Commentary on How Effective Is Telecommuting? Assessing the Status of Our Scientific Findings.

Abstract

This is a timely and important article on a topic that has moved into practice far faster than the research needed to guide that practice. According to the Families and Work Institute’s ongoing nationally representative studies of employees and employers, the percentage of employers with 50 or more employees allowing at least some of their employees to work “some of their regular paid hours from home occasionally” shot up from 34% in 2005 to 67% by 2008. In contrast, the percentage of employers allowing at least some of their employees to work “some of their regular paid hours at home on a regular basis” has also increased, but less powerfully and consistently than occasional work from home (falling from 31% of employers in 2005 to 23% in 2008 at the start of the Great Recession and rising back to 38% by 2014). As global markets increase in number and corporate real-estate footprints shrink in size, the effectiveness of telework (as we call it in our research) or “telecommuting” has become a practical consideration where employers are more likely to ask how to do telecommuting the “right way” rather than whether they will have telecommuting at all. Tammy D. Allen, Timothy D. Golden, and Kristen M. Shockley have created a comprehensive review of the research literature on telecommuting that highlights facts, fictions, and outstanding questions about how telecommuting functions and what it can help employers and employees accomplish. This review includes a succinct definition of telecommuting, its impact on outcomes of importance to employers and employees alike, moderating variables that affect its effectiveness, a legal and legislative review, and recommendations for telecommuting research and practice in the future. The comprehensiveness of this article is no surprise, since the authors are eminent researchers on this subject. As the authors point out, early studies on telecommuting ignored important aspects of how telecommuting manifested (e.g., frequency and relationship to schedule flexibility). When telecommuting first emerged as a business practice, it was available to relatively few employees with fairly similar demographic profiles and strong reputations for productivity. Now it is fairly widespread, with one study cited by the authors suggesting that around 20% of an international sample of employees telecommute frequently. Telecommuting is seen as a solution to such varied issues as traffic congestion, gender and skills equity in the job market, work-family conflict both from home-to-work and work-to-home perspectives, realestate costs, and other complications of when and where work can and should be performed. While many have embraced telecommuting’s potential to resolve these issues, empirical research has shown that telecommuting may be best understood as a continuum of behaviors rather than a binary variable. Some effects of telecommuting are fairly consistent in a variety of studies. For example, telecommuting is consistently related to more favorable job attitudes such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment, lower work stress and work exhaustion, and higher supervisorrated and objective performance measures. The article fulfills an essential role by providing nuance to these findings, highlighting that while the existence of these effects is consistent, typically the effect sizes are small. That is because the magnitudes of effects vary with other variables such as autonomy, schedule control, task interdependence, workplace relationships with supervisors and coworkers, and knowledge sharing. These moderating variables affect whether the impact on outcomes is strong or minimal. This is an essential contribution to the practical discussions of telecommuting, as undefined promises of increased productivity can still lead to disappointment if the practitioner imagines larger effects than the research has demonstrated for similar situations. In other words, the impact of telecommuting depends on how and where it is implemented. The authors also explore potential downsides of telecommuting, drawing attention to issues like housework creep and hidden costs. Housework creep means that the 604666 PSIXXX10.1177/1529100615604666Matos, GalinskyCommentary research-article2015