Telecommuting allows employees to work remotely using telecommunications technology, providing flexibility and less stress. The number of telecommuters has increased in the last decade, with some required to maintain a dedicated home office. There is controversy over the difference between telecommuting and teleworking, but both involve remote work.
It would be safe to say that virtually everyone who commutes to work every day would much rather just do their work at home. Today, walking from the bedroom to a telecommunications device in a home office is now quite common, and that’s exactly the concept behind telecommuting. The emergence of personal computers, laptops, handheld communication devices, such as cell phones and PDAs, as well as the ubiquity of the Internet, has taken many workers out of the office or plant, enabling them to work remotely; essentially, working from home, or working from a client’s facility, on an airplane, or at the beach or golf course.
With telecommuting, employees enjoy flexibility and a less stressful lifestyle. Furthermore, the family life of a teleworker is less disturbed, while the assigned work is still carried out, in many cases, much more effectively. Teleworking also allows for a little more flexibility regarding, for example, contract work. A teleworker is occasionally free to use the telecommunication technology at his or her disposal to continue with an established work routine, perhaps picking up side jobs that do not require direct contact with an employer. This becomes a bit of a problem, however, if the teleworking equipment has been provided by the employer, a fairly standard procedure.
It has been estimated that the number of employees enjoying telecommuting benefits has increased several hundredfold in the last ten years alone. Many workers use telecommunications technology to do all their assigned work and do not even see the headquarters or, in some cases, have to report to a regional office, but once or twice a month. Some teleworkers are required to maintain a dedicated Home Office at their place of residence. In doing so, an employer saves the expense of a separate work office. With the direct deposit, wages and salaries are also transferred directly to the employee’s checking account, with payslips available to the employee online.
There is apparently some controversy as to what the difference is between telecommuting and telecommuting. Telecommuting is often defined as a telecommunication technology that allows a worker to use this technology to perform assigned tasks remotely, rather than at the workplace. Teleworking, on the other hand, is described as allowing home-based information and communication systems to replace a worker’s daily commute to a distant workplace. An employee thus becomes a teleworker. While telecommuting seems like the more common term, words and phrases like e-work, remote worker, and remote work essentially mean telecommuting.
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