Telecommuting, the hot trend of the 1990s that promised to give relief to commuters and working parents, has lost its luster in the workplace.
After years of investment, a growing number of companies have scaled back work-from-home programs, convinced that the practice isn't as valuable as employers had believed.
Some managers now say that telecommuting breeds resentment among co-workers and that teleworkers are harder to monitor. And perhaps most significantly, many managers have come to question a central tenet of telecommuting--that it raises productivity.
Although no one tracks the precise number of telecommuters, most personnel managers and experts in the field say that the ranks of telecommuters nationally are declining and that a majority of companies are planning to allow fewer people to work from home in the future.
"Telecommuting doesn't put anybody ahead," said Larry Prusak, director of IBM's Institute for Knowledge Management, a think tank in Boston that has researched telecommuting trends. "Workers lose because they aren't in the office enough to be taken seriously for promotions," he said. "Bosses lose because nobody's around to keep ideas alive and work through projects together."
AT&T typified the telecommuting boomlet in the mid-1990s. The corporation launched a host of ambitious work-from-home programs. Telecommuting so enthused then-Chairman Robert E. Allen that he made a point of letting everybody know he was doing it himself one day in 1994, and within a year the number of teleworkers tripled.
But in the last couple of years, the number of telecommuters at AT&T hasn't budged and may even have dropped slightly, a company spokesman said. Although about 5% of AT&T's employees now work from home full time, that's far fewer than officials expected to see after several years.
Idea Resisted by Supervisors
"The hype was all there and everybody was waiting for this big telecommuting explosion," said spokesman Burke Stinson. But it "never really got off the launching pad," he said, adding that the idea drew resistance from supervisors. "Let's face it, part of the joy of being a boss is walking around the office and seeing people work for you."
Certainly telecommuting still has appeal to a lot of workers and employers. Companies such as Merrill Lynch, Cisco Systems and Toshiba continue to regard telecommuting as a positive benefit and actively promote it. Merrill Lynch, for one, began a "telecommuting school" at its New York headquarters to better train its employees and managers about the practice.
