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Telecommuting research may explain employee choices.

Telecommuting Review: the Gordon Report

| February 01, 1995 | COPYRIGHT 1995 Gil Gordon Associates. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)Copyright

Employers planning to implement telecommuting often ask, "who pays for the equipment, the phone line installation, the monthly phone charges, and other expenses?" While it had been fairly common - especially in the private sector - for employers to pay most, if not all these costs, today's tight budgets are causing employers to rethink that strategy. Some recent academic research may shed some light on the pros and cons of asking employees to pick up some of these costs.

The research was presented at a January 26 session of the recent Transportation Research Board meeting in Washington, DC. It was presented by Dr. Hani Mahmassani of the University of Texas at Austin; he co-authored a paper with Jin-Ru Yen, his Ph.D. student. The paper is entitled "Telecommuting Adoption: Conceptual Framework and Model Estimation," and it reports on part of the research that is intended to explain the process by which employers and employees decide if telecommuting is desirable for them.

The paper describes two parallel adoption processes - employer and employee - including familiar factors such as characteristics of the employee and his/ her household, organizational culture and type of business, job characteristics, and more. I'm not going to go into detail on this model because it summarizes what many practitioners have observed in the past, though I suggest you request a copy of the paper if you want to see how the authors develop the model.

Most intriguing to me was the section of research that measured employee willingness to telecommute in seven different scenarios. The research was conducted by analyzing surveys from 545 employees in selected organizations in three Texas cities. These organizations did not have formal telecommuting in place, so the employees (and the companies) were asked to respond to questions about various factors that might influence their decision to adopt telecommuting.

The employees were asked to indicate their willingness to telecommute as measured by four alternatives:

* Not work from home at all * Possibly work from home * Work from home several days a week * Work from home every day

The more an employee's choice moved from the first to the last alternative, the stronger the employee's preference for telecommuting is presumed to be.

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