Telecommuting The Evolution Of A New Work Environment Essays

Telecommuting: The Evolution of a New Work Environment David Hess The days of reporting to the office at 8:00 am, taking lunch at noon, and driving home at 5:00, have eroded over the past few decades. People today are faced with different situations that make this type of routine unfeasible if they want to have a career. Women are no longer the stay-at-home moms that they use to be. Many families are force into having a dual career household to make ends meet or single parenting has not left that as an option. Businesses have had to make changes too if they want to keep the employees that they have and also to get the employees they want. Until the dawning of the age of computers and connectivity that allowed users/employees to work outside of the office a concept of ?Flex-Time' was introduced. This allowed the employee to match their work hours to their needs. Technology has advanced now to the point though where business can employ full-time individuals and have them work from nearly any location they want. This has brought us into the age of ?Te lecommuting'. Telecommuting has many pros and con's still attached to it, but as technology continues to improve in this area the cons are fading away, especially in regards to the speed data is traveling at. This is not to say that there will be a point that there are not any drawbacks to telecommuting, because there are many. The loss of personal contact and face-to-face conversations, security, and being able to discipline yourself to this type of work environment are just a few of the problems that can present themselves. Telecommuting with a certain amount of investment and time can prove to be a very profitable way of life for many corporations and for employees. Telecommuting has really become a feasible idea only in the past decade. The ability to be able to communicate through a computer at home with the network at work at speeds that make it functional are really just now falling into place. Modems have been used for several years but have the drawback of being incredibly slow in their transfer rate. Currently using a 56k analog modem, which means that the data can transfer at a rate of 56 kilobytes per second, is a far cry from the 100 megabytes per second used on internal networks. Work cannot fully function in any real time way using an analog modem. It just does not provide the user with a quick enough transfer rate to make doing business work at home a time saving idea. What has made telecommuting work is the creation of DSL. DSL stands for Digital Service Line, which is able to transfer data at from 1.5 Mbps up to 8 Mbps. The DSL uses the same copper wire that phones do but they do it at different bandwidths that allow both data and voice communication to occur simultaneously and at much greater speed. This is nearly 20 times faster than an analog modem, which by the way is unable to share with both voice and data simultaneously, and makes doing work from home via a computer a realistic idea. Companies are now able to create VPN, Virtual Private Networks, through these DSL channels which makes the user at home appear virtually as if they were at work (Communications News, Dec 2000 v 37 il2 p24, Where's the voice in remote access? (Industry Trend or Event) Sanjay Khatri). With the major hurdle of providing a stable, fast enough link achieved what benefits are corporations finding by using telecommuting in their business. The company Putnam Investments found that during the 80's and early 90's job fairs were packed with people. It was not hard to find good qualified people to fill vacancies within the organization. Today, however, that situation is much different. Companies have had to restructure their recruiting process to acquire the people that they want. Another aspect Putnam investments found was that they were running out of office space. The company is located in Boston and Boston's real estate market has experienced a sharp increase. With companies trying to cut costs while still supply the services and products that create the