Is home the workplace of the 21st Century?
More and more people are conducting business from someplace other than an office or traditional workplace. According to a new study released by the U.S. Department of Labor earlier this month, telework holds "vast potential to benefit workers, employers, and the American economy."
Telework uses modern technology to work from somewhere other than an office. "Telework: The New Workplace of the 21st Century" compiles 12 studies by leading experts about telework and its future in the workplace.
By some estimates, there are between 13 and 19 million full- or part-time teleworkers in the United States today. The 12 studies raise key questions about whether telework will help employers address the skills shortage, workers meet family obligations or society achieve greater workplace diversity.
"Our world is changing at warp speed. Using new technologies to work from somewhere other than the office could alter everything we think we know about workplaces," said former Secretary of Labor Alexis M. Herman when the report was released. "In order to shape those changes rather than just react to them, we must understand what telework offers to workers and employers."
According to the report, telework could help employees balance the demands of work and family, promote diversity, increase worker productivity, and make employers more competitive.
The DOL apparently practices what it preaches: the report cites a number of examples of DOL employees who telework. The Labor Department now has about 350 employees who are formally teleworking and 2,000 more who telework on an informal basis.
One example is Laura Patton-Watson, a cost negotiator in Washington, DC. Soon after Laura married, her husband, an army officer, was assigned to a base in Germany. Not wanting to lose a valuable employee, Laura's supervisor arranged for her to telework from Germany for two years. When Laura returned to Washington, she received a promotion. Then her husband was transferred again, and now she is teleworking from Yorktown, VA.
The Labor Department's teleworkers also include more than 30 staff attorneys who work at home one to three days a week, using e-mail and online legal research just as they do at the office. This has enabled their agencies to minimize office space because the teleworkers share offices and most often are not there at the same time.
The report found that the typical teleworker appears to be a college-educated white man, between the ages of 34 and 55, who owns a home computer and earns more than $40,000 a year. Telework is best suited to jobs that are information-based, portable and predictable, or that demand a high degree of privacy and concentration, according to the DOL report. Typically, teleworkers have been information workers in mid-level or senior positions, but the trend is toward teleworking at all levels of employment. Some people telework full-time, but a larger number telework one or two days a week.
The studies in the report were presented at a national symposium held at Xavier University in New Orleans on Oct. 16, 2000. This gathering brought together more than 150 leading experts on telework, including academics, social scientists, practitioners, public officials, corporate executives, and representatives of organized labor for a day of challenging, in-depth discussion.
The telework symposium and report are part of a national Labor Department initiative to address the need for high-tech workers. The report is available online at the Department of Labor's Web site at http://www.dol.gov/dol/asp/public/telework/main.htm.
By Sandy Smith
Content Manager, Safety Online
E-mail: ssmith@verticalnet.com