Has telework failed? That, believe it or not, was the title of a session at the 11th International Workshop on Telework in Fredericton, N.B., last month (the first time this annual conference has come to North America).
Telework? Failed? From where I sit, that sounds like suggesting the automobile hasn’t really caught on as a mode of transportation. I’ve worked from home for 23 years. Just before the conference I visited an old friend who has been doing the same for nearly as long, and my cousin, who edits a weekly newspaper and can now do things like signing off on pages before they go to press via his home computer (a process that used to keep me in the office until all hours when I edited CDN’s sister publication, Computing Canada, back in the dark ages before the Internet).
A week doesn’t go by that I don’t have a phone conversation with someone working from a home office, or some other remote location, which is also a form of telework.
‘The reality is alive’
The paper presented by Norwegian researcher Svein Bergum did not conclude that telework has failed.
Bergum started by observing that there seemed to be fewer papers on telework being presented at conferences, and fewer academics studying the subject and wondered if that meant the concept had gone away. He concluded that it hasn’t; it has just become part of life. One respondent to his survey of researchers in the field put it best: “The concept is dead, but the reality is alive.”
Exactly. Case in point: I am writing this column on my laptop, sitting in a Tim Horton’s on the outskirts of Sackville, N.B. If someone phones my home office now, the call would be forwarded to the cellphone on my belt and I’d answer it as if I am at home.
The fact that there are fewer academic papers on telework is not evidence that it has failed. It is just the opposite. Telework is becoming ordinary and researchers are moving on to newer, more unfamiliar ideas.
Which is not to say that telework has taken the world by storm. Lots of people still don’t do it and many never will. In many jobs it’s impossible. Plumbers can’t telecommute. Cab drivers can’t telecommute.
More people could telecommute than actually do, though, and because of that you could say telework hasn’t entirely succeeded. The old concerns about how to manage people you can’t see are still there. A lot of employers are worried about security issues. Researchers exploring the possibility of using telework to help disabled veterans returning from the war in Iraq return to work – we’re talking thousands of people, by the way – encountered one employer that wasn’t willing to participate unless it could place cameras in the remote employees’ home offices to monitor them.
Telework could be doing a lot more – such as helping people with disabilities and awkward personal circumstances fit into the labour force, reducing traffic congestion and energy consumption and helping retain valuable employees, to name a few.
Telework certainly has not gone away, but it still has unrealized potential.
