Archive for July 22nd, 2009

Telecommuting Works

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

In the latest issue of BusinessWeek, Ernst & Young Partner Billie Williamson offers tips for managing employees who work remotely. “A lot of companies are now looking at having people work virtually,” she writes. “It’s easy to accommodate differing schedules, schedule meetings on short notice, reduce travel expenses, be more ecologically friendly, and decrease unproductive travel time.”

Telecommuting also results in higher morale and job satisfaction and lower employee stress and turnover, according to research by Smeal Ph.D. student Ravi Gajendran and David Harrison, Smeal Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management. Gajendran and Harrison examined 20 years of research on flexible work arrangements, including 46 studies of telecommuting involving 12,833 employees, and found that telecommuting has mostly positive consequences for employees and employers.

“Our results show that telecommuting has an overall beneficial effect because the arrangement provides employees with more control over how they do their work,” Gajendran says. “Autonomy is a major factor in worker satisfaction and this rings true in our analysis. We found that telecommuters reported more job satisfaction, less motivation to leave the company, less stress, improved work-family balance, and higher performance ratings by supervisors.”

Their study, “The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown about Telecommuting: Meta-Analysis of Psychological Mediators and Individual Consequences,” was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Tags: D. Harrison, Human Resources, Management
Posted in News | 1 Comment