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In US Telecommuting for Work Climbs to 37%

  • Average worker telecommutes two days per month
  • 46% of telecommuters do so during the workday
  • Most say telecommuters just as productive as other employees

Thirty-seven percent of U.S. workers say they have telecommuted, up slightly from 30% last decade but four times greater than the 9% found in 1995. These results are based on Gallup’s annual Work and Education poll, conducted Aug. 5-9. Technology has made telecommuting easier for workers, and most companies seem willing to let workers do their work remotely, at least on an occasional basis if the position allows for it. Even though telecommuting has become more common, the growth in the practice appears to have leveled off in recent years. It is unclear how much more prevalent telecommuting can become because it is really only feasible for workers who primarily work in offices using a computer to perform most of their work duties. Along these lines, telecommuting is much more common among those who have had more formal education, those who are upper-income and those who have white-collar professions…”

  • See also – Contagious Offsite Work and the Lonely Office: The Unintended Consequences of Distributed Work – “Research in the area of offsite work arrangements (telework, remote work, etc.) has generally been focused on understanding how the experience of being offsite changes work attitudes and performance. What has been largely neglected is an investigation of how offsite work changes the experience of being in the onsite office. In a qualitative study of a Fortune 100 company on the forefront of allowing offsite work, we examine how the prevalence of offsite working arrangements influences perceptions of the onsite office as well as decisions regarding where one works. We find that individuals desire a co-located office environment as an opportunity for both social ties and work collaborations. In this distributed organization, however, that opportunity is largely not present. Individuals are working offsite not only for many traditionally known reasons but also because of how they imagine others are making their work location decisions. In this way, offsite work is seemingly spreading in a contagious way: individuals choose to work offsite as coworkers are choosing to work offsite, a finding we support in a follow-up quantitative study. We suggest that work in this area refocus to include contagion effects of offsite work and the potential for negative effects of working in a depopulated onsite office.”

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