Telecommuting

In 2009, about 40 percent of IBM’s workforce phoned it in.

The concept of telecommuting was hitting its stride and, of Big Blue’s 386,000 employees, roughly 154,000 were allowed to work from home.

In 2013, IBM summoned nearly all of its EVA workers back to the Mother Ship, and corporate heavyweights like Yahoo and Best Buy quickly followed suit. Several famously forward-thinking industrial empires like Google, which never met an employee perk it couldn’t top (free food, free entertainment, free haircuts and free shiatsu massage) never seriously sanctioned work-from-home in the first place. But if those high-octane holdouts have done little to slow the rising tide of telecommuting, they sharply reflect the wide diversity of opinion regarding its commercial, social and personal value.

As a working model, telecommuting dates back to the oil crisis of the 1970s and early efforts to reduce auto commuting. The Clean Air Act of 1990 spurred many large corporations to send workers home in order to meet government antipollution targets. In 1996, the National Telecommuting Initiative formalized and federalized the push for what many saw as a more cost effective and environmentally friendly labor force, and what many others hailed as the liberation of the modern galley slave.

Because most jobs simply can’t be done from home, the number of American telecommuters remains relatively small. But thanks to the all-encompassing internet and the attendant explosion of information economy gigs that can be performed from virtually anywhere, that number is steadily growing. In 2000, a shade over 5 million people, or 3.3 percent of the workforce, worked from home at least half of the time. By 2017, the number of remote and/or “flex” employees had risen to more than 8 million, about 5.2 percent, no few of them office weary Americans choosing to abandon their corporate desk and steady paycheck for a coffee table and the uncertain financial rewards of an independent home based business.

For Jake and Jackie Workforce, the attractions of working from home are obvious enough. There’s no rush hour, no dress code, no mean old Mr. Slate breathing down your neck, no idle coworkers constantly dropping by your desk with questions, suggestions and trifling chatter. You can set your own hours, your own pace and your own goals.

On the other hand, when you work from home, you’re effectively at work 24 hours a day, domestic distractions are often more numerous and more difficult to control or dismiss than those of the workplace, and many telecommuters are plagued by feelings of social and professional isolation. And anybody who’s ever worked from home will tell you that, no matter how often or how thoroughly you explain your situation to them, your 9-to-5 friends will never really believe that you actually work for a living, or understand why you’re not available 24/7 to catch a movie, grab a beer or move a couch because, I mean, it’s not like you punch a clock, right? But perhaps the greatest challenge facing potential telecommuters is freedom itself. When nobody’s cracking the whip, you have to crack it yourself, and that’s easier said than done. Prospective telecommuters should consider that not every home is suitable for working from, and not everybody can muster the iron-fisted self-discipline that working from home requires. Those two factors alone are sufficient to explain why, while most new businesses are doomed to fail, new home based businesses tank at almost twice the going rate. While the number of home based corporate employees rose by 43.2 percent in the last 10 years, the number of self-employed home based business owners declined by 26.5 percent.

Champions of telecommuting insist that home based employees are generally more productive than their office bound brethren, and there are studies that back them up. There are also studies that don’t. One oft cited Stanford analysis found that remote employees of a large travel call center made 13 percent more phone calls than their call center counterparts. A similar examination of a major retail bank’s sales department, however, found that office based personnel significantly and consistently outperformed their home-based colleagues. How can one reconcile those seemingly contradictory results? As with most modern questions, the answer is ridiculously complex. Suffice it to say that while some jobs simply lend themselves to telecommuting, other jobs, although very much akin, simply don’t, and it’s not always easy to tell which is which until you try it.

Also, as some cynical statisticians maintain, the studies themselves may well be tainted by personal interest. Almost everybody who works from home likes it, wants to keep doing it, and might reasonably be expected to over report their productivity. For that matter, many telecommuters are released from their cubicle on what amounts to be a probationary basis and may work harder than they might otherwise in order to justify the trust. Whether any initial increase in productivity will be sustained over time is difficult to say because large scale telecommuting is still a relatively new phenomenon and researchers haven’t yet compiled a time-tested body of evidence.

So why did IBM jump the telecommuting ship? Certainly, the idea of letting employees load their 16 tons offsite offers tempting benefits to business. Figure 154,000 workers at home is 154,000 desks you don’t need to install in a couple million square feet of office space you don’t need to lease. Sweetening the deal, most remote workers are responsible for the care and feeding of their own tools, which can save a sizeable concern several fortunes in equipment repair, upgrades and tech support.

Conspiratorially minded industry watchers blame it on institutional paranoia. Large companies, they say, prefer to keep all of their bees inside the hive where their professional activities can be more closely monitored. Most businesses, and tech companies in particular, are only as successful as the industrial secrets they keep, and the thought of a bunch of free-range engineers swapping proprietary information over macchiatos at Starbucks or casually dispensing details of the next rollout to who-knows-who via their private Gmail accounts is reason enough to put all of the eggheads in one basket.

IBM and most other work-from-work adherents will tell you it has nothing to do with surveilling the staff and everything to do with collaboration, culture and contentment. Before becoming the next big thing, bright ideas must first be filtered through a tight mesh of creative minds, and meaningful collaboration is only possible in the face-to-face and shoulder-to-shoulder environment of the commercial workplace. What’s more, providing a common physical context is necessary to developing an internal corporate culture that values professional pride, personal satisfaction and a shared sense of purpose. Humans are social creatures, after all, and the much¬-maligned office provides community, camaraderie and common cause.

Be that as it may, the number of Americans working from home is only going to grow. It’s estimated that up to 50 percent of U.S. jobs may be, if not full-time telecommute-able, at least part-time flex-compatible, and there are no end of glowing testimonials from regular working folk who’ve found freedom and fulfillment by working from home.

“Yours truly has never worked out of an office,” smiles regular working Virgin founder and chairman Richard Branson, “and never will.”