ing Life Work.”

But opponents say the measure isa cynical ploy aimed at making theGOP look sympathetic to workers witha bill that is far more favorable to em-ployers. 63 “It’s a wolf in sheep’s cloth-ing — a way for employers to avoidpaying the overtime premium,” says Uni-versity of California law professor Williams.

Others say it’s an attempt by theGOP to win back the women’s voteslost in the last presidential election.

Continued on p. 638

A man shovels out his car in Silver Spring, Md., on Feb. 6, 2010, after the“Snowmageddon” blizzard pounded the Washington, D.C., region, closingfederal offices for five days. The federal government and the states have

encouraged telecommuting to reduce real estate costs, traffic congestion andauto emissions and to keep operations going during weather-related emergencies.

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At Issue:Should employers be able to offer comp time to workers in lieuof overtime pay?yes

yesMICHAEL P. AITKENVICE PRESIDENT, GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS,SOCIETY FOR HUMAN RESOURCEMANAGEMENT

WRITTEN FOR CQ RESEARCHER, JULY 2013

i n today’s hectic society, a growing number of employeesare experiencing a “time famine” — feeling that they lackenough 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 Societyfor Human Resource Management (SHRM) because it gives em-ployees more choices in managing their time. It is a step for-ward for both employers and employees who seek more flexi-bility — 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 giveemployees who are paid by the hour the choice to bank paidtime off or receive cash wages for any overtime hours. Private-sector employers are prohibited from offering this optionunder the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Under the voluntary comp-time arrangement, employeeswould accrue 1 1/2 hours of paid time off for each hour ofovertime worked. Employees could opt out of the program atany time and receive overtime-rate cash payments for unusedhours.

Not surprisingly, much misinformation surfaced during debateon the Working Families Flexibility Act. For example, some ar-gued the bill would cut employees’ pay without a guarantee ofpaid time off. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Employees who opted for comp time would request thetime off the same way they request leave now, and the em-ployer would have to grant the request in a reasonable time,unless business operations were unduly disrupted. This “undu-ly disrupts” standard has been used in the public sector foryears. In practice, it is designed to ensure that a tax firm, forexample, does not have all support staff out of the officearound Tax Day.

And no employee’s wages would be reduced under thebill. Consider the simple math assuming an employee’s regularwages are $10/hour. If the employee works one hour of over-time, he or she would receive a straight wage payout at 1.5 xthe hourly wage, or $15. If employees elected for the comp-time option, they would receive paid leave of 1.5 hours (at$10/hour, worth $15).

The Working Families Flexibility Act would empower em-ployees by giving them the choice to opt for cash or paidtime off for overtime. In the 21st century, shouldn’t we giveemployees more choice in how they use their time?no

ELLEN BRAVOEXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, FAMILY VALUES @WORK CONSORTIUM

WRITTEN FOR CQ RESEARCHER, JULY 2013

t he promise of time off to people starved for family timesounds like a great deal. But beneath the benign-soundingtitle — “Working Families Flexibility Act” — lies an ugly

reality: a law that may allow workers to spend more timewith family only after being forced to spend more time awayfrom family. Employers, not workers, would get to decidewhen people can take the extra time. And the law could costworkers much-needed wages they’d otherwise be owed forworking overtime.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., says he proposedthe bill, which would allow employers to offer comp time inlieu 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 withthat child on the actual day of the illness or play would “un-duly disrupt” their businesses.

Though most working parents want more time off, many areliving paycheck to paycheck — working every hour, includingovertime hours, just to keep food on the table for their kids. Aconsequence of the Cantor plan would be that those needing“extra” pay would be less likely to get overtime assignments be-cause their employers could choose to give overtime work tothose 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 condi-tions. Current violations of wage and hour laws are rampant.

There’s nothing stopping an employer right now from let-ting workers rearrange their schedules to fit in the play or adoctor 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, thelaw imposed a 40-hour-a-week limit on how much employerscan require employees to work and required employers topay time and a half for extra hours.

The comp-time bill would remove this deterrent against re-quiring employees to work excessive hours.

If lawmakers really want to make life work, they should signon to legislation guaranteeing that workers can earn paid sickdays so they aren’t fired for being a good parent or followingdoctor’s orders. Or Congress could raise the minimum wage sopeople don’t have to work extra hours to cover the basics.

Workers desperately want more time with their families andmore control over that time. The comp-time bill would makeit harder for them to have either.

638 CQ Researcher

“It’s a ridiculous attempt to appeal toworking women,” says Ellen Bravo, ex-ecutive director of the Family Values@ Work Consortium, a group of statecoalitions working for paid sick daysand family leave legislation. Politicalobservers say the measure has littlechance in the Democratic-controlledSenate. “There’s no doubt it would bean uphill climb,” concedes Lisa Horn,senior government relations adviser tothe Society for Human Resource Man-agement (SHRM), an association ofhuman resource professionals that hasadvocated vigorously for the bill. Themeasure would provide another “op-tion for employers as they look at thearray of workplace flexibility pro-grams out there,” says Horn, co-leaderof the association’s Workplace Flexi-bility Initiative.

Unions oppose the bill on thegrounds that employers would like-ly pressure workers to take comptime instead of overtime pay whenit served their financial interest. “Re-publicans contend it would be theworker’s choice, but in reality boss-es foreclose options when they makeit extremely clear they want comptime selected,” said United Steel-workers President Leo W. Gerard, whocalls the measure the “forced flexi-bility act.” 64

Opponents especially dislike a pro-vision that would allow employersto veto an employee’s request forcomp time if it would cause “unduedisruption.” Employers could use thisprovision to deny workers’ requestsfor comp time when they most needit — to attend a child’s soccer gameor take a child to a doctor’s ap-pointment — Bravo says.

But Horn says the standard has“been used in the public sector for30 years without problems.” The em-ployer veto power makes sense, shesays, because, “You can’t have all theproduction line workers leaving thesame week.”

Punishing Caregivers

S uppose a young mother leaveswork early one day to care for a

sick child and gets fired the next day.Or finds herself passed over for pro-motion in favor of a less qualified fa-ther or a woman without children.

Such incidents, dubbed “family re-sponsibilities discrimination” by the UCHastings Center for WorkLife Law, haverecently become the subject of a grow-ing number of lawsuits and laws beingconsidered at the state and local level.Pregnant women, mothers of youngchildren and employees caring for el-derly parents say they have been re-jected for jobs, passed over for pro-motion, demoted, harassed or fired.Most of the plaintiffs are women, butmen increasingly are facing such dis-crimination based on familial status,the center says.

The human resources trade presscalls the mounting number of suchlawsuits a new “legal minefield.” 65

The number of such suits jumpednearly 400 percent from 2000 to 2010,according to the center, with employ-ees prevailing in about half of cases.Verdicts and settlements have averagedmore than $500,000. 66

While such employment discrimi-nation would technically be illegalunder a variety of federal and statelaws, so far only the District of Co-lumbia and three states — Alaska,Connecticut and New Jersey — haveprohibited discrimination on the basisof someone’s family status. 67

A similar bill pending in Californiawould expand the state’s Fair Em-ployment and Housing Act to outlawdiscrimination based on “familial sta-tus” — in other words against anyonewho provides medical or supervisorycare to a family member. The Cali-fornia SHRM chapter opposes themeasure, arguing that “familial status”is so broadly defined it would include“every employee in California.” 68

On May 14, Vermont enacted a lawgiving employees the right to requestflexible working arrangements and pro-tecting them from retaliation for mak-ing the request. 69

OUTLOOK‘Big Brother?’

T hree out of 10 college studentsbelieve that once they begin work-

ing it will be their right — not a priv-ilege — to work remotely with a flex-ible schedule, according to a 2011survey of 2,800 college students andyoung professionals in 14 countries. 70

Close to half of workers under 30would be willing to take a pay cut toget the kind of flexibility they want,the survey also found. 71

“To be a next generation compa-ny, we have to be one that providesflexibility,” because young people“demand it,” says work-life fit leaderSilverglate of Deloitte, whose entice-ments include one- to six-month sab-baticals so employees can pursue per-sonal goals. Satisfying such demandsis important, because within the nextfew years more than half of the glob-al consulting firm’s workforce will befrom the Gen Y generation (born inthe 1980s and early ’90s), Silverglateestimates.

Gen Y workers are also more fo-cused on having time for their fami-lies than their baby boomer parents,and young males in particular want toplay a bigger role as dads, researchersare finding. Today, young men tendto see fatherhood as spending timewith their children — not just bring-ing home a paycheck.

“We’re seeing a lot of men takinga much more balanced approach tohow they define themselves as fathers,”says Brad Harrington, executive direc-tor of the Boston College Center for

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Continued from p. 636


Work and Family. “The idea of ‘fatherequates to breadwinner’ seems to havegone down in men’s perception astheir primary role in family.”

“As that stereotype starts to diminish,men’s time in the home would be muchlike women’s — and be seen as ‘I’minterrupting time with my family if I’mdoing work,’ ” Harrington speculates.

Some experts hope that as moremen demand flexible hours andhome-based working, such practiceswill carry less of a stigma. In today’saging population, with almost half ofthe 35- to 50-year-olds expecting tobe caring for an elderly parent soon,men as well as women will need moreflexibility. 72

In a countervailing trend, tech com-pany offices and startups are trying tomake the office as attractive as pos-sible — from serving food 24/7, asFacebook does, to installing pingpong tables like Google — to enticetheir youthful workforces to spend longhours brainstorming about the nextnew idea.

“It’s an arms race to show who ismore relaxed in their work environ-ment,” reports one 27-year-old pro-grammer who has been the target oftech company recruitment efforts.

“Tech companies want to draw peo-ple to the office as much as possible,and they’re using ping-pong tables todo that,” says Michael Gillman, a webdeveloper in New York City for Giggle.com, which sells baby products. “Ithink if you have to telecommute,they’re happy to say, ‘Go do that,’ butwhen it’s meeting time, they’d stillrather have you in the office,” he says.

With the growth of remote work-ing on smartphones and tablets, it maynot be long before telecommuting justbecomes part of everyone’s workday,if that hasn’t already happened. Al-ready most U.S. companies have aBYOD (bring your own device) work-place, where employees can conducttheir work on their own smartphones,laptops and tablets, raising the ques-

tion of why some workers need anoffice at all. Two-thirds of fulltime work-ers now own smartphones, up from48 percent just two years ago, andone-third own tablets. 73 In a recentsurvey, nearly half reported they usedtheir phones at least weekly for work,while a fifth used their tablets at leastonce a week for work. 74

That trend is the precursor of a “100percent mobile web business world”where devices like tablets and smart-phones will become “central portals toinformation and applications that helppeople to be productive anywhere,” fore-casts Tom Schroeder, a senior productspecialist with the anti-virus companySymantec. Most documents and com-puter applications will be stored in thecloud (on central servers), so business-es will no longer own their own servers,he predicts. 75 Google has increased cloudcapacity for applications such as GoogleDocs, which allows colleagues to shareand edit documents on the web. 76

On the negative side, mobile work-ing, once envisioned as freedom fromthe tyranny of the office, may exert itsown form of oppression. A recent sur-vey of 1,600 private sector managersand professionals, most working at least50-hour weeks, found the vast majori-ty spent another 20-25 hours a weekmonitoring their work via smartphoneson weekends and during vacations. Morethan 25 percent confessed to sleepingwith their smartphones. 77

And it’s not just white-collar salariedworkers who feel tyrannized. Chicagopolice officer Sgt. Jeffrey Allen has fileda class action suit against the city ofChicago for failing to pay overtime forthe extra hours he was required to workon his Blackberry while off-duty. 78

Future technology for monitoring re-mote workers more closely could alsoundermine one of the reasons peoplelike to work at a distance — indepen-dence. Already some of the same tech-nologies that make remote working eas-ier — such as iPhone’s FaceTime, whichmakes video calls possible with a tap

on the phone, or computer programsthat let the boss see your work-in-progress— allow bosses to intrude more easilyon teleworkers.

That could be a problem because re-search indicates that when telework im-proves one’s productivity, “a lot of it hasto do with the ability to control yourtime away from the office,” says researcherGavendran. “Once you strip that awaywith electronic monitoring, some ofthese benefits may go away,” he says.

If managers’ prying eyes becomean overbearing Big Brother presence,Gavendran warns, “Technology maykill the telecommuting star.”

Notes1 Alex Williams, “Working Alone Together,”The New York Times, May 3, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/fashion/solo-workers-bond-at-shared-workspaces.html?_r=0.2 This figure does not include self-employedworkers. Telework Research Network, www.teleworkresearchnetwork.com/telecommuting-statistics.3 Peter J. Mateyka, et al., “Home-Based Workersin the United States: 2010,” U.S. Departmentof Census, October 2012, p. 3, www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p70-132.pdf. Also seewww.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/employment_occupations/cb12-188.html.4 “Work-Life Balance and the Economics ofWorkplace Flexibility,” Council of EconomicAdvisers, 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’sthe Internal Yahoo No-Work-from-HomeMemo for Remote Workers and Maybe More,”All Things D, Feb. 22, 2013, http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the-internal-yahoo-no-work-from-home-memo-which-extends-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-work-from-home/index.html.7 “Marissa Mayer Breaks her Silence on Yahoo’sTelecommuting Policy,” “CNN Money,” April 19,2013, http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/04/19/marissa-mayer-telecommuting/. Note: The Yahooweather app uses geolocation technology to

640 CQ Researcher

help users get a more accurate image of localweather.8 Ben Waber, People Analytics (2013).9 George Packer, “Change the World,” TheNew Yorker, May 27, 2013, pp. 44-55, www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/27/130527fa_fact_packer See p. 46.10 Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd. had 193,359employees as of May 2012.11 Nicholas Bloom, et al., “Does Working fromHome Work? Evidence from a Chinese Ex-periment,” Feb. 22, 2013, www.stanford.edu/~nbloom/WFH.pdf.12 James Surowiecki, “Video: How Does Telecom-muting 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 Cof-fee 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,” Interna-tional 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 aboutTelecommuting: Meta-Analysis of Psycholog-ical 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 NewYorker, March 18, 2013, www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2013/03/18/130318ta_talk_surowiecki.17 “Report: VPN Logs Led to Yahoo Telecom-mute Ban,” USA Today, March 6, 2013, www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/03/06/report-vpn-yahoo-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,” RotmanMagazine, Winter 2013, pp. 35-39, http://worklifelaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/TheFlexibilityStigma.pdf.21 Ibid., p. 36.22 Bloom, et al., op. cit., p. 17.23 Gajendran, op. cit.24 “When Work Interferes with Life,” pressrelease, University of Toronto, Jan. 12, 2010,on article in December 2009 issue of AmericanSociological 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 ‘Elec-tronic 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 theStructure of Cities?” Experts 123, www.experts123.com/q/why-will-teleworking-change-the-structure-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, “FlexibleWork Arrangements,” CQ Researcher, Aug. 14,1998. See “At Issue,” p. 713.30 “Fact Sheet,” Texas A&M Transportation In-stitute, 2013, http://d2dtl5nnlpfr0r.cloudfront.net/tti.tamu.edu/documents/tti-umr.pdf.31 Census statistics find that 9.5 percent ofthe working population telecommuted at leastone day a week in 2010. At least a quarterof those telecommuters are self-employed work-ers who would not be commuting to workanyway. See Mateyka, op. cit., p. 2.

32 Deborah Salon, et al., “How Do Local Ac-tions Affect VMT? A Critical Review of theEmpirical Evidence,” Transportation ResearchPart D, 17:7 2012.33 Patricia L. Mokhtarian, “If Telecommuni-cation Is Such a Good Substitute for Travel,Why does Congestion Continue to Get Worse?”Transportation Letters: The International Jour-nal of Transportation Research, 2009, vol. 1,pp. 1-17, http://trid.trb.org/view.aspx?id=883718.34 Ibid.35 Pengyu Zhu, “Telecommuting, HouseholdCommute and Location Choice,” Urban Stud-ies, 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 In-dustrial Revolution on Families in New Eng-land and America,” Myriad, Dec. 7, 2011, www.articlemyriad.com/impacts-industrial-revolution-families-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 Be-comes 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-databook-2012.pdf. Note: the bureau describesthe labor force as those who are employedand 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 Cen-tury Jobs for a 21st Century Workforce (2010),p. 2, www.amazon.com/Workplace-Flexibility-Realigning-20th-century-21st-century/dp/0801475856.50 Ibid.51 Phyllis Moen, et al., “Does EnhancingWork-Time Control and Flexibility ReduceTurnover?” Social Problems, Vol. 58, Issue I,pp. 69-98; see p. 90, www.flexiblework.umn.edu/publications_docs/SocialProblems-Turnover-2011.pdf.52 Hochschild, op. cit., p. xxi.53 Ibid., pp. 51-52.54 Ibid., p. 26.

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About the AuthorSarah Glazer contributes to CQ Researcher and was a reg-ular contributor to CQ Global Researcher. Her articles onhealth, education and social-policy issues also have appearedin The New York Times and The Washington Post. Her re-cent CQ Global Researcher reports include “Future of theEuro” and “Sharia Controversy.” She graduated from the Uni-versity of Chicago with a B.A. in American history.

55 Ibid., p. 246.56 Koch, op. cit., p. 708.57 Kenneth Matos and Ellen Galinsky, “2012National Study of Employers,” Families andWork Institute, 2012, http://familiesandwork.org/site/research/reports/NSE_2012_.pdf.58 “Telework 2011,” op. cit.59 Andrew Dunn, “Bank of America is CuttingBack on At-home Workers,” The Charlotte Newsand Observer, Dec. 5, 2012, www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/12/05/v-print/3706260/bank-of-america-at-home-work.html.60 “Bank of America Formalizes Work-from-Home Rules,” The Charlotte News and Ob-server, Dec. 12, 2012, http://obsbankwatch.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/bank-of-america-formalizes-new-work.html.61 Dunn, op. cit.62 For bill status see Govtrack.us, “HR 1408Working 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’sQuest to Soften GOP’s Image Hits a WallWithin,” The New York Times, April 24, 2013,www.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/us/politics/majority-leaders-quest-to-soften-gops-image-hits-wall.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.64 Leo W. Gerard, “GOP Forcibly Making Work-ing Families Flexible,” USW Blog, May 7, 2013,http://blog.usw.org/2013/05/07/gop-forcibly-making-working-families-flexible/.65 Tim Gould, “Family Responsibility Dis-crimination: New Legal Minefield for HR,”HRMorning.com, Sept. 7, 2012, www.hrmorning.com/new-legal-threat-family-responsibility-discrimination/.66 “Cost of Caregiver Discrimination Increas-ing for Employers,” press release, Center forWorkLife Law, UC Hastings College of theLaw, Feb. 22, 2010. “Fact Sheet: Family Re-sponsibilities Discrimination,” Center for Work-Life Law, UC Hastings College of the Law,(undated), www.worklifelaw.org/pubs/WLLPressRelease_2_22_10_Report_FRDupdate.pdf.67 “Public Policy: Family Responsibilities Leg-islation (FRD) is Illegal,” Center for WorkLifeLaw, UC Hastings College of the Law, 2012,http://worklifelaw.org/frd/frd-resources/public-policy/; also see Dylan Scott, “Family Re-sponsibilities Discrimination Legislation BeingRaised by States,” Governing, May 11, 2012,www.governing.com/blogs/view/gov-family-responsibilities-discrimination-laws-being-raised-by-states.html.

68 “2013 Fact Sheet: Familial Status Protectionfor 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 Stigmaof Workplace Flexibility,” The New York Times,June 14, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/your-money/the-unspoken-stigma-of-workplace-flexibility.html.70 “The New Workplace Currency — It’s Not JustSalary Anymore,” press release, Cisco, Nov. 2,2011, http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=532138.71 Ibid. Forty percent of college students and45 percent of young employees under 30 saidthey would accept a lower-paying job that hadmore flexibility with regard to device choice,social media access and mobility than a high-er-paying job with less flexibility.72 See “Adult Children Caring for Elderly Par-ents Need Financial Guidance,” Law FirmNewswire, March, 2013, www.lawfirmnewswire.com/2013/03/adult-children-caring-for-

elderly-parents-need-financial-guidance/.73 “All Work and No Play? Mobile Wipes out8-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 WallStreet Journal, March 11, 2013, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324034804578350852590865198.html.75 “What will the future working week looklike?” Symantec blog, Jan. 18, 2013, commentby Tom Schroeder, www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/what-will-future-working-week-look.76 Ofir Nachmani, “Amazon, Microsoft andGoogle: The Cloud Leading Trio,” Sys-Con Media,July 12, 2013, www.sys-con.com/node/2733500.77 Leslie A. Perlow, Sleeping with Your Smart-phone (2012), p. 6.78 Susanna Kim, “Lawsuit against ChicagoPolice for Blackberry Overtime,” ABC News,Feb. 7, 2013, http://abcnews.go.com/Business/chicago-police-officer-sues-hoping-overtime-pay-blackberry/story?id=18432865#.Ud6711NgN1Q.


FOR MORE INFORMATIONCenter 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 in-tegration 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 work-life 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 changingfamilies and workplaces.

Mobile Work Exchange, 921 King St., Alexandria, VA 22314; 703-489-1185;www.mobileworkexchange.com. Public-private partnership that promotes telecom-muting 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 organi-zation 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 promotesworkplace flexibility options such as telecommuting.

WorldatWork, 14040 N. Northsight Blvd., Scottsdale, AZ 85260; 877-951-9191;www.worldatwork.org; Association of human resources professionals; conductsresearch and education around workplace benefits such as telecommuting.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

642 CQ Researcher

Selected Sources

BibliographyBooks

Perlow, Leslie A., Sleeping with Your Smartphone: Howto 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 andHow to Fix It: The Results-Only Revolution, Portfolio/Penguin, 2010.Two former Best Buy employees describe the liberal pol-

icy they created letting workers set their own telecommut-ing schedules as long as they met work “results.” Best Buyannounced in March it was abandoning the approach.

Waber, Ben, People Analytics: How Social Sensing Tech-nology Will Transform Business and What It Tells Usabout the Future of Work, FT Press, 2013.A former MIT researcher and founder of the Boston con-

sulting firm Sociometric Solutions describes how sensor badgesworn by workers have detected productivity boosts as a re-sult of in-person interactions at the office. His findings havebeen cited to support the collaboration and performancebenefits 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/PERSONNEL03/312160007/Why-you-don-8217-t-flex-schedules-OPM-8217-s-failed-1-year-experiment?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE.The author describes how the federal government scuttled

an innovative experiment to let employees work whereverand whenever they wanted as long as they produced re-sults, the same program recently canceled by Best Buy.

Mateyka, Peter J., et al., “Home-Based Workers in theUnited 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 per-cent 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 Truthabout Telecommuting,”Monthly Labor Review, June 2012,

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 teleworkingoccurs on nights and weekends, suggesting that it is length-ening the workweek.

Williams, Joan, et al., “The Flexibility Stigma: Work De-votion vs. Family Devotion,” Rotman Magazine, Winter2013, pp. 35-39, http://worklifelaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/TheFlexibilityStigma.pdf.A University of California-Hastings law professor and coau-

thors conclude that workers don’t take advantage of all theflexible workplace options because they fear it will hurt theirchances of advancement.

Reports and Studies

“Telework 2011: A WorldatWork Special Report,” WorldatWork, June 2011, www.worldatwork.org/waw/adimLink?id=48160.A 2010 survey by an association of human resource pro-

fessionals found a dip in the number of employees tele-working but that more were working while on vacation.

“Work-Life Balance and the Economics of WorkplaceFlexibility,” Executive Office of the President, Council ofEconomic 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 Teleworkin the U.S.: How Individuals, Business, and GovernmentBenefit,” Telework Research Network, June 2011, www.workshifting.com/downloads/downloads/Telework-Trends-US.pdf.A research group summarizes recent trends and argues in

favor of telework.

Matos, Kenneth, and Ellen Galinsky, “2012 National Studyof Employers,” Families and Work Institute and Societyfor Human Resource Management, 2012, http://familiesandwork.org/site/research/reports/NSE_2012_.pdf.Sixty-three percent of employers offer telecommuting on an oc-

casional basis to some employees, up from 34 percent in 2005.

Matos, Kenneth, and Ellen Galinsky, “Workplace Flexibilityin the United States: A Status Report,” Families and WorkInstitute 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 itwould jeopardize their careers.


Business Impact

Dyer, Kelly, “A New Law, New Money and a Pilot ProgramMade Telecommuting More Common,” Tampa Bay (Fla.)Times, Nov. 2, 2012, www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/437/educate-business-about-the-benefits-of-flexible-wo/.New laws have allowed businesses to expand telework.

Malcolm, Hadley, “Jobs Get Flexible in Work-Hard, Play-Hard World,” USA Today, April 30, 2013, p. B5, www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/04/27/employers-adopt-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] ExactBig Costs, Headaches for Employers,” The Business Jour-nal (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 en-

couraged employers to use telecommuting.

Employee Impact

Rein, Lisa, “In New Space, Agency Rejects Desk-JockeyCulture,” 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 theagency’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.chicagotribune.com/2013-03-06/business/ct-biz-0306-phil-20130306_1_work-mary-noonan-office.Research shows that telecommuters work more hours com-

pared to those who work in the office.

Trinko, Katrina, “Telecommuting Makes Work Family-Friendly,” The Washington Times, March 6, 2013, p. B4,www.p.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/mar/3/trinko-how-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 NotUsed Nearly Enough,”The Washington Post, July 10, 2012,p. B4, www.articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-07-09/politics/35487939_1_telework-federal-workforce-federal-employees.

Many managers refrain from using telecommuting becausethey lack training in how to supervise teleworkers.

Fritze, John, “Big Storms Like Sandy Boost Federal Tele-work,” The Baltimore Sun, Nov. 18, 2012, p. A10, www.articles.baltimoresun.com/2012-11-17/news/bs-md-sandy-telework-20121116_1_hurricane-sandy-telework-exchange-federal-employees.Telecommuting increases the productivity of federal em-

ployees during major storms.

Johnson, Nicole Blake, “How Feds with SmartphonesCope 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 Watchas $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-and-watch-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 Answerto Traffic Congestion,” Daily Camera (Colo.), June 5, 2013,www.dailycamera.com/guest-opinions/ci_23387514/telecommuting-is-more-than-an-answer-traffic-congestion.Telecommuting could cut pollution costs and shorten com-

mutes as traffic volume decreases, a columnist says.

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occasional telecommuting

Documents

Transcript of occasional telecommuting